“Porcelain” by Moby

"Porcelain" is the heartbreak at the center of Moby's 1999 album Play, a song about the end of a relationship that he wrote, sang, produced and mixed himself, with Pilar Basso adding vocals. He didn't much like it at first and had to be talked into putting it on the record at all.

That would have been a mistake. It floats on backwards strings and soft synthesizer haze, Moby's small, sad voice drifting through the middle like he's talking to himself on the night bus home. It went top five in Britain and turned up all over the place, most memorably in the 2000 film The Beach, and critics have kept singling it out as a high point of Play. Jonas Åkerlund and Nick Brandt each directed a video for it.

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