It’s a delightfully temperate night at Stage AE, perfect for hours of nonstop, sweaty dancing, and Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, is winding down his raucous show, screaming “I live here! I LIVE HERE!” into the microphone to a roaring crowd. It’s the last night of his U.S. tour that’s two years overdue. The Pittsburgh gig, originally scheduled for May 2020 and canceled due to the pandemic, finally happened on April 30, 2022, and Gillis, after many weeks of travel, is happy to be home.
It seems his then 4-year-old daughter, Remy, is happy he’s back as well. She joins him on stage, along with her mom, and Gillis’s wife, Kendall Bieselt, to party alongside the throngs of enthusiastic fans who routinely dance their hearts out at his shows. She wears noise canceling headphones and snuggles her mom as she watches her dad perform.
Backstage after the show, with Remy home and off to bed, Gillis kicks back with a small crew of friends, bets dollars on a dice game he used to play on tours years ago, and relives the night. Another young girl, about the same age as Remy, sporting a bright sequined dress, had also been on stage that night with her parents, and her feet never stopped moving. “She went hard, she was awesome,” Gillis says. “But I was worried about her! She wasn’t wearing any ear protection!”
Even in the throes of his tour’s grand hometown finale, the dutiful dad in him couldn’t help but kick in.
Since the mid-2000s, Gillis, 41, has been performing as Girl Talk, a one-man, one-laptop mashup act and purveyor of wild dance parties. His work and artistry have evolved since 2006 when his first hit album, Night Ripper, took off, and he began touring. Over time, the venues and crowds got bigger, the lighting design got more complex, and the effects got tighter and more precisely-timed. He evolved his craft offstage as well, becoming a producer, creating beats for and cutting tracks with the likes of Wiz Khalifa, Big Krit, and T-Pain.
In 2017, he also became a dad with the birth of Remy, alongside his longtime partner, Bieselt, 42, whom he’s been with since 2005. The pair added Cameron to their brood in 2020, which is also the year Gillis and Bieselt officially got married.
In recent years, particularly due to COVID, Gillis hasn’t performed as much. “I felt retired for the first time,” he tells Pittsburgh City Paper, even though the hiatus wasn’t entirely voluntary. When he kicked off this most recent tour last year, he was surprised to find he had to shake off nerves on opening night. “The first show, getting back into it, I remember being backstage in Cleveland and thinking, ‘What the hell am I doing? This is bizarre that I’m doing this right now.’”
But he got over that quickly, and found that side of him — the part that feeds on sending a crowd into a dance-induced euphoria with his intricately-stitched, intoxicatingly fun music — had remained intact. It was like riding a bike.
You can catch Girl Talk on stage somewhat regularly again. In April, he performed at a music festival in Mexico and headlined the dance stage at Stagecoach in Palm Springs, California. This month he’ll hit the Summer Camp festival stage in Illinois, and in June, he’ll appear at the Dream Machine festival in Bali.
But most days, Gillis is home, spending time with his two young children, and working relentlessly in his third floor studio every day.
A typical workday for the Highland Park resident looks like this: Gillis gets up around 11 a.m. and relieves Bieselt of parenting duty for a few hours. Once Cameron goes down for a nap, Gillis heads upstairs to his studio, where he toils away on his Panasonic Toughbook, combining layers of various songs until he finds something that clicks. He’s laser focused on this until about 6 p.m., when he comes back downstairs for dinner and family time until the kids knock off around 8 or 9 p.m. Sometimes he’ll stay down for hang time with Bieselt, but many nights take him back upstairs to keep at it until the wee hours.
It could go without saying — but Gillis is eager to say it — that this kind of schedule, and ability to focus on his craft, wouldn’t be possible without Bieselt.
“Kendall holds everything down at home,” Gillis tells City Paper. She’s an incredible mom, he says, and pretty much runs the show in their family. “I very much appreciate what she does,” he says. “She does an amazing job.”
If his daily routine sounds like it must lead to a ton of music generation, it does. To be successful, especially as a producer, he needs a fully-stocked bag of tricks, especially if he’s working with a new artist he’s never collaborated with before.
With Big Krit, for example, Gillis says he’s worked with him long enough to know what he likes, and can create beats with more confidence. But he recalls a recent studio meeting with a new artist for whom he played about 50 beats to find only one she liked enough to record over. “So, I feel like at home, I’m always hungry to work on creating new beats,” he says, “because you never know when you’re going to have that kind of session where you have to work so hard to find ‘the one.’”
Finding new elements to weave into his live shows is simultaneously always on his mind, and always in pursuit. On his third floor, against the backdrop of an extensive CD collection, he pulls up an example. There’s a poppy new rap song — “Boy’s a Liar” by PinkPantheress — he’s pairing, in one form, with elements of George Michael’s “Careless Whisper,” In another version, he combines it with “Dreams” by The Cranberries. He finds the former to be more musically dynamic, and is adding it to the list of beats he may use in collaboration with other artists. The Cranberries version is just a bop. He’ll save that for the stage.
For as much as he’s performed for big crowds, and for as many big-name rappers he’s associated with, Gillis remains, in his own words, only semi-famous. Even now, and even in Pittsburgh, where he’s best known, he says that being recognized out in public is a relatively rare experience.
“It’s never been overwhelming in any way. I feel like I’ve been able to have success in music without having that much fame,” he tells CP. That’s not necessarily by design, he says, but “it’s comfortable for me.”
Which isn’t to say success isn’t the goal. It is. He’s plain about that. “I love making music and I love creating, and I want that to be big,” he says, “but I don’t necessarily desire personal attention to me. I like the attention on the work. I’m proud of that.”
This low level of personal fame sets him up well, he says, to enjoy a certain domestic bliss mega-stardom can sometimes hinder.
“We’re happy here,” he says of his East End neighborhood. “This street’s awesome. We moved here just basically because it seemed like there were a lot of kids hanging out.”
On his block, he says he’s pretty much “one of the dads,” although after last year’s Stage AE show, his neighbors are now a bit more aware of the other side of his life. One kid from across the street knocked on his door soon after that show and said he was interested in learning how to make beats. Gillis took him under his wing, at least for the afternoon, and showed him how.
He frequently has Remy, now 5, in his studio as well, and she is, he jokes, probably his toughest critic. Gillis says that, to Remy, making music on a computer isn’t dissimilar to her playing on her tablet. “She knows I make stuff, but it’s definitely not cool or impressive or anything to her.”
“She comes up all the time and I’ll always play her what I’m working on, and she’ll say, ‘Not very good,’” he says, laughing. “She messes with me.”
As if on cue, while Gillis toys with more samples, pairs of little feet begin clomping up the stairs. “We heard music, Daddy!” Remy says as she jumps into his lap. Cam has just woken up from his nap, and is sporting a Mickey Mouse shirt with a diaper. Bieselt brings up the rear, ensuring no one falls down the stairs.
“Want me to play your song, Remy?” Gillis asks his daughter. She very much does. He proceeds to play a song they collaborated on, in which Remy improvised all the lyrics. Her little voice mostly just lists all the people she loves over a sick beat. Remy sheepishly lip-syncs along. Bieselt busts a dance move. Gillis smiles.