Gigi Perez recalls the electric Toys “R” Us first-act guitar her grandmother purchased her when she was a child.
“I destroyed the hell out of it. I didn’t want to take lessons. I just liked playing around with it and banging on shit,” says Perez. “I have memories of being, like, in Costco, as a child. They would have those display pianos, and I would just bang on the keys. I felt somehow, so connected to it. Even though, I’m sure whatever was coming out was dogshit. But like, I felt so moved by it. I always had that thing.”
As she grew up, she began to grow frustrated with not knowing how to properly play any instrument she would stumble upon. The internet was her best friend when it came to learning chords.
“The first thing I taught myself was a C-Major chord,” says Perez. “It was just, like, a diagram of what that looked like. I remember just being so elated by that simple feeling.”
For her fifteenth birthday, Perez asked for a ukelele and began teaching herself covers, learning piano covers simultaneously.
“It kind of all tumbled at the same time,” says Perez of the start of her musical journey. “One of my friends brought a guitar into choir class one day. At this time, I was like, ‘Okay, I think I’m good off the ukelele.’ The ukelele is only satiating so much for me, at this time, cause I’d been playing it for a minute.”
After adding guitar covers to her portfolio, Perez continued to level up.
“Around this time, I was writing poetry. And, I think, just a combination of the two – I eventually started veering off from covers and making my own melodies,” says Perez. “It was a very, kind of, natural thing. And then, I just, somehow, got into songwriting. I literally didn’t even know that was, like, an option.”
Songwriting was the outlet teenage Perez had been craving.
“There was something that was always missing in my life, and I know that now,” says Perez. “Every day was, like, headphones in, world out, as a teenager. I think I just had a lot of stuff that I was dealing with, growing up. My sexuality and self-image and self-esteem – just everything that so many young girls go through, if not every young girl. Not having a way to express it for many years was really hard. And I think, songwriting, was the first time I felt like I could breathe.”
Perez says she stands by the quality of the first song she ever wrote on the piano and believes she could turn the bones of it into something worth releasing someday. She posted it to Soundcloud and received support from her classmates and 10,000 plays in the first week.
The first song Perez ever wrote, however, was a nursery-rhyme type of tune on the ukelele, as a young Perez was beginning to figure out rhyme schemes.
The 26-year-old still recalls the lyrics, to this day: “Maybe, when I’m in my dreams, that’s where you’ll be. And we’ll stay up counting sheep; it’ll be just you and me. And the stars don’t compare to the eyes in front of me.”
Songwriting was hailed above everything else in Perez’s life, from that point on.
The feeling it gave her was enough to become the guiding force that led her to a Berkley summer music camp and eventually to Berkley, as a college student. But Perez credits the incubator-period of her development as a performing artist to a music café in her hometown of West Palm Beach, FL, where she worked and played her songs when she deferred her Berkley acceptance to save money.
“I remember being so freaking mad about it, too, cause I wanted to go. All my friends were leaving to school,” says Perez. “It ended up being a really good thing for me.”
Testing out her own songs in front of a crowd and honing them behind the scenes scratched a different creative itch for her than the theater she grew up performing. This time it was her story, not someone else’s that she was sharing. There were no characters she was trying, and failing, to connect to; she was the main character.
“West Palm Beach, Florida is, like, not musical at all. Unless you wanna go like have brunch and DJ, ya know? That’s like the extent of it. And then, there was this café called Village Music Café,” says Perez. “I walked in. And I remember they were doing like an open mic thing. And I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. And I got involved in that and became very close to the owners, Steve and Donna.”
Perez was teaching lessons in the café’s music store, working in the café, and taking every possible opportunity to play her songs. For a little while, her whole world existed between those walls.
“That’s when I started regularly performing. I did that for a little over a year, while I was doing general requirements at my community college. And then, the next year, I went to Berkley. And by that time, I felt like, I’d been so poured into by Steve and Donna and the community they had at Village Music,” says Perez.
“It ended up being such a big – not just a preparatory phase, but one of the most important memories that I have of being a younger songwriter. I experienced it so much there. And I could do that.”
Armed with her subpar coffee-making skills and her songwriting vocation, Perez spent the next year at Berkley.
She learned fundamentals that she employs, but the classic learning style didn’t click for her immediately, and she wasn’t placed in the proper ear-training classes for her self-taught capabilities.
“I learned that I could do theory. Like, I have the capability. I, personally, don’t practice it in my songwriting, really. Everything that I typically do is by ear,” says Perez. “I know what kind of feeling I want, and I identify and understand what it is. I do think, if I had a deeper understanding of musical theory, I would probably make really crazy stuff, but I don’t ever want to risk that getting in the way of my natural pull.”
The stamp of her time on campus remains intwined in her artistry, but her individuality is always going to be prioritized.
“It’s an interesting dynamic, because when it comes to when it’s time to perform, the musicality aspect is so present, because of my experiences at Berkley, and just being around really great musicians, but, like, school is off and on.”
Once she began doing well in school, COVID hit at the same time she was experiencing an earth-shattering breakup.
“I literally was like, ‘Send me back to Florida, I need Mommy and Daddy.’”
Perez found online school a particularly challenging learning-style. Especially, after tragedy struck. Perez’s older sister, Celene passed away. The shock and grief washed over her, altering the path she had laid out for herself academically and creatively. Everything paused.
