Catching Up With... Girl Talk

Paste caught up with Greg Gillis (better known as pop-collage artist and plunderphonics extraordinaire Girl Talk) via phone in mid-April as he was in the middle of a sunny drive to see his family in New York. Amongst other things, he discussed helping people party, paying artists royalties and the changing trends in celebrity. His forthcoming record, Wild Peace IV: Feed the Animals, Raise the Dead, currently has no official release date.

Paste: How far along are you into the new record? Are you still planning on a double-album?
Gillis: It’s about over a third of the way done, and I don’t think it’ll be a double album, but it may be a little bit longer [than a normal album]. It’s so hard for me to estimate because I feel like I have a gauge on how long certain material will be, because I have these basic ideas that I know are going on, but once I actually edit it, it takes a new form. I’ve had this whole month off from shows, so I’ve been working locked in my room for the past month.

Paste: Although all of them reappropriate pop music, Secret Diary, Unstoppable, and Night Ripper are three very distinct records. How do you think the new album will stand apart from them?
Gillis: The material moves a little bit slower than on Night Ripper. That’s the main difference between my live shows and Night Ripper: I don’t jump around so crazily as much [live]. I think it’s on there, but I think I’ve done a lot of work being like, “Well okay, this is a sample from a song. I wanna use multiple parts from this song, make it build up as a song.” I think there are parts of Night Ripper that were like that, and I think those were people’s favorite parts anyway, like the “Tiny Dancer” thing, where I actually used multiple parts from Elton John. It was kind of subconscious, but from the moment Night Ripper came out, I noticed that’s what works better at live shows. I still think it’s choppy and sporadic, and based on what I’ve made so far, I still think it doesn’t really sound like a standard mash-up album by any means. I think it just builds a little bit more. I can’t say it’s my best album or anything like that, but I’m very proud of it.

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Paste: When will it come out?
Gillis: I’m gonna try to finish up within a month or so, but I can’t promise that. The moment I’m done and have it mastered and finalized, it’ll be up on the Internet. So I’d say, like, mid-May to June, you should probably hear it.

Paste: Is there any deeper meaning or a story behind the title?
Gillis: The story was from my last U.S. tour with Dan Deacon. I brought these inflatables onstage, just as props every night. And there’s a guy named Andrew Strasser who’s done all my album artwork and is one of my best friends, and he was on tour doing visuals and was in charge of setting up the inflatables as well. Every night when he would put them anywhere near the crowd, the crowd would just grab at them. If they were in a place close enough to actually touch them, they would just grab them and tear them apart, just so nuts and ready to party. And he started referring to breaking out the inflatables as “feeding the animals,” and we all thought it was really funny. He would say, “Gregg, you have to go feed the animals,” like I have to give these people what they need, the food they need to party.

Paste: What about the previous title, Death Sucks?
Gillis: I was gonna go with that, but Dan Deacon convinced me that death doesn’t suck. He said it could be a portal to another world. He thought it was too negative.

Paste: I read in the Chicago Tribune that you and your label Illegal Art are considering setting up a system to compensate the artists sampled for this record. Can you tell me a little more about that?
Gillis: Yeah, we’re gonna do that. Potentially [my music] could be legal. Someone could take us to court and this could be deemed legal. They could say, “It’s transformative. It’s not negatively impacting the artist’s potential sales,” and we’re cool with that. But we were interested in proposing a reasonable system, because when you put out an album like Night Ripper with 300 samples, if you have to pay 10 cents for each sample, you’d have to sell the CD for $50 to pay the artists back. So we’re setting up a system where we have a roof on each track on how much we can give out, and the details aren’t locked in on this 100% yet, but there’s gonna be a fan voting system, where fans get to vote how vital they think each sample is to each track, and based on that we’re gonna give away percentages of money to the artists.

