In April, a fan approached American singer Gigi Perez after a show and proudly showed off her latest tattoo.
“Gigi I 🖤 U,” read the ink. The singer was left with no words.
“In my mind, I was thinking, ‘Please don’t regret this’,” she laughs.
“It’s hard for me to understand having my name permanently imprinted on someone else’s skin.
“But, I mean, it’s such an honor to know that music made such a profound impact on them that they would do this.”
It was the first time someone had felt so much passion to turn their name into a tattoo – and it couldn’t have come at a better time.
Six months earlier, Gigi was dropped by her record label, in the middle of a promotional tour of London.
And after moving back to her parents’ home in Florida, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter had to reevaluate her life.
“I was free falling,” she says.
“I had no income, I was back home, and I started doubting myself.
“But I was like, ‘I should just give myself a year to record and learn how to make my own records.
“From there, if I need to get a job so I can still make music, I’ll do that.
“And then everything happened…”
If you haven’t been following Gigi’s story, everything, including getting a global hit single out of nowhere.
Sailor Song, an aching love song about falling in love with a woman who looks like actress Anne Hathaway, aired online in June and soon became a success in the real world.
In the UK, it reached number one, ending Sabrina Carpenter’s nine-week stay at the top.
The song also peaked in Ireland and Latvia and made the top 10 everywhere from New Zealand to Belgium.
“I knew the song was special to me,” says Gigi.
“I had no idea it would be so special to so many people.”
When she found out it reached number one, “I got out of the shower and started crying,” Gigi told the UK’s Official Charts Company.
This success marks a clear conclusion to a complicated origin story.
Born in New Jersey and raised in Florida, Gigi was a drama school buff and turned to music when she realized she would “never be cast in a simple role”.
Self-taught on piano and guitar, she went straight to the top of the US streaming charts in 2021 with her self-released debut single, Sometimes (Backwoods).
The song earned her a contract with Interscope Records and Gigi supported Coldplay on their Music of the Spheres Tour, before she even played a headline show of her own.
Looking back, she says that the initial wave of success created pressure to advance her career too quickly. For a long time, she felt “stuck and limited” due to her lack of progress.
“It was cognitive dissonance where I got to an amazing place [on someone else’s tour] But there was no knowing who would be on the show,” says Gigi.
And by the time she played in London last November, she knew she had reached breaking point.
“I said to God or the universe, ‘Open doors that need to be opened and close doors that need to be closed,'” she says.
“I knew it had to happen – but I was so scared to hear what it meant.”
‘No democracy’
Interscope released him two days later. But instead of the world ending, Gigi’s energy was renewed. He wrote more songs – and taught himself how to create them by watching YouTube tutorials.
The Sailor Song came to him as a sudden inspiration this February.
“I was on my bed, my door was open and I was just messing around, jamming,” Gigi says.
“My little sister was passing by and she said, ‘Gigi, what was that?’ And I said, ‘I have no idea, but I think it’s really cool.'”
“A lot of times I spend a lot of time thinking about a song and what I want to say. This was one of those times where it just suddenly ended.”
She teased it on TikTok in April, released it in July – and, as of Wednesday November 20, it’s been streamed 340 million times on Spotify alone.
In some ways, it’s an unexpected hit. The production is low-tech and homespun and Gigi’s vocals are androgynous to such an extent that many listeners were surprised to learn that it was a song about two women in love.
But the chorus is undeniable.
She sings, “Kiss my mouth and love me like a sailor.” “And once you get a taste, can you tell me what mine tastes like?”
Of course, in our deeply divided culture, no success remains untainted for long.
In America, evangelical Christians criticized Sailor Song for the line: “I don’t believe in God, but you are my savior.”
Gigi’s response, posted on TikTok, was uncompromising.
He wrote, “My songwriting is not a democracy,” and this applies to every artist’s work.
The singer’s struggle with faith runs deep.
Her parents converted to Christianity when she was in elementary school, after which her mother began working extra jobs as a bus driver to get Gigi and her sisters into a private religious school in Florida.
The experience was not positive at all.
“Being gay in an environment where you’re not allowed to do that was a huge burden on me,” Gigi told the Bringin’ It Backwards podcast in 2022.
However, her faith was really shaken when her older sister Celine died suddenly at the age of 22 in the early months of 2020.
The shock and pain is unimaginable. The foundation of Gigi’s world is forever shaken.
In his music, he tried to explain the unknown.
“The other day, I thought of something funny/But no one would laugh except you,” she sang in a song called Celine.
“And mom and dad are always crying/And I wish I knew what to do.”
Gigi’s latest release, Fable, is another attempt to confront the grief that strikes those who weakly offered her “thoughts and prayers” after her sister’s death, and wonders what it’s like to be separated from the faith. His “skin starts burning”.
She says, “One of the hardest parts about my grief is that I didn’t have any music that could touch my life, my situation, that could help me get through it.”
“And so I made it for myself.
“I’ve written a lot of grief songs, but finally, in Fable, I said it the way I always felt, since the day I lost her, and its expression brought me great relief.”
That catharsis is a kind of self-healing. And, more than anything, the singer wants her music to reach those who need it.
“One of my greatest wishes is that I don’t have to let this dark and isolating experience stay the same,” she says.
“My hope is that there may be a way [music] Can help. And it’s surprising, because I see a lot of that. It’s been very healing for me.”
And with that ability to reach people in their most vulnerable moments, it won’t be long for Gigi to get her name tattooed on many more arms.
