It’s difficult to put pain and grief into words. However, pouring it into songs has provided solace for rising artist Gigi Perez.
When Gigi returned home to Florida from Boston’s Berklee School of Music to ride out the COVID pandemic, she was greeted with the unimaginable loss of her sister. Isolated and grieving, she turned to music to express that unimaginable pain in the only way she knew how.
With a basic, bedroom set up, she began to write. “The beginning was very bare in the sense that I was just writing it to get it out because I was going insane,” Gigi said.
She began uploading those rough tracks online, and listeners began to find themselves in her vulnerability, “changing the trajectory, and intention of what these songs were.”
With the support of friends, the internet, and the introduction of Jennifer Decilveo, Gigi “picked the things that best exemplified the experience of heartbreak and grief” and set out to build her debut EP How To Catch A Falling Knife.
“It came most naturally in the sense that I wasn’t expecting to turn songs that I was writing in my bedroom into a project. That was the aspiration,” Gigi shared of the process.
As the EP evolved, that bedroom recording studio was soon moved to one that was formerly graced by the recording of Yours Truly, the debut project from one of Gigi’s biggest inspirations, Ariana Grande. “Growing up, I was a huge Ariana Grande fan, like the biggest. …when she released that project Yours Truly, I remember it was the only thing I listened to. I was totally enthralled by that whole project. “
“We were working with Jen and she booked the studio for the EP and it turns out that I’m going to be in the same room that Yours Truly was recorded in which was insane because that was Ari’s first project and it was just one of those fate moments. I think the whole experience of being in the studio especially where one of my greatest inspirations worked and it wasn’t something that I did…but that was the universe or God,” Gigi revealed of the serendipitous moment.
One of the results of those writing and recording sessions is the track “Kill For You.” Her first collaboration with Decilveo, the emotional single taps “into something that was more obsessive and dark and to the point of a certain kind of toxicity and delusion,” Gigi explained, “ I think that one thing that grief has made me, and anybody who has experienced sudden complicated traumatic kinds of grief, experience a sense of delusion. I wanted to capture that kind of delusion of experiencing something that’s not real. When I experienced my first really intense loss with my sister, it just became very apparent to me how crazy your brain can get and the things that you can think. I was ashamed of the concept of literally straight-up wanting to dig somebody from the ground, but it doesn’t make sense and it also doesn’t have to. I know there are so many people that have experienced really weird delusional kind of fantasy things that you can think of when you’re grieving and instead of having the shame and the weird feelings and something that used to literally terrorize me, I wanted to turn it into a joke.”
The song is accompanied by an equally moving and thought-provoking video directed by frequent collaborator, Leaf Lieber. “Leif understands that,” Gigi shares of their mutual grief, “He lost his mother. When he sent over the treatment, it just felt so true. I knew I was working with somebody who was like ‘I experienced this too,’ like ‘oh yeah, we’re crazy.’ It was very very natural.”’
In addition to healing, the process of creating this album has been one of self-discovery, but even Gigi is still figuring it all out. She describes the project as a “guide, not a question.” “The reason why I say that is because I don’t know,” she confides, “These are my experiences of taking a really big risk on a person, on a relationship, and on love, and watching it fall apart before you. So that’s why I aim it more as a question because how to do it, I don’t really know. If I figure it out I’ll let you know though.”
One thing she does know is the purpose of the project and her music. “I always feel like that is such a big question. There are so many layers to what is the goal and I think that’s something that I’m always reevaluating, but I think the most important and precious thing to me is to be a vessel where others can experience whatever they need to experience.”