Perez was born in New Jersey to parents of Cuban heritage and raised mostly in southern Florida. Her parents sent their four daughters to a Christian school. Celene loved to act and sing — she dreamed of making it to Broadway — and Perez followed her to local theater productions, usually ending up in the ensemble. When she was 15, she started to write songs in earnest, fiddling around with piano, ukulele and guitar. She binge-listened to Troye Sivan and Hayley Kyioko, queer artists whose work she said “literally saved my life”; Kyioko’s “Girls Like Girls” became a kind of lifeline.
“When you’re a kid, music is verbalizing things you don’t know how to say — you don’t have the vocabulary to understand. You’re discovering how you feel in real time,” she said. She wanted to follow in their footsteps: “I wanted to do that back,” she explained. “I wanted to be part of that wheel.”
Perez attended Berklee College of Music, but left after losing her sister. She kept trying to write, eventually coming up with a song she named after Celene: “Mom and Dad are always crying / and I wish I knew what to do / and I wish you knew how much I miss you,” she wails. Soon after, she uploaded “Sometimes (Backwood)” to SoundCloud, and suddenly it felt like everything was happening. Perez signed to Interscope; she opened for Coldplay and Noah Cyrus; she moved to Bushwick. In the summer of 2023, she went to London to play a monthlong run of shows.
Then, two days after her first performance there, her ascent suddenly paused: Interscope dropped her. Perez remembers pacing around her un-air-conditioned room in London, sweating, paralyzed by not knowing what would happen next. She listened to “Breathe,” from “Into the Heights,” Celene’s favorite musical — a “failure song,” Perez said. Celene wanted to be the singer who made it, Perez added, saying she felt she was letting them both down.
Maybe an hour later, she flopped across the bed and wrote “At the Beach, in Every Life,” the title track from the album — a quiet, strident song about a lover’s reassurance.
When she returned to the United States Perez moved back to her childhood home. She felt like she was going backward. She rode her bike; she went to hot yoga classes; she tended to her three Chihuahuas. She poked around for freelance work online, looking for a way to make $100 at a time. And she turned her bedroom into a makeshift studio, padding the walls in black foam, messing around with the music software Ableton as she learned to produce her own songs.
