Girl Talk Interview Typed Up

Gregg Gillis a.k.a. Girl Talk Interview

December 17, 2008

3:00 PM CST

When did you start playing the laptop? How did you get involved in the mash-up scene?

I started in the year 2000. And the project has always been about remixing pop music and tacking other peoples stuff and reinterpreting. But back when I was getting yelling it, mash ups existed, and what I was doing I wasn’t making mashups was I was in a band in high school prior to Girl Talk and it was a lot of experimental electronics and just revolved around a lot of this weirdo underground stuff and in that band we kind of dabbled in working with skipping cds and and tape collage stuff like John Oswald, Negative Land, Kid 606 and lots of other people that where doing sound collage and remixing pop music in a way that wasn’t necessarily a cappela overload with an instrumental more or less like the history of hip-hop production. I got my first lap top in the year 2000, and in high school I’d seen a lot of people play computer music through the late 90’s and early 2000’s in that kind of blooming scene of experimental electronica across the US touring around and doing live music on computers. And, I wanted to be a part of that and take a very pop approach and that’s when it got going.

How did you come up with the pseudo name, Girl Talk?

It’s a reference to a bunch of things. Girl Talk is a board game, magazine, and children’s toys. And when I was getting going a lot of the scene I was involved with prior to Girl Talk was to me like the electronic underground and there was two kinds of camps. There was people pushing a fun vibe and there was people pushing a more serious, kind of academic sort of feel. And I felt like the electronica music in the underground was very stiff and I wanted to stir things up so I picked the name Girl Talk because it sounds like the exact opposite of what than other guys playing a computer because it was very glossy and over the top and flamboyant. I almost wanted to embarrass the people I was playing with, with a name like Girl Talk.

I read that before you started touring full time you where a biomedical engineer. What was it like working a day job and trying to create an audience for your music?

It was something that was surprisingly normal at first. When I went through college, music is something was something that I never attended to be a career. When I was in college I put out a couple of albums and fooled around all the time. Music is something that I've always been obsessive about but it was something. It was something, I always pushed it as hard as a can but I always understood it as in terms as being an underground thing. So when I started the biomedical engineering job, I just kept with the theme. Always making music when I got home, playing maybe one show per month, just going out on the weekends, kind of getting things going. It wasn’t a big deal, it just was always thought I would make music and work on the side. And then in 2006, my album that was then released kind of took off a bit and things then got really insane. Shows started selling out, and then I had shows every weekend, and it was just a wild ride. It was just surreal.

Your concert on election night was amazing?

Yeah, that was a big day. I was talking to a friend how it was obviously a historical day, and to have that many young people that day under one roof. And it was just like a day ill remember in terms of the election to have all those people there. It’s one of those days that people will recall where they were at, so I was happy to share that with so many people.

What have been some of the hardest steps to becoming an independent artist, and what helped you to overcome them?

I don’t think there was anything that was a hard step. I just felt really aware of what I wanted out of the project. And the goals were very modest. So, I think when you start a band or project, if your goal is to make money or to be famous off of it, then it could be very stressful. But, my goal was always to exist, and in essence there was nothing that I really wanted out of it. When I would tour around the country and play with newer people, fights would break out and people would try to break my laptop. It wasn’t like I was failing, it’s just that that is where it is at. It’s really how you’re going to succeed as a musician or artist; it’s really in terms of where your head’s at, or what you want out of it. So, I really didn’t overcome anything to get where I’m at, it just kind of happened. Where I’m at now wasn’t originally the goal, but it’s fantastic and I’m very happy. I never had dreams of becoming like this.

How would you describe your music?

I would say it’s like a visual collage if you could imagine taking hundreds of pop-songs, cutting them up, layering them, and twisting them around and manipulating them and just having a big collage of sounds.

How would you describe your concerts?

To me, it’s always like the energy of a house party, where there are no rules and people are just losing their minds. That combined with a sort of concert energy where people are going to watch a specific show, and they are being part of something where you’d buy a ticket with anxiety and anticipation, and in the air and all of that, just coming together.

How do you create your live show? (Technical perspective)

It’s all isolated loops, so anytime you hear a change in the music, it’s me triggering samples and muting other ones. So, the program I use is basically running hundreds of loops simultaneously, and I’m kind of mute and un-mute them in real time, and then you can manipulate those loops as well. It’s all a matter of on my computer, I have thousands and thousands of loops or songs and the live show is just constantly evolving. I have a set saved on my computer right now and if I pull one out today, maybe I’ll find a combination of a melody and vocals that work together. I’ll take something out of the set and I’ll introduce that substitution of pop-music loops, so it’s a very smooth process. It’s mainly me sitting on a computer being meticulous and cutting things up and that goes on to influence a much bigger picture.

