For many, Gigi Perez seemed to burst out of thin air last year. Her independently released single “Sailor Song” became a hit on TikTok, enamoring listeners with the swooning timelessness of the folksy tune, before climbing to Number One in the UK, Ireland, and Latvia.
But like many of her peers, the 25-year-old’s career path wasn’t as simple as having a viral hit launching her into mainstream success. Years of grief and feelings of shame and failure have been poured into her debut album At The Beach, In Every Life, out now via Island Records.
“I felt like I didn’t have this innate gift,” Perez says, sitting across the table at Sardi’s, a New York institution in the heart of Times Square. She played a sold out show at Irving Plaza the night before, a venue she performed in nearly three years ago while opening for Noah Cyrus. Perez wasn’t born too far from the city; her parents are Cuban immigrants who settled in Hackensack, New Jersey before relocating their three daughters to South Florida.
Perez’s older sister Celene “came out singing,” drawing her younger sister into theater. Their parents found themselves seeking community with local churches, sending their daughters to a Christian school with a great performing arts program. Gigi and Celene began taking vocal lessons, with Celene often winning state competitions for her opera singing.
“I was the ensemble girl,” Gigi recalls, with no drop of malice. She was proud to bask in her sister’s light.
Perez began to find her own light around the age of 15. After not making the soccer team, she joined the choir instead. One day after practice, she went to the piano and taught herself a few chords. “It was like a Disney moment where the lights go off,” she remembers. “It was very intense.”
She would start to cover songs by the artists she loved most at that time: Marina and the Diamonds, Troye Sivan,Hayley Kiyoko. Kiyoko’s breakthrough hit of that time, “Girls Like Girls,” would unlock something Perez had been trying to squash for years: her undeniable attraction to women. Because of the devoutly Christian community she and her family actively participated in, her feelings felt unsafe. She struggled immensely with keeping them locked up.
“Playing the piano sparked something in me,” she explains. “I didn’t really know how to express what I was feeling until I started writing music. The more shame and the more guilt and the more anxiety and fear that I felt at this age, the more I started to sink into writing.”
At 17, Perez came out as a lesbian to Celene and her best friend Katie, both of whom made her feel seen and safe. She started to see her music dreams become a reality after she was accepted into her dream school, Berklee College of Music. But her family was beginning to experience a wave of grief that would fundamentally change them: Her grandmother and uncle passed away within weeks of each other. It led to a crisis of faith for Perez, who began to ask questions of eternal life and God.
“It was very traumatizing to experience death back to back and in the manner that it happened, watching people that are sick and struggling with disease,” she says. It threw our family for a loop while I was also experiencing a lot of moments of promise.”
As Perez began to separate herself from her faith more, she still remained entrenched in the doctrines. Even while in her first relationship, she struggled with feelings of shame for what it would mean for her soul.
“I used to think in my head that when I die, I’ll just make sure to accept Jesus Christ. That was my mentality at 18 years old because I was so afraid of not living these very real feelings that I had. I felt so trapped but I didn’t want to live at the expense of my eternal life.”
By 2020, Perez was enrolled at Berklee after a year deferred to attend community college in Florida. But the pandemic made school difficult as she remained remote. Then, that July, her life changed forever when her sister Celene suddenly passed.
“People die all the time but I felt like I had nothing I could cling to,” Perez says. Her life was upended and she became angry at the world and her God. She had left Berklee and found herself unable to write until she finally sat down and penned the song “Celene.” Perez’s raw and honest detailing of her own grief found an audience on TikTok, as did her song “Sometimes (Backwood).” Six months after her sister passed, she was signed to her first recording contract.
Perez’s career was on the upswing for a bit; she opened for Cyrus and for Coldplay on their tours and released her debut EP How to Catch a Falling Knife. But it was all bittersweet; she thinks about the Broadway theaters Sardi’s neighbors and the walls being covered in caricatures of massive stars, and she notes how her sister should have been performing on one of those stages. Since losing Celene, Gigi has been in therapy twice a week, every week and still experiences PTSD from the grief.
Last year, it seemed like her dreams had slipped from her, too. She was released from her deal and suddenly independent. She moved out of her Bushwick apartment and back home with her parents in South Florida. Home has felt complicated; while her parents have been supportive, Florida has become an increasingly unsafe place for LGBTQ+ youth. “Fuck Ron DeSantis,” she says with her middle fingers up.
“I feel like the version of Christianity that exists right now in America has created real danger,” Perez says. “This horrible rhetoric is affecting our trans brothers and sisters. The one thing that I know is that I know the Bible well, and I am gladly here to put it back in the face of those politicians that are making these hateful policies that are trying to erase people from existence.”
Perez’s goal has always been to build community and help people, so losing her first deal was not going to stop her from continuing to write. While home, she began to learn how to use Ableton and honed her recording skills.
“We’re sitting here because of that,” she says proudly.
The success of “Sailor Song” led to a new deal with Island and her self-produced album At The Beach, In Every Life. She wrote the title track two hours after she was released from her first deal. “It was in my lowest moment, in that year of silence and not having money and not knowing what to do, that I came across this the purest form of love,” she says.
It’s given her strength today: “I know that in whatever happens from here, I carry that with me. And that there’s an intrinsic value to the experience of being me.”
