Where did breakout star Gigi Perez come from?

In April, a fan approached American singer Gigi Perez after a show, and proudly showed off her latest tattoo.

“Gigi I 🖤 U,” reads the ink. This singer is at a loss for words.

“In my head, I was like, ‘Please don’t be sorry’,” she laughs.

“I have a hard time processing that someone else has my name permanently etched on their skin.

“But, I mean, it’s a major honor to know that the music had such an impact on him that he’s going to do it.”

This is the first time someone has felt inspired enough to turn their name into a tattoo – and the timing couldn’t be better.

Six months earlier, Gigi had been dropped by her record label, in the middle of a promotional trip to London.

And after having to move back to her parents’ home in Florida, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter had to reevaluate her life.

“I’m free falling,” she said.

“I had no income, I came back home, and I started to doubt.

“But I was like, ‘Let me give myself a year to learn how to record and produce my own records.

“From there, if I needed a job so that I could still make music, I would do it.

“And then everything happened…”

Everyone, if you don’t follow Gigi’s story, participate in scoring a global hit single out of nowhere.

Sailor Song, an aching love ballad about falling in love with a woman who looks like actress Anne Hathaway, exploded online in June and quickly became a real-world success.

In the UK, it went to number one, ending Sabrina Carpenter’s nine-week run at the top.

The song also peaked in Ireland and Latvia and made the top 10 everywhere from New Zealand to Belgium.

“I know this song is special to me,” Gigi said.

“I just didn’t know it would be so special to so many other people.”

When she realized she had reached number one, “I got out of the shower and started crying,” Gigi to the British Official Chart Company.

That success provides a great conclusion to a poor origin story.

Born in New Jersey and raised in Florida, Gigi was a drama school nerd who turned to musicals when she realized she was “not going to play the ingenue role”.

Self-taught on piano and guitar, he went straight to the top of the US streaming charts, in 2021, with his self-released debut single, Kadang (Backwood).

The song earned her a contract with Interscope Records and Gigi supported Coldplay on their Music of the Spheres tour before she played her own headline act.

Looking back, he says the initial wave of success created pressure to expand his career quickly. For a long time, he felt “stuck and limited” because he was not moving forward.

“It’s this cognitive dissonance where I get an amazing slot (on someone else’s tour) but I don’t know who will come to show,” said Gigi.

And when he played in London last November, he knew he had reached a tipping point.

“I ask God, or the world, ‘Open the door that needs to be opened and close the door that needs to be closed,'” he said.

“I knew it had to happen – but I was terrified of what it would mean.”

Interscope released him two days later. But instead of the end of the world, Gigi’s energy is new. He wrote more songs – and taught himself how to make them, by watching YouTube tutorials.

Sailor Song came to him with a sudden inspiration this February.

“I was in bed, my door was open and I was just stuck, stuck,” Gigi said.

“My sister walked by, and she was like, ‘Gigi, what is that?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know, but I think that’s really cool.'”

“There were moments when I thought about the song and what I wanted to say. It was one of those moments that just blew me away.”

He teased it on TikTok in April, released it in July – and, as of Wednesday 20 November, has been streamed 340 million times on Spotify alone.

In some ways, it was an unlikely hit. The production is low-tech and homespun and Gigi’s vocals are androgynous to the point where many listeners are surprised to find it’s a song about two women in love.

But the chorus is undeniable.

“Kiss me on the mouth and love me like a sailor,” she sings. “And when you get a taste, can you tell me what it tastes like?”

Of course, in our segregated culture, no success remains untreated for long.

In the US, evangelical Christians criticized Sailor Song for the line: “I don’t believe in God, but you are the Savior.”

Gigi’s response, posted on TikTok, was uncompromising.

“My songwriting is not a democracy,” he wrote, “and that applies to every artist’s work.”

The singer’s struggle with deep faith.

Her parents became born-again Christians when she was in elementary school, and her mother took on extra work as a bus driver to pay for Gigi and her sister to attend a private religious school in Florida.

The experience was not all positive.

“Growing up gay in an environment where you’re not allowed to be is very expensive for me,” Gigi said on the podcast Bringin’ It Backwards, in 2022.

However, his faith was shaken, when his sister Celene died suddenly, aged 22, in the early months of 2020.

The shock and pain was unimaginable. The foundations of Gigi’s world are forever unstable.

In her music, she tries to explain the inexplicable.

“Back in the day, I thought it was funny / But nobody laughed but you,” she sings in a song called Celene.

“And Mom and Dad are always crying / And I want to know what to do.”

Gigi’s latest release, Fable, is another attempt to face the grief, attacking those who weakly offered “thoughts and prayers” after the death of her sister, and wondering why breaking from the faith made her “skin start to burn”.

“One of the hardest parts of my grief is that I don’t have music that touches my life, in my situation, to get me through it,” he said.

“That’s why I made it myself.

“I’ve written a lot of sad songs, but finally, in Fable, I say what I feel, since the day I lost him, and I’m just relieved because of that expression.”

The catharsis is self-healing. And, more than anything, the singer wants her music to find its way to others in need.

“One of my biggest hopes is that this very dark and isolating experience stays that way,” he said.

“My hope is that there is some way this (music) can help. And it’s great, because I’ve seen a lot of that. It’s very healing.”

And with the ability to reach people in their most vulnerable moments, it wasn’t long before Gigi saw her name tattooed on another arm.