Songfacts®:

• Gigi Perez is a lesbian artist who's single "Sailor Song" explores Sapphic love in a world often hostile to same-sex relationships. The song finds Perez longing for her heart's desire to love her openly and without shame.
• Oh, won't you kiss me on the mouth and love me like a sailor?
  
  Perez uses the metaphor of a sailor's love to convey the intensity of desire she longs her romantic interest to have for her. Sailors, often absent for extended periods because of their profession, develop a deep, passionate love for their partners.
• Perez wrote the song herself and co-produced it with Noah Weinman, the LA singer-songwriter behind the melancholy bedroom-folk project Runnner.
• "Sailor Song" first took shape in February 2024, in the cozy confines of Perez's childhood bedroom while she was casually strumming her guitar. She had been mulling over the idea of a love so intense and consuming that it felt almost chaotic, and she wanted to capture that feeling in her lyrics. "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," she explained to Billboard. "It came from that desperate place."
  
  Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a line popped into her head: "Kiss me on the mouth and love me like a sailor." With that, the song began to take on a life of its own.
  
  As Perez played around with the chords and scribbled down more lines for the chorus, she realized she wasn't the only one tuning in. "My door was open, and my little sister walked by and said, 'Oh, Gigi, that's really awesome,'" she remembered fondly.
  
  Buoyed by the encouragement, Perez kept at it, and by the end of the night, the chorus was complete.
  
  But it wasn't all smooth sailing. "It really just stayed as a chorus for a while, and the lyrics had changed," she admitted. "There were certain little words that changed the meaning of what [the song] was."
  
  Eventually, Perez took a melody from another song she had been working on and merged it with "Sailor Song." "It really is one of those things where it was a puzzle putting it together, but there wasn't much resistance," she said. "Other times, in order to get something like that, you have to really dig for it."
• Released independently, "Sailor Song" quickly gained traction, catching the attention of Island Records, who signed Perez in September 2024.