“I ask myself every day how different it would be if my mom was alive,” Debbie Gibson says. The singer-songwriter is contemplative and clear-voiced, which is unsurprising for a woman who has captivated audiences for decades. This August afternoon, she is on a video call from her home in Las Vegas, where the barefaced star shares a room with, as she describes it, “my Liberace piano” and a full-size carousel horse.
That horse, suspended from the ceiling, was in her music video for “Girls Night Out,” which was filmed at Planet Hollywood.
“During the pandemic, Planet Hollywood gifted me the horse for my 50th birthday,” she explains. The piano and the massive horse aside, Gibson says her home in the Vegas suburbs is “normal and low-key. I wake up every day to views of the mountains.”
It’s a far cry from Brooklyn, where both Debbie and her mother, Diane, were born.
Gibson’s mother was her partner in crime, personally and professionally, her whole life. Gibson’s new memoir, “Eternally Electric: The Message in My Music,” could only have been this honest in the aftermath of her beloved momager’s death in 2022.
She says, “I think I did her justice and told my mom’s and my story honestly and effectively. I do think that there are several layers more candor in the book than had she still been here. Her passing deepened everything, especially the anniversary shows over the last few years. I’ve been considering the doors she broke down for a lot of young female singer-songwriters and producers. She was going to bat for all of them by sticking up for me in conference rooms, fighting for my voice and the young, female voice.
“That is so strong right now with Taylor Swift, Chappell Roan, Gracie Abrams and Alicia Keys starting out super young; all of them with this aggressiveness and soulfulness that my mom went to bat for.”
Gibson chronicles her childhood in the suburbs of New York and the peaks of celebrity — including her comeback in 2020, when her single “Girls Night Out” returned her to the Billboard charts after 30 years. From teaching herself to produce as a teenager, to death threats, panic attacks and international fame, Gibson, 54, mined decades of experience for this memoir.
She was only 16 when her debut album, “Out of the Blue,” dropped in 1987. It went triple platinum. A handful of albums in the ‘90s and early 2000s and singles of varying chart success all the way up to 2022 followed, and all the while, Gibson was singing and dancing on Broadway stages and serving as a judge on reality programs, or as a contestant in the case of “Dancing With the Stars.”
“I proposed books several times throughout the course of my career,” she says. “With my late, great momager Diane, we made the rounds but, truthfully, I hadn’t lived enough life. A publishing company wants something salacious, which I didn’t have, and that was never what I wanted to do.”
In December 2023, she immersed herself in remembering, writing and compiling a record of her life in and out of the public eye.
“It felt like such a great time at this point because I’m in a true second act, the party is still going. … I feel so grounded, so connected to my audience in a way I recall feeling back in high school. I’ve been through so many of the universal challenges and difficulties, but my story has had so many plot twists, and I’m at a point where I feel I’ve landed on my feet.”
Gibson was a rarity in the late 1980s, writing and producing her own work at a time when record labels saw young women and girls as pretty faces and nubile bodies delivering songs written by established male songwriters and produced by male engineers. “Out of the Blue,” which sold 5 million copies worldwide, was written and produced in Gibson’s family garage, which her mom had custom-built into a studio. Gibson set out on a tour of nightclubs and within months, the first single, “Only in My Dreams,” was No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. “Seeing my name printed below Michael Jackson and Madonna and immediately above Whitney Houston was surreal,” she writes.
By 1988, Gibson’s first chart-topper, “Foolish Beat,” established her as the youngest artist in history to write, perform and produce a No. 1 U.S. single, breaking the record set by George Michael. Nine months later, she repeated the feat with “Lost in Your Eyes” from her 1989 double-platinum second album, “Electric Youth.”
It was an unusual childhood, but a happy one, by Gibson’s account. “I remember the sense of joy and freedom as a young girl making music,” she says, “I had no bills, nothing on the line if I failed, so to speak. If I didn’t get a record deal, my life would go on. I don’t know quite where that self-motivation came from.”
Gibson says Diane empowered her and her sisters, so perhaps the source of her inspiration isn’t a mystery.
“My mom, my sisters — a family of mostly girls — our mom empowered us all, and she really instilled in us that we should do whatever makes us happy and that we had the power to do so. I was always doing things that are usually reserved for males. I was doing production when there were no techie girls in my town. I was a freaky, techie kid, wiring my own patchbay in the studio. I was doing whatever I had to do to get what I visualized out of those speakers.”
For the high schooler, that catapult to fame coincided with the onset of crippling panic attacks. She and her parents faced death threats and several stalkers, so Gibson had a security guard when entering and leaving hotels and tour buses. It was isolating. But the perks were undeniably big. At 18, just before setting off for the Electric Youth tour, Gibson bought her family a 10,000-square-foot house in Lloyd Harbor, N.Y. She met Princess Diana during a London trip, received praise backstage from Michael Jackson and “battled” Kylie Minogue for the same pool of dancers.
She reflects, “Some people feel like, ‘the arts are not a real job, not a real profession, and it’s too risky.’ And it is very risky. So you need parents that are as crazy as you are. And I had that, which is amazing. I wouldn’t be here talking to you now if I didn’t, and so, what a life. You know, it’s a hard life, it’s an uncertain life, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
While Gibson recalls some dubious, if not deeply concerning, interactions with male celebrities and executives, she insists she was never treated inappropriately. Still, she mentions Australian actor Craig McLachlan showing up to her dressing room wearing nothing but a “dance belt” to play guitar for her and a suggestion from her label that if she wanted her record to get airplay, she had to go to dinner with a radio program director, “this man old enough to be one of my school teachers.”
In 2005, the butter-wouldn’t-melt Gibson finally agreed to pose nude for Playboy, which had “called us like clockwork about every two years or so” since her 18th birthday. At 34, she rationalized that she’d already shown most of her body for her roles in the musicals “Les Misérables,” “Grease” and “Chicago.”
Gibson reflects on the thin line between what was Playboy material two decades ago and what is album cover material today. She says, “It’s so funny, because I saw the Taylor Swift artwork for her new album, and went, ‘Oh my God,’ because she’s got the cropped dark wig on and I did that exact look for Playboy. It’s so interesting that the line between showing what you need to show for it to be a Playboy shoot or not is a thin line, but that’s everything.”
She adds, “I always had a freedom about me, and Playboy was a chance to express it. It was a final frontier in breaking out of what people might have boxed me in as.”
Four decades into her career, Gibson epitomizes the relentless drive that her momager instilled. Her performances and her music are independently produced, which is nonstop work, but that hasn’t dampened her plans for tackling even more projects.
“This whole ‘book chapter’ has been a long time coming, and continuing my own independent tour is a bitch,” she says (though it’s “bee-atch” in her intonation). “It’s a round-the-clock job, but I’m planning on expanding it internationally.”
Then, there’s the album and Broadway.
“Next on the plate is more international touring and recording my next album. I referenced some of the newer songs in the book. Writing for musical theater is definitely on the plate and possibly getting the musicals I have written off the ground. I have people ask me all the time, ‘Do you want to come back to Broadway?’ And I might, but I’d rather go back to Broadway next as a creator, as a composer and lyricist, producer, musical director and all of that.”
Creating is her “happy place,” she confesses, which sounds like a reprieve from the experience of writing her memoir.
“It was very emotional,” Gibson acknowledges. “It’s like being in therapy all day, every day, talking about your life, writing about your life.”
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