If you’ve been enjoying listening and/or sobbing to Gigi Perez‘s breakout single “Sailor Song,” then you should thank her little sister, who spotted it as a potential hit early on.
Speaking with ABC Audio, Gigi recalls that when she was first writing “Sailor Song,” she was playing it with her door open and it caught the ear of her younger sibling.
“She stops by when there’s something good,” Perez says. “She was like, ‘Gigi, that’s sick.’ I remember months before I posted it, she’d just be singing it and singing it.”
Another person who deserves credit for the existence of “Sailor Song” is Anne Hathaway, who Gigi name-checks in the opening line: “I saw her in the rightest way/ Looking like Anne Hathaway.” She feels that the lyric reflects “the concept of that ethereal beauty.”
“I mean, I grew up watching Anne Hathaway movies and, you know, I turned out to be gay,” she says.
So far “Sailor Song” has cracked the top 25 on the Billboard Hot 100, and has racked up tens of millions of YouTube views and more than half a billion Spotify streams.
“To see the places that people have resonated with it, especially in the younger LGBT community, and what that kind of desperate love means to people universally, I mean, it’s changed my life,” Gigi says.
Gigi will launch a U.S. tour in April.
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