The singer’s struggles with faith run deep.
Her parents became born-again Christians when she was in primary school, after which her mother took extra work as a bus driver to pay for Gigi and her sisters 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 that was very taxing on me,” Gigi told the Bringin’ It Backwards podcast, in 2022.
Her faith was really shaken, however, when her big sister Celene died suddenly, aged 22, in the early months of 2020.
The shock and the pain are unimaginable. The foundations of Gigi’s world were destabilised forever.
In her music, she tried to explain the unexplainable.
“The other day, I thought of something funny/ But no-one would’ve laughed but you,” she sang in a song simply called Celene.
“And Mom and Dad are always crying/ And I wish I knew what to do.”
Gigi’s latest release, Fable, is another attempt to confront that grief, lashing out at people who feebly offered “thoughts and prayers” after her sister’s death, and wondering why disconnecting from faith makes her “skin start to burn”.
“One of the hardest parts about my grief is that I didn’t have any music that touched on my life, on my situation, to get me through it,” she says.
“And so I made it for myself.
“I’ve written tons of grief songs but, finally, in Fable, I said it in the way I always felt, from the very day I lost her, and I was so just relieved by the expression of it.”
That catharsis is a sort of self-healing. And, more than anything, the singer wants her music to find its way to others who need it.
“One of my biggest wishes is to not let this experience that is so dark and isolating stay that way,” she says.
“My hope is that there can be some way this [music] can help. And it’s amazing, because I’ve been seeing a lot of that. It’s been very healing for me.”
And with that ability to reach people in their most vulnerable moments, it won’t be long before Gigi sees her name tattooed on many more arms.
