Gabi Sklar still can’t quite believe the pace of her last few years.
The 25-year-old pop singer-songwriter, who grew up on Long Island’s North Shore, has amassed 4.7 million followers on TikTok, earned millions of streams on Spotify and signed major brand deals — all while insisting she remains “an everyday girl” who just happens to make music that resonates.
“Oh my goodness,” she said when asked what the past year has been like. “Well, I have a new single coming out. So we just came from Louisiana — we were filming a video for it — and we have a project coming out, hopefully next year. So I was in Sweden finishing that with people I love to write with.”
Sklar’s path began long before the viral numbers. She was discovered as a child, a girl who, as she said, “played the piano by ear and sang songs” before she ever turned to social media. By 13, she was traveling regularly to Manhattan for vocal training with Don Lawrence, best known as Lady Gaga’s longtime coach. She still trains with him weekly, now virtually.
Sklar made early trips to Los Angeles to record and even played the organ in the office of Universal Music Group chairman Lucian Grainge, who offered her a deal she ultimately didn’t take. Instead, she spent years developing her voice, songwriting and sense of artistic identity.
But everything changed the day she reluctantly leaned into TikTok.
“I woke up and had like 33 million views on a video,” Sklar’s manager recalled — a moment that launched her page from about 3,000 followers to millions. From there came a Sony Electronics deal, national endorsement campaigns for Band-Aid and Zyrtec, and a wave of attention from the industry in Nashville, Los Angeles and New York.
Even with the sudden visibility, Sklar said she never expected her career to unfold this way.
“I actually looked at my manager a couple of days ago in Louisiana, and I was like, ‘I can’t believe this has happened,’” she said. “There are the things that you expect — some sort of attainable dream — and then there are these things that you don’t even think could happen. And that’s kind of what my life trajectory has been.”
Music, she said, always felt central to her identity, even before she thought of it as a career. “I always knew music was so essential to the core of who I was,” Sklar said. “But I never thought it was something I could do as a career and make a living off of and reach as many people.”
That shifted around age 13, when early recording sessions helped her see a path forward. Writing, however, was her entry point.
“My first thing I love to do is write,” she said. “When I was seven, I’d sit down at the piano and kind of have myself by ear. I really loved the storytelling aspect.”
Her inspirations were eclectic and emotional — a mix of powerhouse female artists and older records she dug into as a teen.
“I always loved Dolly [Parton], Stevie [Nicks], Miley [Cyrus],” she said. “I love that these women can do as much as they want, or as little as they’d like, but still have just as much impact. That’s power.”
She added that 2013 was a formative year for her.
“I was 13, but also [I was inspired by] the art that was playing at that time — Lana Del Rey’s ‘Born to Die,’ Arctic Monkeys’ ‘AM,’ Nirvana, Celine Dion. There were just so many elements of different genres I admired,” she said. “What connects it all is this feeling. What you really hold onto is the emotion.”
Her own sound, she says, reflects those wide-ranging roots: “a melancholic ’70s western daydream fused with organic, bare-boned avant-garde pop.”
While social media ultimately propelled her, Sklar said her relationship with it wasn’t always easy.
“I think at one point I almost had resentment towards it,” she said. “I’d go into meetings and they’d say, ‘We love the music, we like you, but you don’t have a social media presence.’ That was preventing me from moving forward.”
Her mindset shifted when she realized the medium wasn’t going away.
“I thought, this is the sign of the times — you have to adapt,” she said. “People online are very smart. They can tell when a video is dubbed or auto-tuned. So if you have the bare bones — if you do an a cappella video and people resonate with the feeling of it — that’s where you win. That’s where I found my community.”
Her upcoming single, “Sugamama,” out Nov. 21, leans into a “fun country-pop feel,” she said. The music video, filmed at Coyote Ugly in New Orleans, will be followed by a wider project in 2025. The track will be available on all streaming platforms, from Spotify and Apple Music to YouTube.
Looking forward, Sklar has her dream collaborators in mind.
“I would always love to work with Mark Ronson,” she said. “Performance-wise, it would be really cool to do something with Miley. I want to say Dolly and Stevie — that would be so iconic.”
For now, she’s focused on the work — writing, recording and connecting with fans online.
“None of this was overnight,” she said. “But if you show up for the people who show up for you, that’s how you win.”
