Q&A with Gregg Gillis of Girl Talk

With his 2006 record Night Ripper, Gregg Gillis, better known as Girl Talk, rose to into the international spotlight. He’s not your typical musician: He takes bits and pieces of songs you already know and love, rips them apart and reorganizes the pieces into what’s known as a mash-up.

Loved by audiences and hated by record labels, Gillis is still touring in support of his 2010 record All Day. He plays the Longbranch Saloon in Raleigh tonight.

Gillis talked to Diversions Editor Allison Hussey about his convoluted career path and how he goes about making his infectious, danceable mixes.

Diversions: All Day was released about two years ago. Have you been on the road pretty consistently since then?

Gregg Gillis: Yeah, it’s been — not nonstop, I do come home a good bit — but I’d say since then, I’ll do about 150 to 200 shows a year. For a lot of the year, I’ll do little lumps, like this week for instance, I’ll be going out of town on Wednesday and have shows Wednesday through Saturday, then come home for a few days, then next week, it’ll be Friday and Saturday.

So it’s kind of been most of the time, most of the couple years have been doing that, and I think with the show, it’s kind of always evolving and always working on new material for the show, even just visually with the show, we kind of change that up every so often.

But yeah, it’s been staying busy, just keeping the show moving forward.

Dive: Are you working on any new material right now?

GG: Yeah, I would say the show, like this weekend, for instance, I’ll probably play — the set will probably be about half new material.

With the show, it’s always about kind of striking a balance between new stuff and old stuff, but there’s a lot of new stuff. Even just reinterpreting old stuff, I put a lot of time into that.

There’s elements from albums five or six years ago that people like. Going back and revisiting some of that remixing, and reinterpreting that — I put a lot of time into that.

I have a lot of new material. I’ve kind of been on a cycle of typically putting out a record once every two years, so I feel like I’m at that point now, where I have close to as much new material as I normally would going into starting a new record, so I feel like I am approaching that point.

Dive: There’s a video online of your cat meowing along to Collective Soul. Will the cat be on any new mash-ups?

GG: I feel like I might have to! When I came up with the idea for that video, I did think there was a chance that it would have some viral energy to it, but I didn’t think it was going to quite explode the way it did.

So now it feels like there’s going to be some popular demand for my cat to come on tour with me. We’ll have to see if she can actually perform in front of a crowd.

Dive: You used to be an engineer — how did you make the jump to creating music full time?

GG: Even though I’ve kind of always been involved in music, I always intended to have a life in something else. So I went to school for engineering, and that’s kind of when I started doing Girl Talk. And again, the focus during school was never, “Oh man, I wish I could do Girl Talk full time.” It was always just like, “That is not a reality, so I’m going to do this engineering thing.”

I toured on summer and winter breaks, and when I was in college, I put out two records, just playing shows on the weekend, that sort of thing. It was always something to the side.

After I got out of school, I got an engineering job, and I think things at that point were pretty much as I had envisioned them. Even the music thing was going well.

It’s not like I was living off it, but I definitely had a little bit of a cult following, and that was cool. I put out one record in 2006, and it really kind of caught on, on the Internet, and it definitely blew up on a level that I didn’t anticipate that it would.

At that point, I started booking shows every weekend, and I got a booking agent for the first time and a publicist and all those sort of things.

All of a sudden, I kind of had a whole year of working the day job and every Friday and Saturday going out and playing these shows. And they were all selling out, the venues were getting bigger, there was more and more of a demand for shows overseas.

By the time I quit my job, it definitely wasn’t like I was going out on a limb or anything. It was predetermined at that point that I could at least live off music for a year.

The shows were selling well, I could see that the demand was there, so it was kind of like I had to pick one or the other.

When I quit the job, I honestly thought that it would be really cool just to do this for a few months or a year, and if I had to get a new job, that would be fine.

Just doing music for a year seemed like a dream. That was, like, six years ago, so it just is kind of crazy that it kind of continued on that path.

Dive: How do you come up with the combinations that you do? Did you just hear Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is in the Heart” and think, “Oh, yeah, that would go great with a Nirvana song”?

GG: Most of it’s trial and error, but I do hear music and say, “Oh, that part could work well with something.” I definitely hear parts of music and say, “Okay, well there’s an isolated segment.”

There’s “Groove Is in the Heart,” and it has that interesting whistle — very distinctive, and everyone can recognize it. But there’s an element to it where something can be added to it.

As far as sampling vocals goes, sometimes it’s just like, “Oh, those are memorable lines,” or maybe even just the style of the rapping or the style of the vocals might be very punctual, there might be a specific rhythm to it that attracts me.

I hear things all the time, thinking, “I could do something with that.” It’s not that intuitive. I don’t usually know what I want to do with it.

I spend a lot of time just isolating samples, just cutting things up, isolating loops, chopping them up in different ways. I’ll go a week at a time where I work on music eight to 10 hours a day without actually putting any two things together, just spending all day long actually going through samples, cutting them out, quantitizing them, doing different things to the samples.

For me, it’s like the more potential tools I prepare — the more samples I isolate — then the more potential combinations I can hear. And the more potential combinations I can hear, then the more potential interesting results can come out of it.

A lot of days I sit down and say, “OK, here’s this new vocal line I like,” or, “Here’s this new rap song that came out that I really enjoy.”

I have the vocals, I have them in a loop, I’m going to run through hundreds of different things and just try them out and kind of make mental notes of what I like.

Like I said, I’m not necessarily trained in a traditional way, so it’s never like, “Oh, this is in the key of G, so I’m going to find something in this particular tuning, or that.”

For me, it’s just kind of hearing it, and it’s a feeling.