How do you give each show a unique feeling, and one different from a recorded album?

With this style that I play, even if I go through a similar set list of material, it’s impossible for me to recreate that exact set. Everything is so isolated, so when you hear a drum beat, that could be four distinct loops playing like a kick-drum, a hand-clap, a snare, a high-hat. So like for me, executing those loops and bringing in the percussion, along with melodies and vocals. Even if I had these ideas in certain way, it’s impossible for it to be the same every night. Along with it, the real variability in the show comes from the crowd. So, I try to get in the crowd, try to get people on stage, get everyone involved. How the crowd reacts really governs where the show goes. The pace that goes from materials and just the style of it, how much repetition there is. So, it’s kind of a roll of the dice every night, just how people are going to get involved, how the show’s going to go off, how security is going to react, all of that. It’s kind of completely up in the air and it’s just a lot different from being in a band where you’re standing on stage just kind of going through the same thing every night, and no one knows how many people are going to be on stage or who’s going to be next to me or what’s going to be going on.

Your laptops must go through quite a beating during your concerts. How many do you go through while touring?

In 2007, I went through three laptops, and I invested earlier this year in one of those Panasonic Puff-Books, they are supposed to be military grade. You’re supposedly not able to break them. I worked that laptop so hard; I went on it many times. People have kicked it over and spilled things on it. It has been put through the test his year, and it finally started to mess up right near the end of the tour. It’s still functional, but only a few elements of it broke. I actually just sent it back to Panasonic today, which was a miracle that it lasted eleven out of the twelve months, which is very impressive.

Most of your mash-ups seem to consist of pop and rap music. Have you always been a fan of both these genres and why do you tend do use them in your music?

I think from the rap end, it’s something that I’ve always listened to and always kept up with new rap and pop. It’s something I grew up listening to as a kid, along with some of the early pop from the ‘60’s, ‘70’s and ‘80’s. I think those are things I didn’t really get in to, until shortly after I started the Girl Talk project. Prior to Girl Talk, I was very involved in experimental music and underground things: that was focus. I listened to a lot of mainstream rap, but outside of that, I really just listened to a lot more underground stuff. But as I think the Girl Talk project started, the general idea was to take a song whether people loved or hated it, heard it once in the grocery store, it doesn’t really matter, it’s the idea that they had heard the song and became familiar with it, then I take it and manipulate it and make something new out of it. That’s kind of the general idea behind it. To me, with the hip-hop end of things, sampling has always been a big part of hip-hop; you don’t hear it as much anymore.

Because it is so expensive, right?

Absolutely, back in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, it was just a huge component. Like where Public Enemy albums are just one giant collage. Most of those albums are around that level, and that’s something that I’ve always loved, growing up hearing a familiar tune that’s completely recontexualized because the beat of that keeps on rocking. That’s always been something very exciting and cool to me. When I do my work, and I’m working with hip-hop samples, in my mind it’s almost like an imaginary producer kind of thing-me making a beat for these guys.

How important do you think it is that the listener recognizes what you are sampling/do you think your music is unique for each person depending on what samples they connect to?

Absolutely, and I don’t think it’s crucial. I think people relate to the music on different levels. When my parents listen to it, they don’t know the newer rap samples, but they’ll recognize every James Taylor and Hall and Oates sample. A lot of young kids come out to the shows knowing all the new pop stuff, but they probably don’t follow much Credence Clearwater Revival. So I don’t think it’s crucial, I think the music in an ideal world would be transformative, and something new, and that’s the ultimate goal. Even when I was listening to early hip-hop records, I never heard a James Brown song when I was in 2^nd grade. But when you’re listening to people who sample his work, you know the idea is that they’re manipulating a pre-existing source, whether you know it or not, and there’s a certain appeal to that. So when people do identify something, that does have an absolute value, and playing with that is a very powerful thing. But I don’t think it’s necessary for the music to appeal to people.

Which of your mash-ups do you like the best, why?

