Gossip is the new pornography

Last week I asked Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, about crafting his songs, with the above song (“Here’s the Thing”) as the example I used:

When in the process of crafting songs do you realize that it will work to go from Quad City DJs to Kelly Clarkson, via Nine Inch Nails?

I don’t think I figure that out until later in the process. I might be listening to music and hear Quad City DJs and say that’s a classic song and I love that verse or you hear Nine Inch Nails’ “Wish” and realize that guitar riff is perfect and it’s isolated with no vocals over it and it’s very distinct. I can fill that in. When I listen to music, certain things come out. I can go home and sample and isolate those elements. I sample a lot more material than you actually hear at a show or on an album. I sample maybe ten songs for every one song I actually use. Maybe for a day, or a week, or a month, a very long period of time, I work on isolating pieces of songs and quantizing them and cutting them up.

Once I have a lot of them organized, I sit down, and using the software I use live, where I trigger samples and load in loops and change tempos and change different things; some things work together and better than others. From there, I work that into the show. I have new ideas where a new song came out of a new song. Maybe I don’t have too much nineties alternative music in the set so I use Nine Inch Nails’ “Wish” and it goes pretty well with Kelly Clarkson. Every weekend, I try to just integrate new parts into the set, small things each week - maybe a minute or thirty seconds, or whatever. Sometimes it works well and sometimes it doesn’t, but you learn from that at each show. I try to work on everything, the transitions – how one thing flows into another, the peaks and valleys of the set – and slowly, over time, that evolves and takes shape. When I sit down to make an album I realize that this part goes really well with this part and things that became staples in sets become very normal to me because they work well. Other things I may play once and never play them again. I think by the time I actually do the album, it’s almost a juxtaposition of what I thought was the best material I thought from the performances.

You can read the rest of my interview with Gillis here.