“Honey” by Moby

"Honey" was the first taste of Play, Moby's fifth studio album, arriving as its lead single in August 1998, and it's built on somebody else's voice. Moby came across Bessie Jones singing "Sometimes", a 1960 recording, on a box set of folk recordings that Alan Lomax had put together, and he wrote the track around samples of her vocal; Jones and Lomax share the writing credit with him. Moby produced and engineered it himself, and Mario Caldato Jr. mixed it for Mute.

That old blues voice riding a breakbeat proved hard to shake: critics singled the song out as one of Play's highlights, and it charted in several European countries even though radio there barely touched it. Roman Coppola's video sends three Moby clones wandering from place to place, and Kelis later added fresh vocals to a remix.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.