Paste: You mentioned in that same article that you were considering this system because you wanted this record to reach a new height of popularity for you. How far can you see your music going? Is there any chance you’ll ever be a household name like Maroon 5 or Kanye West?
Gillis: I don’t feel like it will be like that in this era, but eventually, I think it will be. It’s not far off. At a certain point in time, people couldn’t imagine rapping over a sampled track could make you a household name. I don’t think I will be, but I think this art form will get to that point eventually. It’s kind of like Timbaland. He does a little bit of vocal work, but for the first time ever, pretty much in the past five years, producers have become legitimate celebrities, to the point where thirteen-year-old girls know who they are. So I think we’re fading toward that. I don’t think it’ll happen to me, but I think it will happen.

Paste: I read on your blog about someone who made a fake leak of the new record.
Gillis: Yeah, yeah.

Paste: When you make a record, it’s not like your voice is all over it or something. You still have your own distinctive style, but theoretically it’s something someone could make something not too far off. Has this experience made you more concerned about that at all?
Gillis: No, I think it’s cool. It was a weird case because I kind of respect the move. I like people who mislabel things, and I like the idea of a fake leak and all of that, but I was torn. It’s like, if he would have done something really interesting, like had a whole bunch of racist samples, or if it was some crazy thing were he was trying to debase me, it would’ve been like, “Damn, that’s insane and amazing.” But it was more like a guy who clearly put a lot of time into doing music like me. It’s super-complicated in my mind, because this guy specifically bit my style on purpose (which is not a problem; everyone bites each other’s style), but then used my new album as a form to get his music out. So if that’s your ticket to get your music heard, everyone’s gonna automatically say, “You’re ripping off Girl Talk.” It’s almost a bad move in a lot of ways.

Paste: That’s funny, because in the days of Napster and the more prevalent, single-song file sharing, people would always mislabel their songs as Linkin Park to get more audience. But then it’s like, how are people gonna know it was you and not Linkin Park?
Gillis: It can work, though. I read from Soulja Boy that he did that with that song “Crank That.” That’s how it got out there initially. Maybe ’cause his name is all over it too, you know, that was pretty much the signature, but he put it out as a thousand different names, like “new 50 Cent freestyle,” etc. etc. And that’s how that song got distributed, and that totally worked for him, I guess.

Paste: You’ve said in the past that your popularity/career is like some kind of “rock ‘n’ roll dream come true.” You refer to rock ‘n’ roll a lot. Is it a dream of yours to play in a successful instrumental band?
Gillis: Yeah, I would love to play guitar in a band. Sometimes when I play these festivals, I look around seeing all these bands hanging out and drinking together, getting ready for a show together, having some chemistry, a collective experience with the audience. Sometimes I’m jealous of that. I like being in complete control of this project, but it’d be awesome to be in the middle of Europe right now playing a show to your fans and having two of your buddies there, sharing the experience with you onstage. I’d be really interested in that.

Paste: Do you play guitar?
Gillis: No, I don’t know how to play anything. But I played guitar in a band called VIP Blowjobs. We had a ten-year-old drummer; we told him the band’s name was VIP. It was my friend Frank and my friend John, on guitar and bass, and then the ten-year-old-drummer, and then I played kinda guitar, but it was more or less just like noise guitar. We practiced and things like that, and we had one show that was really amazing. It’s on YouTube.

Paste: I read that someone gave you a Nirvana multitrack.
Gillis: Yeah, I got two, for “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter,” labeled as its earlier title, “Four Month Media Blackout,” which blew my mind, and then the other one was “Pennyroyal Tea.” Oh shit, and then “Moist Vagina,” so there were three of them. And they’re whole tracks, there’s even some vocal stuff in the beginning that’s not on the record, even them talking for a second, just an amazing, weird glimpse into their recording process. I don’t think I’m gonna use any of it on my new album, but I kind of want to work with Trey Told ‘Em [Gillis’ remix side project with Frank Musarra] and do straight-up remixes of all the songs. Maybe even do like a three-song EP or something like that. It’d be fun, because no one really has access to that stuff.

Listen to Girl Talk’s “Bounce That”

Catching Up With… Girl Talk