It’s tough because the stuff I work on, I think as whole pieces of music. So, in my mind, they are like one cohesive thing. I think based on the fans’ response, and how people have taken to it. From the album Night Ripper, there’s a mix with the drums from Nirvana’s “Scentless Apprentice,” mixed with Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer,” and Biggy Small’s “Juicy.” And it seems like when that came out, people really took to that. A lot of blogs and music press really isolated that moment as the single on that album. And that was cool because when I was putting that together, I thought it sounded so natural, I consider it as not using it, because I thought people might interpret it wrong. I thought people weren’t going to be into it because it sounded so perfect.

That’s a very cool sample; it flows so well, it sounds like they were meant to be together.

In a certain way, it’s a lot of intendancy and I wanted it to sound cohesive and good. I like people to be aware that I’m manipulating songs. So it’s not like I hired someone to rap over the top of this beat; I like it to be apparent that the works weren’t meant to be put together. And when “Juicy” entered things, it kind of seemed so natural; it had a weird effect on it. So the fact that people took to it so well meant a lot. That’s where I change up a set list every night, and that’s something that I try to reference every single night.

Which one do you consider to be the most over the top, why?

On unstoppable, there are a couple of tracks that are under a minute and a half long and those are definitely over the top in terms of editing. It’s literally like a hundred songs in a minute and a half going by so quickly; it’s really intense. It’s sort of like a certain material being right there in your face. I think Kelly Clarkson, from the last album, to me seems very over the top. It was a song that existed a couple of years ago, and everyone kind of knows it, especially in terms of the album, because it’s a lot of hip-hop and older pop, that was like a few of the vocal samples that wasn’t from a reference source from the last 5 years ago. So I think that one kind of hits people over the head. The general idea behind the music really is that I want people to be open to anything; there should be no real rules to what you really should be in.

Has there been a song you wanted to sample but it has never seemed to work?

Yea, there are tons. I think most things that I’ve sampled, I haven’t used yet. For most things, I’ll isolate a melody, and there are a lot of things that don’t work out because of where I want it to fit in to the set or on the album. On “Feed the Animals,” off the top of my head, the one sample that made the last cut that I wanted to include was “The Cars” song “Drive.” That’s my favorite “Cars” song. It’s amazing; I play that live a lot and manipulate it in many ways. I was set having it be on the album. It was just where it fit, I had too much ‘80’s music, and I wanted to keep it as diverse as possible. I felt like the other stuff that was on the album I didn’t want to get rid of, so I had to get rid of it, which was crazy because it was something I had been working on since “Night Ripper” and all that’s loaded on there. And on “Feed the Animals,” it’s something that I’ve always played live a lot, and I think it hasn’t found its right place yet.

On Secret Diary and Unstoppable, you seem to use fewer samples than Night Ripper and Feed the Animals. Are you creating more of your own sounds, or are the samples just shorter and harder to recognize?

I think on “Secret Diary” that the idea there was to be more focused on sound processing. It’s the idea that you can take a Cindy Lauper song and run it through a bunch of filters and collage it together and make a four-minute track on “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” that sounds nothing like it, and completely manipulate it. It wasn’t a focus on jumping around so much, but I think on “Unstoppable,” that was the first time I started fooling around with more samples. I think on “Unstoppable,” there are about the same amount of samples as on “Night Ripper.” It’s just they’re harder to hear, it’s just a lot of very small elements of microsecond samples that are very involved. And on “Unstoppable,” our goal was to make new melodies out of preexisting melodies; where I think that on “Night Ripper” and “Feed the Animals,” the general idea was to take melodies that people can recognize and then recontextualized them in a way that becomes something new. So then rather than just rearranging the notes, more or less than just framing them in a new way, and adding a bunch of elements, and putting a whole production value on it, that kind of manipulates it how you understand it.

Your music is in confrontation with copyright laws and other ‘fair use’ policies, what type of legal headaches and fees have you had to deal with?

We’ve had no issues so far. There’s a doctrine called “Fair Use,” with copyright laws that allow you to sample preexisting works without asking permission. Depending on the nature of the work you do, it works on how it impacts the actual sales of the actual material. So “Illegal Arts,” the label that releases my material and I both put out the music, believing that it should qualify under “Fair Use” and believing that the music is its own entity and it’s not creating competition for the source material. So far, we haven’t heard anything on the negative side. There are a lot of major labels and a few artists reaching out and saying, “What’s up?” and that they are, “Into it.” But outside of that, everything has been cool.

What are your opinions of the copyright laws and fees to allow artists to sample music?

