Moby and 'Porcelain' come to the Free Library

Moby is known for his sample-happy, ambient electronic albums, the biggest of which - 1999's Play, which has sold more than 10 million copies. Moby tracks were heard prominently in ads across the globe. This makes him a godfather to the current EDM scene, an early generation techno DJ whose "Go" was a rave-era sensation.

Moby is also a vegan (with a new restaurant in California), an iced-tea purveyor, a Christian, and other things. He brings Porcelain, the first volume of his memoirs, to the Free Library on Thursday, May 19. Porcelain closes before Moby becomes a household name. We caught up to him after his first reading of the tour, in New York.

You grew up in New York City, and it is a huge part of the book. You now live in Los Angeles. How's it feel to touch down in New York for a minute?

It's odd and disconcerting to come back to the city of my birth as a tourist. It's 2016 and I find myself a sober 50-year-old man walking down streets where I got blind drunk in 1979. I very pretentiously used the phrase Proustian ghost to describe the feeling. The city is still filled with 22-year-olds doing the same thing I did then, having the time of their lives - I just stand on the sidelines.

Are 22-year-olds today as daring or multicultural as they were in New York City back then?

That's exactly why I wanted to write the book. I was at a party in Bushwick five years ago, explaining to a bunch of kids who had just moved to New York what this city was like in the '80s and early '90s, and they were rapt. "You should write these stories down," one of them said, and it stuck. NYC is still this dynamic, interesting place, but it's now a safe place, a culturally homogenous place. It's not the bizarre, multiethnic, noisy melting pot.

Why does Porcelain close right before you hit it big?

The 10-year period made sense, especially as there was so much transformation and change within myself during that decade, as well as the changes in New York, the music world, everything was in flux. The more conventional memoir would have been a conventional descent toward bottoming out.

And that certainly is not the only thing this book is.

In 1999, I was suddenly drinking very heavily. Every year after that until 2009, I just drank and bottomed out more until I got sober. That story - a quasi-public figure going down the rabbit hole of narcissism and alcoholism - has been told many times. I want to tell that tale, but I have to find a way to tell that uniquely. The other first story in Porcelain - the naïve, young clueless person both enthralled by and destroyed by New York - was more interesting and relatable.

Any memoirs inspire you?

There were many memoirs that showed me what not to do - too self-serving - but John Cheever's journals were very inspirational, just because there was a level of honesty there, very dark and very revealing, especially regarding moments that most writers wouldn't dare touch upon.

There is a passage about yourself and Aphex Twin, an electronic-music figure who might have been a rave comrade-in-arms, but was not.

I kind of assumed naively that everyone had everyone else's best interest at heart. Our goal was to have solidarity and advancing this new underground culture. Who knew that there would be infighting and bitterness? It broke my heart when I encountered it.

You write about David Bowie, your neighbor and friend in Soho. Any comment about his passing?

It's very disconcerting to become best friends with the greatest musician that ever lived. The love, the reverence. The first job I ever had was so that I could buy Bowie records.

I believe Herman Melville is your four-times-great uncle. Thus the name Moby. What would Melville say about you writing a book?

I can't speak for the dead, especially the most popular writer in American history, but I think he'd be happy that people are paying attention to what I have written, and even a little jealous. He labored in obscurity and gave few interviews. Here I am, doing an interview. He might just be annoyed that his musician-relative wrote a book and that people like yourself wish to discuss it with him.

Moby reads from and signs "Porcelain" at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Parkway Central Library, 1901 Vine Street. Free. Information: 215-686-5322, freelibrary.org