Gregg Gillis, better known as the one-man mash-up sensation Girl Talk, never thought he could turn his passion for music into a full-time career, but through the success of his albums and extensive tours, he has managed to do just that. The engineer-turned-musician has sold out venues all over the U.S. and Europe and his most recent studio albums Night Ripper and Feed the Animals have received acclaim from fans and critics alike (both albums receiving an 8.4 and 8.0 respectively from Pitchfork.com). I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Gregg about the growth of Girl Talk, his most recent tour and what's currently on his playlist.
The Retriever Weekly: I know you held a job as an engineer for a while, what initially got you interested in creating music?
Gregg Gillis: For me I was always obsessed with music when I was young. I was never formally trained in any instrument, so the way I understood my role in music as a kid was just purely hobby and interest. I got involved in the Pittsburgh music scene in high school, played in a band and went to a lot of shows. Most people I knew who made music in bands all had jobs and didn't really live off of it, they just did music for fun. So that's how I grew up understanding just being a musician. I went to high school and then graduated and then eventually went to college and decided to study engineering all while doing Girl Talk. I was making albums when I could fit in the time and touring over breaks and things like that, so I've always viewed music and work as two separate worlds that weren't really competing. It wasn't like music would be a potential career in my mind at any point.
TRW: So when did you realize it was time to quit your day job?
GG: It reached a point around the summer of 2006 when things started to pick up with the whole world of Girl Talk. I just started playing a lot of shows and the shows started getting bigger and they started selling out and I had a booking agent for the first time in my life. So I did that for a year where I was playing steady shows and working a day job as well and it just got to a point where I had used up all 10 of my vacation days and had dates planned in the future for Australia and Europe. And the shows were making me enough money that I could live off of them. It wasn't like I went out on a limb to quit; I had to do one or the other. The schedule of both was a bit too much.
TRW: Your first albums weren't as easy to dance to, given all of the quick clips and cuts. How would you describe your style progression from Secret Diary to Feed the Animals?
GG: I think it's definitely grown in a more accessible direction. My general focus of what I want to do has changed. When I started the project of Girl Talk, I was 18 years old and I'm 27 now. I'm still into what I was into back then, but my general focus, what I really listen to the most, has changed a bit. Back then, the idea was to make experimental music out of pop and over the years it has faded into wanting to make pop out of pop. I've always wanted the show to be fun and something you could dance to and I think all of the early Girl Talk parties went on to influence me. There is an interaction between the live show and the albums and the albums and the live show and everything kept building in the direction of acceptability and wanting people to actually enjoy the music rather than making something that was borderline pretentious and unlistenable.
TRW: Do you have a particular approach when creating a Girl Talk song or is it mostly experimentation?
GG: It's a lot of experimentation and a very long process. For Night Ripper and Feed the Animals, I created whole albums and didn't work on any individual songs. For live shows I work on coming up with new material and within the shows there is all live sample triggering, so there is also a lot of experimentation there. I'll sit at home and just sample loops and hooks just to try out different combinations of material and if I find something I like, I'll use it in a live set. When I sat down to make the last two albums, it was loosely a year and a half after I had been out on a tour, so that experience came to generating new ideas and new structure on where the albums were going to go. So by the time I sit down to actually put together an album, the general flow of it and many of the pieces are already thought out.
TRW: In a way, what you do with pop music, other artists have been doing with pop culture in print media for decades. Do you connect with any collage or appropriation artists that aren't musicians?
GG: Yeah, I'm a big fan of Andy Warhol, a fellow Pittsburgher. I definitely think he was working in a similar area to what I'm doing, re-appropriating ideas from pop culture. These days it's like everyone's a post-modern artist. If you look on YouTube, a lot of interesting Internet content is generated from collage video and cut up songs and things like that. I feel like we're almost surrounded by it.
TRW: In a recent interview you said you feel like you "completely exhausted this style with this album (Feed the Animals)." If that's true, what do you see in the future for Girl Talk?
GG: I was thinking of that at the end of Night Ripper as well. I don't conserve anything for future albums and when I sit down to do an album, I make it like it's the last album I would ever make. So I feel like there's room to grow whether it's in the style or not. Using sound collage you can sound like Public Enemy, or the Go! Team or the Avalanches or you can sound like John Oswald, I think it's just like any other instrument: you can innovate and make a sound in new ways. Even now that it's a few months past the point when Feed the Animals came out, I have already generated a lot of content loosely in the style of that album, maybe moving forward, that I wish was on the album and that's the way it always works. When I sit down to complete an album, I just put everything I have into it from the past few years and for me that's an exhausting process. And when I finish up, I'm always kind of like "I can never imagine doing that again." But in a year from now, I couldn't really say what I'm going to have in front of me or how I'm going to feel about it.
TRW: Who are your current favorite pop musicians?
GG: I've been listening a lot of the new Project Pat, the new OJ the Juiceman, the new Gucci Mane, the new Beyonce, and the last Metallica album I've been jamming to a bit. I listen to lots of new stuff everyday, it's kind of amazing how much stuff comes out.
JV: Your tastes seem pretty eclectic; do you have a certain style?
GG: I'm down with whatever, here I listen to the modern rock stations, and I listen to the hip-hop stations. For the past couple of years I've really been focusing more on the rap and pop arena, but I'll listen to whatever.
TRW: How many laptops have you gone through over the years of playing live shows?
GG: In 2007, I think I broke 4. Since then I've been investing in Panasonic Toughbooks, which are built for military use. Like hardcore difficult to break. I currently have three of those, but after the switch I haven't really broken too many. I have damaged them to the point where I have to send them back, but nothing to the point where they're completely unusable.
TRW: So you just rotate through those three laptops?
GG: Yeah, they actually just sent me a new demo model. In the past year I've had two of them, using one during a live show so if something goes wrong with one I'll send it back and use the other one and use another computer as a backup. I always have two up on stage in case something breaks down.
TRW: What do you do to prepare for your live shows?
GG: I'm always coming up with new material to use in live shows. I kind of go through different phases where I like to play stuff that people are familiar with, but I also like to have new material, so it's always an effort. I just did a whole US tour in October/November, and now I'm gearing up to do summer festivals, so I want to have a distinctly different set ready to play and ready to do different material for those shows. That's where I'm at now, the process of constantly cutting things up. And when I'm physically at the shows I have a routine, I like to relax beforehand. I feel like every show is potentially going to be an extremely exhausting experience, so I just kick it and relax, stretch it out a little bit because I know I'm going to be sweating it out.
TRW: You just got back from a pretty extensive European tour. How well are your mixes received in other countries compared to here?
GG: This was the best time I've had over there. I think every show I played was a sell-out and there was a lot of enthusiasm. I feel like my exposure in the U.S. has been a lot bigger, through media, blogs, festivals and touring; it feels like I've been working here for years. Over in Europe I don't think people are as familiar with my work. It's funny because you'll see a lot of Americans at the shows, specifically in London and in Paris with all of the students studying abroad coming out. I think what I'm doing serves a different role over there. I can't really generalize, but I feel like electronic music and more traditional techno music is popular here in the U.S., but over in Europe it's more standard. It's more traditional to go out on a Friday and Saturday night to hear electronic music at a club. I feel like in the United States you can go out to a club and hear pop, and that's very common, but over there I think electronic music is so much more at the forefront. I can't really articulate it, but I believe my role over there is different, that people observe my music on different levels, but I was very pumped about the tour. I've had some smaller shows in the past, but everyone was very enthusiastic this time around.

Don't forget! Gregg Gillis aka Girl Talk will be performing live in the UC Ballroom on April 26th at 8 p.m. as a part of Quadmania 2009.