Last week, WXPN named singer-songwriter Gigi Perez our Artist To Watch for the month of May, and she kicked off the month by taking the stage to a packed house at World Cafe Live for a commanding Free At Noon concert.

The room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop as Perez played seven of the album’s twelve songs, dipped back to her debut single for the fans (2021’s “Sometimes (Backwood)”), and got the room singing along to her viral hit “Sailor Song.” But it was a moment mid-set where Perez was about to go into the title track for her album At The Beach, In Every Life and realized that her guitar was in the incorrect tuning that she paused and took a couple minutes to reflect on the song, the album, and her career while her guitar tech got the instrument ready offstage:

“‘At The Beach, In Every Life,’ I’ll talk about that for a second. It’s the title of my debut album. It’s so crazy. I remember when I was 15, that’s when I first got into songwriting. And from the moment I wrote my first song, I imagined what a debut album would feel like. Some of my favorite projects of all time are the artist’s debut. So when I was 15, I remember thinking ‘I’m going to have my debut album out at 17.’ It’s been a whole ten years. But so much has happened in the past ten years that really created the album for what it is. And I definitely didn’t expect at 15 the [things] that I would experience at such a young age. A lot of the album is about my grief after losing my oldest sister Celine.

“And she’s all over the project; if you take a listen to the album, a lot of the voice messages are from her, from our childhood. She was an incredible opera singer, and in a way, it is an homage to her. But the album is also about romance and being capable of love and being loved in the middle of your grief and these uncertain times. … I look back at when I was 20 years old, it’s been about five years now that she’s been gone, [and] a very small piece of hope that I had is that maybe there’d be a way for me to express it, and that it could be something that could help others. Being on tour now, I’m seeing that every single day. It’s something that saved my life, you know? Music saved my life, and being able to share the story as well, and connecting with you guys, regardless of whether you’re here from the understanding of that grief or that kind of loneliness or the difficulties of live, or if you just want to connect and have fun through music, I think that we knock those two things out.”

See photos from Gigi Perez’s Free At Noon concert below; listen to At The Beach, In Every Life and follow updates on her North American tour at her website. Perez will be back in the Philadelphia area on June 10th opening for Hozier at the Freedom Mortgage Pavilion.

Manchester Orchestra: Free At Noon Concert (Virtual)