Girl Talk was on the bill the first night the Hangout Music Festival ever ran on Gulf Shores Public Beach, the site Sand in My Boots now uses: a 7:15 slot on May 14, 2010, that the Mobile Press-Register picked as the set most likely to upstage the weekend's Grammy-winning headliners. He was back the next year in the Boom Boom Room tent, where a Paste writer dancing onstage watched his crew fire rolls of toilet paper into the crowd with leaf blowers while confetti and balloons came down, around six in the evening with the sun still over the water.
The method hasn't changed much. Gillis, from Pittsburgh, quit his job as a biomedical engineer in 2007, and he builds everything out of other people's records; the opener on 2008's Feed the Animals stitches Roy Orbison, OutKast and the Spencer Davis Group together before it's barely started. Live, he said, an hour can trigger 300 or 400 samples off a laptop, with plenty of improvising in the transitions. Lately he's been making rap records with rappers instead of out of them: Full Court Press with Wiz Khalifa, Big K.R.I.T. and Smoke DZA in 2022, "Believe In Ya" with T-Pain and Yaeji in 2025, and an EP with Michael Christmas and Chris Crack in August 2026.