After perfecting "abcdefu," GAYLE took matters into her own hands to get the single on the desks of producers, sending the track to nearly a dozen names in the music industry. Long weekends spent trying to get the song picked up resulted in rejection, but TikTok's American Sign Language community saw the single for what it was worth and quickly transformed it into one of the platform's biggest hits of early 2022.
"I found out the other day that Avril Lavigne followed me back on Instagram, and I was like, 'I'm dying.'"
Thanks to ASL TikTok, "abcdefu" slowly began to pick up traction, landing a spot in loops from around the world. "It was a really crazy, exciting time. But also terrifying, because I was like, 'I don't want it to stop, but I also want to be very grateful for what's happening right now,'" she says, adding that the song even won her the attention of a few established artists, including Jon Bellion, Upsahl, and Blu DeTiger. "I found out the other day that Avril Lavigne followed me back on Instagram, and I was like, 'I'm dying. I'm dead. This is death. Wow. This is ascending to the heavens.'"
Even Olivia Rodrigo slid into her DMs to congratulate her on her success. "She's really lovely, very, very sweet," GAYLE says, noting that her favorite conversations are less about music and more about checking in with one another as real people.
"She's a very, very successful young woman inside the industry," she continues. "The media and people inside of the music industry love to pit women against each other. So it's really nice to have a personal moment [with her] and be like, 'Yo, we both can be great in our own ways, and it doesn't have to be one or the other' . . . She's like, 'Are you OK? You good? How's your brain?' I'm like, 'My brain's good, how's yours?'"