I think the idea of copyright is a very valid concept. I don’t think you should able to bootleg CD’s or anything like that or just give away music for free that’s not intended to be given away for free. But simultaneously, I feel that you can make new music from preexisting music in a way that doesn’t negatively impact it. So I think that certain works like mine, and some from my other contemporaries that are doing remixes and stuff, I feel like its valid. On a piece like “Feed the Animals,” where there are 300 samples, if I would have went the traditional route and paid the royalties for all those samples, it would be physically impossible to release that album. It’s an album with a lot of opinions, and right now a lot of year-end lists are coming out that have reviewed it, and many major music publications have treated it like a real album and people understand it as an album. It’s just an interesting case where there would be a piece of music that would be potentially impossible to release. If I were to pay royalties to every artist I sampled on the album, we’d have to sell “Feed the Animals” for a few hundred dollars each to pay back the royalties. It’s just kind of a bizarre case; it’s an example of something where a lot of other people are doing this related music, and paying royalties, I’m not against that depending on the case, but a lot of times it’s just impossible unless you’re a millionaire.

Congratulations on your Rolling Stones Top 50 Albums of the Year.

Thank you, stuff like that, I really don’t care about anyone’s opinion, it doesn’t validate anything, it’s just cool that they treated that as an album. They heard this piece of work that is potentially impossible to release financially, yet Rolling Stone listed it as one of the best releases of the year, which is kind of contradictory in some ways.

People were able to get your last album for free from your website, do you know what the average price people paid for it was/ what percentage of people downloaded it without paying?

I don’t have any stats, but I can definitely say that a lot of people take it for free. But then again, there are people that dropped 100 dollars for it. The people getting it for free are something that I expected. You know, when you put out a real CD, you don’t keep track of how many people download it for free. But, there are probably more than people buying them these days, which is fine. The ultimate goal for me is to expose the music to as many people as possible. I download some music for free, and I’m sure everyone else does.

Have you been asked to produce any other artists’ albums or would you want to/ what are your future plans?

Some majors have reached out to do production work and stuff like that. It’s something I’d be interested in. I make beats everyday, it’s just trying to come up with material for Girl Talk is so time consuming, it’s a trial and error process. So, the more time I put into it, the more potential output. So when I sit down to do a major remix or production work, I mostly sit down and take 2 or 3 weeks doing that. It’s just that I play shows all year round, and I love to come up with new ideas for each show. So if I spend 3 weeks working on a beat for someone, that would be interesting. It would kind of be counter-productive to the overall goal of Girl Talk. Right now I like dedicating all my time to material for live shows and potential albums.

What were you like in High School and college?

With high school, I was very involved in the Pittsburgh music scene, and I was also in a weird area. I had 10 varsity letters. I was a pseudo-jock, but I was a lot more focused on music. I was kind of a bitter teenager to some degree, I didn’t like going out with other people from my high school that much, I didn’t go to prom, and I was focused very much on just sitting around my room, and working on stuff and going out and playing shows. I was somewhat miserable like most high-schoolers, and by the time I got to college, I got all of that out of my system, and I think that all went on to heavily influence the idea of Girl Talk. In high school, I was in a band that was focused on challenging people and pissing people off. Doing that for 3 years, I wanted to do something opposite of that with Girl Talk; I wanted to do a project that could be potentially enjoyable for everyone.

How did you get the Windows ad?

It was a weird thing; I can’t remember how it went down. I’ve done some other advertisement offers in the past. Nothing seems perfectly fitting. I’m open to it [commercials] in any way, everything else I didn’t really use, but people made it a big deal about me playing a PC because many live artists and musicians use Mac’s. I thought it was cool. The main thing was I thought it was going to be hilarious. They paid me money, but it really wasn’t all that much. It was really more about getting my face on TV so my parents could enjoy it. It was the sort of thing that when it was going down, I knew that there would be some level of backlash from people saying that I “sold out” and that I was taking Microsoft’s money, but beyond that, I’m living this really surreal life right now. 20 years down the road if I look back and say, “I didn’t get on a commercial because I thought people would think it’s un-cool,” that’s the lamest thing I’ve ever heard of; I was very happy to take part in it.

When is the next time you’re going to be playing in or near Milwaukee?

Yeah, I travel all year round, and I’ve averaged 125 shows a year for the past couple of years. With that, I go to Europe and Australia, so I really get around to those cities once a year. Maybe once every 9 months is the best I can do, I’m sure I’ll be back.