Gigi Perez Is Turning Her Grief Into Hope

Before dropping her debut album in April, Gigi Perez achieved the thing many artists dream of: a viral hit. The 25-year-old’s single “Sailor Song,” released independently in July 2024, blew up on TikTok last summer, after a video she shared months earlier racked up 15 million views. This May, the song hit over 1 billion streams on Spotify. But the real excitement for Perez doesn’t have to do with the numbers.

“I've built such a strong connection to each and every one of my listeners and my audience from a one-to-one basis,” she says. “Although ‘Sailor Song’ made such a major impact that I'm very aware of, from the bottom of my heart, the thing that gets me up and makes me excited is the person in front of me in the moment.”

Having those intimate interactions with fans is part of the reason why Perez was so excited to go on her sold-out tour for her album At The Beach, In Every Life. After wrapping up her last headlining show on May 7 in Los Angeles, California, Perez jumped on Hozier’s Unreal Unearth Tour as a special guest. When we hop on the phone to talk about her recent success, Perez is backstage at their show in Argentina.

When you share your story with others, it does save lives.

Her name may already be thrown out there on prediction lists for the 2026 Grammys, and it may seem like “Sailor Song” (which has been featured in nearly 700,000 TikTok videos) is just the beginning of her story, but the singer-songwriter says her rise to fame has been more gradual. In fact, the single might be the Brooklyn-based singer’s most viral hit, but it’s not her first. Back in 2021, while attending Berklee College of Music (her dream school), her songs “Celene” and “Sometimes (Backwood)” found success on TikTok, which led her to sign with her first label.

It was an emotional time, though. Perez’s older sister and musical inspiration (“an amazing opera singer”), Celene Perez, passed away in 2020, before her second year at Berklee. “My whole entire world flipped on its head,” she says. While dealing with grief, Perez was also taking a huge step in her career. That’s when she realized she had to drop out of school. “The record label conversation started, and that's what I went to school for, so I totally got what I needed and left,” she says.

As a kid, the singer connected to music as a way to express herself. “When I started songwriting and teaching myself the guitar and the piano at 15, I was really struggling with my sexuality and the acceptance of my attraction for girls,” says Perez, who identifies as a lesbian. “The way that I channeled it was through writing and Tumblr. I found it just very invigorating, that I was in charge of saying what I wanted to say.”

Growing up in Royal Palm Beach, Florida, Perez also did a lot of theater in high school, but never felt like she fit into the more heteronormative storylines. “I was a gay kid who was struggling with herself and self-image,” she says. “I blinked two years later and realized, ‘Wow, I've been staying up till 3 a.m. every night, because I can't stop writing.’ And so that was my indicator.”

Even after getting dropped from her first label in early 2024 and returning home to Florida for a fresh start, Perez continued to write and found that working on her own was more her style. While she found the actual production part easy, she had to navigate more than she expected. “The biggest challenge of self-producing my album was just the experiences that I lived to get me there. It was more so what I was dealing with and enduring, like my grief and coming back from a pretty big failure in my 23-year-old eyes,” she says.

A lot of artists in the industry work best with producers (think of collaborators like Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff or Olivia Rodrigo and Daniel Nigro). “Their best potential and expression is going to be brought out by another producer. They're a badass duo that comes together, and that's their highest potential,” Perez says. “For me, my highest potential, when I started making this music at 24, was learning how to record, engineer, and produce on my own.” Now, she says collaboration would be a want versus a need.

Even after getting picked up in the fall of 2024 by Island Records, Perez was able to self-produce At The Beach, In Every Life, which kept her debut very much her own and raw with emotions. The 12-track album, which includes “Sailor Song” as well as other singles like “Fable” and “Chemistry,” addresses grief and heartbreak.

I never thought in a million years that there would be people who understood the things that I talk about.

Perez may be writing about her own life, but fans can relate to her honest lyrics. “I walk blindly in my grief. I never thought in a million years that there would be people who understood the things that I talk about,” she says. “I almost feel like it's a duty now to talk about it and be there, because I know that there's somebody who's just lost their sibling or whoever it is, and they don't have that. When you share your story with others, it does save lives.”

Perez uses Lady Gaga as an example of another artist who has helped her fans through difficult times. “All the lives that that woman has saved because of the way that she's been there for people and so open about her story, I just want to help and hopefully prevent loneliness and isolation as much as possible in an otherwise very lonely and isolating experience.”

Getting to perform At The Beach, In Every Life on tour is a way for Perez to see just how much of an impact her music has had on fans, and she doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. On June 2, she announced an extension of her headlining tour this fall, and before that, she’ll be doing the festival circuit this summer.

While she jokes she’s manifesting sleep right now, Perez’s drive to keep going comes from her late sister. In addition to writing songs about her, each new success feels like “another way to continue her legacy.”

“The fact that my music has been received this way after a lot of hardship is a blessing to me,” she says. “It shows others that life doesn't stop at your grief and your suffering and your failures.”