A Case for Shame

This track features vocals by Cold Specks, who is the pseudonym of a Canadian singer-songwriter called Al Spx. Based in London, England, Spx has a deep south sound, which she calls "doom soul." The song is one of two on Moby's Innocents album on which she features, with the recordings taking place in November 2012 while she toured. "He had heard about me because I'm on Mute in America and the UK," Spx told The Huffington Post. "He heard about the record ("I Predict A Graceful Expulsion") and asked if I wanted to sing. So I went and I sang." "It was a very free, collaborative, creative environment," Spx added. "He was really open to what I was doing and luckily he liked what I was doing and it worked really well."

The song's music video features Moby immersed in his pool at his Los Angeles home. Some masked individuals can be seen cavorting about (they also crop up on the Innocents album art). It was the first video that Moby both directed and shot himself. He explained its narrative as follows: "I've drowned, and I've gone to an afterlife inhabited by people who are concealing themselves because of shame. The masks are not meant to be conventionally frightening, the masks and sheets are being worn because the after-life people are hiding, because they're ashamed."

Innocents is Moby's 11th studio album and finds the electronic musician, who sold millions of records with his 1999 breakthrough, Play, unconcerned with record sales. He told Rolling Stone: "It's really great and emancipating to be a middle-aged guy making a record at a time when people don't buy records. About eight years ago, I had a friend who put out a book, and another friend who was directing an off-off-off-Broadway play. The book sold 20,000 copies, and that was a success. My director friend had about 800 people come see his play, and he was thrilled. And I started thinking, why, in the world of music, is success judged in hundreds of thousands and millions? I started thinking about my own records that way, and then the world reinforced that. Not selling that many records enforced a degree of purity: I'm making earnest, heartfelt music and hoping people are willing to listen to it. As opposed to in the Nineties, when a band no one cared about could sell millions of records."