Gigi Perez’s viral single “Sailor Song” has hit one billion streams on Spotify. The ballad about lusting after a girl who looks like Anne Hathaway was a No. 1 single in the United Kingdom last fall and has frequently been among Spotify’s most-streamed songs in the United States.
“Went to find the first version of ‘Sailor Song’ and was catapulted back to the bed I wrote it on. So in love and yet so desperate for answers to my grief and the way it’s changed how I see the world. I was crying out for something divine and it called back to me. I never imagined a song I would write would resonate in the ways it has,” Perez wrote on Instagram.
“One billion is unfathomable but in certain moments, when I look at you guys each night, I feel what it means to you. With every face and our arms reaching out for each other, I feel it. I am so grateful to the divine thing that I don’t understand for stringing me and us together the way it does. Romance exists despite grief and failure.”
Perez has performed “Sailor Song” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The tune has been covered by Joe Jonas and Tate McRae; The Chainsmokers remixed it. “When that person is so constant in your life, it’s kind of like you fall into it, and you have nothing else to grasp on to,” Perez told Billboard of the track. “It came from that desperate place.”
In April, Perez released her debut studio album, At the Beach, in Every Life. Perez self-produced the album and wrote the title track two hours after she was released from her first deal (she is now signed to Island): “It was in my lowest moment, in that year of silence and not having money and not knowing what to do, that I came across this the purest form of love,” she told Rolling Stone. “I know that in whatever happens from here, I carry that with me. And that there’s an intrinsic value to the experience of being me.”
Buy Gigi Perez’s Sailor Song on vinyl now.
