Girl Talk Quotes

The traditional DJ world isn't a world that I come from.

With rap music, there are billions and billions of samples that are uncleared that people have never been bothered about on an underground level.

KRS-One is one of my favorite rappers ever. I actually don't even know why I have this on my computer, but I do. I really like this album, Criminal Minded.

I do try to pick music that is from different worlds and typically doesn't flow together. When you do that, you get songs with conflicting messages, but for me, it's on a musical level first and foremost.

I want to make new and interesting music out of pop music in a way that isn't ironic. I want to stay sincere to the source material but at the same time manipulate it and take it to a new world.

A lot of artists are used to their music being reused online and have come to accept and embrace it. You have a generation who go on YouTube and remake and remix music online all the time. They remake and upload songs and videos, and then other people remake the remakes; it just keeps going.

My start came with experimental musicians and live bands. I never played with DJ's because it wasn't really the correct fit. It fit in more with someone using a laptop to create their own electronic music. When you're doing music like that, it's hard to get more than 20 people to come to your show.

I wanted to make experimental music out of pop.

Sharing information, art, music, and everything on the internet now has become a part of everyone's lives.

That's something I've always been down with: creative commons and people being able to license their music and allow other people to reuse it and recycle it.

When I'm performing, this is what everything builds up to, and everything has allowed me to be here.

I do have some weeks coming up in the summer where I will actually be in my house, and I love working on new music and all of that.

I feel like all the artists that I really love, they've had a strong contingent of people who really hate their work as well.

You can feel a little vulnerable when you see people tearing you apart on the internet or saying, "It's the end of music." "This guy is a total hack." I've read it all. But at the same time, even though I feel a little vulnerable with that, I do feel comfortable.

I'll put out an album, and people review it, and some people love it, and some people tear it apart. By nature of the project, I've always wanted this to be something where people react strongly to it.

I am ultimately comfortable with what I'm sampling.

The goal of the work is always for it to come across as original material, as transformative material.

I want the material I make to be mine; that's always the goal of the record and of the show.

The goal for me is, I build the record that I put out as one individual song. Even though it's broken up into tracks, to me it's like one hour-long piece of music. In assembling the whole thing, I'm really thinking, okay, it's gonna end here, it's gonna start here, and I kind of have the idea of the journey.

I can't wait to wake up in the morning and listen to music in order to try to find something to work with.

I've always enjoyed taking pre-existing sound, songs I like, songs I want to share, and manipulating them and trying to do my own version. So just knowing there's that potential for that thing out there that I haven't discovered yet, really gets me motivated every day.

I think there's always room to grow.

I hear something I like, and sometimes, I think it's gonna work, and I will cut it up, try it out, try to work with other material. Sometimes, it falls flat, and other times, it works out, so in that way, I'm constantly listening to music because I enjoy it.

I listen to music constantly, and I'm always hearing things I love that I'm excited to use.

I'm most excited about going swimming and riding water slides, shooting off fireworks, and playing basketball, and things like that. That's what I really love doing. Summer is a great time.

I am always excited for gaps of time where I can actually hang out with my friends.

When there's something negative in my life, be it in the art or the music world or in my personal life, I really just want to face it as immediately as possible. I don't run from it. I just want to immerse myself in it, get through it as quickly as possible, understand it, and look into what is positive about it.

I feel like there's always something to prove.

I can't edit live as meticulously as I can for an album.

When people come to my shows they know there is a distinct beginning and end. It's difficult for me to play for much more than an hour, so people kind of come out and treat it like a rock show. They're fiending and ready to dance.

A lot of people aren't aware of the years and years of humiliation and horrible shows I've played.

In 2008 it's easy to get huge before you have an album out with the Internet. I think that's great and you see a lot of artists like that. It seems like it's becoming rarer to find a band that has been touring for six years, doing small shows and then breaking out.

I typically get around to most major cities at least once a year. I think people see that as their chance to go nuts for the year if they're into the style of music.

I didn't change much in terms of my setup or how I was making my music. It's evolved to this point where I think people look at it as one big traveling party.

When you're playing for 30 people and you're jumping around stage, screaming, getting in peoples faces and acting cocky you're kind of poking fun at yourself.

It's hard to play a laptop in the midst of band and have people want to buy your t-shirts and CD's.

Me and my friends would drive for eight hours to play for twenty people. That was cool, and if a couple of people bought t-shirts, that would be the greatest thing. We could go eat some hamburgers that night.

I like to use recognizable songs, but other than that, this song would be perfect.

I like to give stuff away for free and play shows for cheap and not rely on music as a job.

I've grown up playing pop music for the experimental crowd and I always feel like I'm pushing something weird on people. I had this underdog feeling. It's crazy that all of a sudden I'm the overhyped band you read about on the blogs.

The whole basis of the music is that people have these emotional attachments to these songs - whether they love it or hate it. Being able to manipulate that is a really easy way to connect with people.

People can judge me on whatever level they think but I've always tried to make my own songs.

I use minimal software to make my music - a wav editor and a calculator for my beats to make sure everything falls on mathematical precision. If you were just mapping this out visually, it works by math. I guess it's slightly engineering influenced.

I've been cataloguing samples for years, I have this massive library. Songs come out everyday so it's never ending.

The internet helps with information exchange in general so it's obviously easier to check out tracks and whatnot from different genres. I think people are a lot more open to music in general because it's being communicated easier.

It's weird for me when someone asks me to do a remix as Girl Talk and not use samples.

Anytime there is any lyrical meaning or combination in my mixes, it's very blatant. I'm not trying to make any statement or anything like that.

To get 300 songs to fit together on an album, it's not like I choose 300 songs and say these are the ones I wanted to pick. To get those 300 songs I sampled 1000's of songs and narrowed down the ones I felt worked the best musically.

It's rare when I feel like I can extract a lyrical message out of combining two things together.

It's hard enough to get things to work in a musical way.