While Girl Talk is a trained and experienced engineer, he willingly left this career to pursue his musical endeavors. Girl Talk first began playing electronic music at while studying biochemical engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. While Girl Talk uses a variety of musical styles from different genres in his mashup hodgepodge style of music, his sound is most directly influenced by punk, hip-hop, and pop music. In order to legally use sample from a dozen different songs in just one of his mashup tracks, Girl Talk cites Fair Use and Creative Commons licenses as the backbones to sampling. Girl Talk released his first full-length album, Secret Diary, in 2002, Unstopable in 2004, Night Ripper in 2006, Feed the Animals in 2008, and All Day in 2010. All Girl Talk albums were released on the Illegal Art website, asking listeners to pay whatever they want when downloading the music.