Songfacts®:

• A song titled "Harbour" suggests safety, arrival, a place where thoughts stop rattling about so much. And in the hands of Moby - music's patron saint of gently bruised electronica - it becomes exactly that: a soft, melancholic drift toward emotional refuge.
• "Harbour," featuring the ethereal vocals of Sinéad O'Connor, appears on Moby's sixth album 18, released in 2002. The track shimmers with his signature production: moody, electronic, and slightly ghostly.
• Moby wrote the song in 1984, 18 years before it was released, when he was just 19 and still several years away from becoming the thoughtful, vegan, techno-Buddhist we all vaguely associate with café playlists. Sinéad O'Connor, upon learning this, was reportedly astonished. She assumed the lyrics were inspired by the trauma of September 11; particularly as the recording of 18 coincided with those terrible events.
  
  In fact, O'Connor was so unnerved by the idea of flying to New York to lay down her vocals that she recorded them in a studio in London instead.
• Lyrically, "Harbour" leans heavily into the metaphor of the sea as escape, sanctuary, and final resting place. Consider these lines:
  
  So lead me to the harbour
  Float me on the waves
  Sink me in the ocean
  To sleep in a sailor's grave
  
  It's not quite the feel-good anthem of the summer - unless your idea of summer involves windswept cliffs and a strong desire to vanish into the briny deep – but there's something poetic about the idea of dissolving into the sea to find peace.
• "Harbour" is one of the longer tracks on the 18 album, with a runtime of 6:26. The 18 album title simply refers to the number of tracks on the album, though Moby has hinted at "some really esoteric reasons" for the title.
• The metaphor of harbors has been used several times before in popular music. "Martha's Harbour" by All About Eve, for example, offers up a fictional refuge, a sort of idealized mental B&B for the emotionally weathered. It's a soft, acoustic reverie, full of longing and imaginary salt air.
  
  Then there's Jimmy Buffett's "One Particular Harbour," which, being Buffett, refers to an actual place - Cook's Bay in Mo'orea, near Tahiti - where the sun always seems to set at the exact moment you reach for your fourth piña colada. His harbor becomes a tangible representation of paradise and escape.