“That just really, completely fucked everything up. And I was like, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to focus in school.’ And I was right; I ended up doing horribly,” says Perez. “It was too much. I literally was like, ‘Fuck this. Fuck arranging.’ I hated arranging so much, because I just, like, didn’t know how to make ‘Here Comes the Sun’ into, like a Bossa nova.”
Perez’s world was at a standstill, and she was just fighting for air, any way she could, trying to get back into her mind in body. She couldn’t even write, her favorite thing.
“There was nothing. It was just, completely, like a black hole. And I felt so disconnected from everything,” says Perez. “I would go outside, and I would run until I couldn’t breathe anymore. That’s, like, what I did for, I don’t even know how long.”
When the words did come, they were 100 percent her and what she was living through, as they had always been.
“I wrote two songs, days apart from each other,” says Perez. “‘Sometimes (Backwood)’ and ‘Celene.’”
Throughout the pandemic, Perez had been posting videos to TikTok as one of her distractions.
“My little sister was very early to TikTok, and she was like, ‘Just join this app and share your music,’ says Perez. “I remember posting ‘Celene.’ I didn’t think anything of it. It was just a song. And it was the first song that I had written about my grief, really. I hadn’t been able to put anything to words.”
The song was born from an old Facebook post that fortuitously popped up on Perez’s phone, in which her late sister was encouraging her to keep making and sharing her music.
In the post, Celene prophesized that her sister’s music would change the world.
That was the song that gave Perez enough online traction to begin to build an audience and sign a record deal she was later released from.
“It started everything. Then, people found ‘Sometimes (Backwood)’ a few days later. It just started popping off. Then, you know, eventually, the labels started reaching out and, really everything’s been history,” Perez summarizes.
When Perez was dropped, she was determined as ever. That was when she taught herself to record and produce complete songs. She took being ‘back to the roots,’ in stride.
Perez found solace in not having to care about industry-driven numbers anymore and just focusing on her music, the community she was building, and finding a way to survive.
“I remember I wrote two songs for these young girls. Anything that was involved in music that, you know, could sustain me. And that was kinda the plan,” says Perez. “And then, everything that I was going to do was for me. And it wasn’t for any other purpose, but just doing it because I love it, and preserving it. Like, I don’t care if I am in a coffee shop for the rest of my life.”
Every person who was impacted by her music mattered, and she carries that lesson with her today.
“I was having so much fun through the heartbreak of losing the dream that I thought was being signed to a record label, and the idea of being on a roster filled with all these incredible artists. There were just so many things that mattered to me when they needed to matter, when I was younger. But the process of creating music, and how happy I was to literally write something that I loved again – the same way I felt when I was fifteen – that replaced every single other dream that I had,” says Perez.
She had conversations with her parents at that time, declaring that she had already been vindicated.
But the universe had other plans.
“Sailor Song,” one of the pre-album singles from Perez’s debut album, At The Beach In Every Life” has amassed over two billion streams on Spotify.
“I cannot fathom that there’s been so much impact and community built and worlds that have been built through being able to, you know, have that experience through the song,” says Perez. “I mean, I’m just so grateful to be in this place with it. And I think that, in terms of ‘the payoff,’ it always comes back to just being there for other people.”
Perez was writing honestly, while struggling with her mental health, relationships, growing up, and making her way in the world. And people connected with her perspective.
The first full song that Perez produced by herself, “Please Be Rude” is also on the album.
“It wasn’t like I was starting from scratch,” says Perez. “I knew how to record vocals. I knew my way around Ableton. I understood certain things. But it was the first one that I really made sound good. And I remember calling my friends and sending them the thing. And I was like, “‘I’m very confused. Does this sound good? Like, I feel like it sounds good. I’m kind of confused what’s going on right now.’ And it began the process.
Perez finds it funny how well the album fits together, crediting writing it in a similar time frame and her “specific touch,” because the process of writing each song felt so singular.
“Every single song that I made on the album, every time I finished one, I was like, ‘Oh shit. I don’t know how I’m gonna do that again,” Perez reveals earnestly. “I would sit at the computer again, and I would be like, ‘I don’t know how to record a song.’ I still feel that way.”
But the songs stemmed from somewhere deep within and landed her an opening slot on Noah Kahan’s ongoing stadium tour. Perez is soaking up the full-circle moment, declaring herself a day-one fan of Kahan, while sharing that he was one of the first artists to reach out to her and say he connected with her songs.
“I’ve been a big Noah fan since I was 18. And that time period, when I started working at Village Music, was when I discovered Noah,” says Perez. “He was an artist that really got me through that weird, whimsical time of working in a music café and feeling like… ‘False Confidence’ [from Kahan’s 2019 debut album Busyhead] “which is all about struggling with your self-esteem. And it’s just, it’s the best thing ever. It’s the best song ever.”
So, the tour is not only a key career opportunity, putting her in front of massive crowds each night, but a full-circle moment.
“To be here, now – to have watched his growth as an artist and have known and respected him since I was so young, to being able to be a small part of this incredible journey of storytelling that he’s on right now – it’s a privilege. It’s really a privilege,” Perez gushes.
These days, Perez derives her value from connecting with her friends, family, dogs and anyone who is impacted by her music. “Everything else is just noise.”
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