 "Photo: Andrew Strasser")
 "Photo: Andrew Strasser")
If you ever thought the Jackson 5, Rihanna and Queen would be good together on the same song, your dream has become reality. Gregg Gillis, also known as Girl Talk, is the king of sampling and brings hundreds of songs and artists together on one album.
A former biomedical engineer in Pittsburgh, Penn., Girl Talk's life now revolves around playing with other people's music. He mixes, mashes and combines samples to create the songs that fill up his albums and play during his shows. Just don't call him a DJ.
On his most recent album Feed the Animals, Girl Talk samples beats and lyrics from artists both new and old. Whether it's Kanye West, Sinead O'Connor, Outkast or Dexys Midnight Runners, you'll find it on Feed the Animals.
Before coming to perform at the university in front of a sold-out crowd on Thursday, Girl Talk found some time to talk to The Review.
Do you do college shows a lot? What do you like about the college crowd?
Recently it's been going up a bit with college shows - this year it's been a lot. Starting at the beginning of this year I was planning to take January through March off to finish my new album. In that time, I got a lot of college offers so I decided to start picking them up, so I started doing a bunch of college shows then. In general, it's cool. A lot of colleges are not in an actual city or don't get that much entertainment provided. Kids are ready to go bananas at all the shows. It's kind of less pressure - I feel like at the college shows, people are less likely to judge or critique the performance. They're more into just getting into it and that's what I'm about. I don't really like to play shows to a bunch of critics - I like playing to a whole bunch of people who are ready to get crazy.
How many songs are in your library now?
I actually don't collect digital music. Not for any reason - I just buy a lot of CDs and vinyl. That's kind of the way I listen to music. On my computer when I perform live, it's all live sample triggering. If you hear a medley from a song or a drum beat from a song, I probably don't have that song on my computer - I may own the CD at home. Live, I have thousands and thousands of loops and samples from songs, but I probably have maybe 100 or so MP3s on my computer.
Night Ripper and Feed the Animals clock in at just under an hour each and there are hundreds of samples thrown together on each album. How long does it take you to make a CD?
The past two have taken me two years each. Every time I perform live, I change up the set. I introduce small, new elements - 30 seconds here, one minute here. I'll work all week and hopefully come up with a few minutes worth of new material. If I can change up two minutes of the set every week, then over the period of time, large chunks of it will change. For the past two albums, I've done a year and a half or two years worth of live shows, just constantly generating material, trying to figure out ideas and see what happens. People see what I like. Once I feel like I have enough interesting material to dump into an album, it usually takes me about six months.
Branching off of that question, how do you go about making a song? Does an idea just come to you or do you sit down and play around with samples until something makes sense?
It's very trial and error for me - it's not intuitive. I'll have a bunch of songs, ideas and things - I'm always jotting notes to myself, texting myself song ideas, something I hear I'll be able to work with. I sample, isolate those parts, catalog them, take a beat from a song, take a melody, not really worried what I'll be able to do with it. Then I sit there and try a whole bunch of different things. Sometimes things stick, but more often than not, things don't work. The more and more I sample, the more possibilities something will work. At this point, you can probably name an artist. I probably have a loop to some of their music in my computer.
You seem to really embrace pop music and the songs I hear on the radio. Why do you decide to play around with pop music when there's so much other stuff out there? Why heavily rely on Top 40 material?
What I sample is what I'm into. I have a background doing more experimental music and I'm interested in stuff like that, but I just really appreciate pop art. I think it's an amazing piece of art if you can get the whole world to know your song and know your face. Some music has changed over the years, but the general idea has stayed the same. I want to manipulate familiar elements and twist them into a new light. I like to take things people have heard and their standards and take people's nostalgic connections and their memories with these songs and with how they understand them and just play with the relationship, with the music.
You sample artists like James Taylor, Jay-Z, Twisted Sister and Kanye West. Do any of the artists you sample ever contact you about your work? Any really like it, really hate it?
I haven't ever had anyone come out to me in a negative manner. Big Boi from Outkast came out to my last show in Atlanta. My friend was doing live visuals, things you do with touch keys to trigger specific effects and things on the keyboard. Big Boi ended up standing next to him and actually helped run the visuals for the last 30 minutes of the show - he was triggering effects while I was doing remixes of his songs. I ran into him after the show and he said he had seen me previously in Vegas and he knew my work. That was cool - I've been an Outkast fan forever. It was in Atlanta on a Saturday night, and he chose to come out there. A couple random run-ins, but everyone's been cool about it.
I heard you don't refer to yourself as a DJ. What do you tell people you do?
I'm a producer. I've never spun records - I've never tried to beat-mash records. My shows have been performing for eight years and I've never played an all-out whole song. I've never queued up a song. I never wanted to do that, especially in the early days. I never play with DJs in clubs. I've always done the live performance thing. To me, I'm trying to make creative, original, transformative music based out of people's samples. I want to make music, rather than play music.
Radiohead made the news by releasing its CD online, allowing people to pay what they want. You did it with Feed the Animals. Did you or your record label decide to do it? Why?
The label came up with the initial idea. I wasn't even thinking about it - they just threw it at me. I was completely down with it. For me, the album, I had been working on it for so long - a lot of people had been asking about it - so my goal was to get the music out in the most efficient manner possible. The pay-what-you-want-thing - everyone is connected to the Internet, everyone realizes you can download basically any song for free once it becomes digital on the Internet. It seems ridiculous to ignore that - I'd rather be up front with people and say, "I know you can get it for free - if you want it for free, take it for free. If you want to pay, pay for it." It just seemed reasonable. To me, buying a CD in a record store is like donating. You could go home and look up those songs on YouTube or download them so you can get them for free, but you chose to pay that cost because you want to support that artist. That's the way it is. Buying music in 2008 is all donation based. Why not work with that system, rather than ignore it?
You quit your day job. Any regrets with that?
Hell no. It's been excellent. I mean, the job was fine, but I hate waking up and I hate dealing with people that I don't want to deal with. Right now, I feel like I don't really have a job - I just do music, which is something I've always done for fun. The shows are cool. Magically, a paycheck occasionally appears in my hand.
How long can you see yourself doing this? Artists will always be putting out new music and there's an endless supply of samples out there - when do you call it quits?
I want to make music until I die. I don't really care about sustaining this as a career. I can't see myself going back to the day job or even getting into other styles of music - there's always collaging music and chopping things up to make music. There's a lot of different angles you can go - you can do a variety of things with it. I don't see myself stopping regardless of the level of popularity or the number of people coming out to my show or the number of people downloading or buying records. I don't really see that fazing me in any way.
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