Debbie Gibson Talks New Memoir, ‘Eternally Electric’: ‘These Are the Good Old Days’

“I am busy, but the good kind of busy. I feel good and happy and this is a wild adventure,” Debbie Gibson tells Billboard.

On Sept. 9, the entertainer — chart-topping singer-songwriter, stage and screen actress and now book author — releases her memoir, Eternally Electric (subtitled The Message in My Music), its name an ode to her second album, 1989’s Electric Youth. The set ruled the Billboard 200 for five weeks and spun off her second Billboard Hot 100 No. 1, “Lost in Your Eyes.”

In June 1988, “Foolish Beat” had become Gibson’s first Hot 100 leader — making her the youngest act to write, produce and perform a No. 1 on the chart. She still holds the mark among women artists.

Gibson continued to rack up chart hits through the years, woven into a personal and career journey that has also encompassed Broadway and television roles, as well as mental and physical health challenges. In 2021, she released her first proper album in 20 years, The Body Remembers, which hit Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart. She followed in 2022 with her first seasonal collection, Winterlicious, which decorated the top 20 on Top Holiday Albums.

Days before the release of the new book, Gibson served up her newest musical creation, premiering the video for The Body Remembers triumphant track “Legendary.” As throughout her career, it finds her showing off a range of talents, from boxing to adding an Elton John-esque piano run to the song’s intro.

“It was so interesting picking what I was going to write about, what I was going to leave out,” Gibson says of Eternally Electric, published by Gallery Books, a division of Simon & Shuster. “I tried to give each era of my life equal time, because I’ve had a lot of varied experiences.

“So, my mom and I had pitched a book, like, twice before this, always a memoir, but it was at times in my life where I really hadn’t been through enough to write anything profound. I see why those deals didn’t happen back then,” Gibson muses.

“But it felt like right now … this is my true second act,” she continues. “It’s been for about five, six years. It really has been this rebuilding time and this reconnecting time with my audience. It just felt like a really fun perspective to be in the middle of it, and for the party to be going — not to be like, ‘I’m going to sit back now in old age and reflect on the good old days.’ These are the good old days that I’m living right now.”

Gibson pauses. “By the way, I say a line like that and I’m like, ‘Where was that in the book?!’, ” she asks with mock anger, though seemingly strategizing on the fly, another hallmark of her endurance. “The paperback,” she says. “I can add things …”

Gibson wrote Eternally Electric guided by Richard Buskin, longtime author, podcaster and all-around pop-culture devotee (whose résumé includes bylines in Billboard; Gibson’s, too).

What did he bring to the process?

“Writing three-and-a-half-minute songs is very different than writing over 90,000 words about your life and knowing how to structure it,” Gibson says. “I always do really well with the right collaborator and the right sounding board, and he just really knows the structure.

“The whole idea was very much for it to be my voice. I mean, every word’s mine, but he would point out when I repeated a word or when maybe I was sitting someplace too long and it wasn’t moving along,” she continues. “It’s a weird thing when you’re writing about your life to realize how much material there is. Very often it was like, ‘I want to get this anecdote in,’ but it was just isolated and just didn’t have the right inroad and the right out.”

Gibson met with prospective pen pals, including many women. “I was like, well, I have the female perspective, so it’s kind of cool to have a male energy, as well,” she says of choosing Buskin. “Beyond that, what I got from him is — as I was [once] called in Billboard: indefatigable — he was a true partner and he did not want to stop until we felt like we had it as great and layered and tight as we could get it.”

Then It Was Her, Out of the Blue

Gibson first reached Billboard’s charts in the issue dated Jan. 31, 1987, with “Only in My Dreams.” By September, the song had climbed to No. 4 on the Hot 100, becoming the first of four top 10s from her debut album, Out of the Blue, which went on to hit No. 7 on the Billboard 200 in February 1988.

Though 16 years old at the time of her chart arrival, the Merrick, Long Island, N.Y.-raised Gibson was already a seasoned vet in the spotlight thanks to numerous stage roles growing up, including in the children’s chorus at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Her musical roots trace to kindergarten, when she showed-and-told an original song, “Make Sure You Know,” a classroom how-to deeper than its lyrics (“Make sure you know your classroom, make sure you know your seat … I’ll help you find your teacher, or you’ll have to wait in the street!”) In the book, Gibson writes, “It was like, Better know your way around, kid, or we’re kicking you to the curb! My mind was always going to the worst-case scenario …”

Looking back to her professional musical career’s launch, and trajectory, Gibson says, “I mean, it really is astounding that my records got on the radio, the charts, that I don’t have a #MeToo story, that I’ve landed in a very sane, happy, healthy place, and I’m creatively thriving. I’m not a statistic. That’s pretty amazing.”

Shaping her along the way? Her mother, Diane, who became Gibson’s longtime manager (“Momager”), dad Joe and three sisters, Karen, Michele and Denise.

“It’s great having three sisters,” Gibson says. “I guess what we learned in my family and what made it really normal and great for me is that I was not taught that to be in show business or to be famous was anything better than to be whatever everyone wanted to be.

“We celebrated each other, the great uniqueness in people.”

Gibson is now managed by Heather Moore, who has been a part of her business team dating to the ‘90s. (Gibson’s mother passed away in 2022.)

“It really was like she and I came full circle to where she could just be my mom,” Gibson says, following the ups and downs that would seem unavoidable with a mother managing her daughter well into the latter’s adulthood. “I said to Heather the other day, my mom, if she was alive right now and in the industry, she’d be going crazy, feeling like she couldn’t keep up. And it’s a lot to keep up with, you know?

“Nobody could’ve or would’ve done what she did in the first part of my career,” Gibson reflects. “It was her soul’s passion.

“And nobody would have done it as well as her. Sometimes her bedside manner was that she was that tough Sicilian woman who was protecting her daughter. She pissed off a few people along the way. Oh, well.”

Couch! Couch! Couch!

Mixed with funny memories (Gibson once unknowingly thought that donuts would make for a good addition to a friend’s Seder), Eternally Electric, perhaps surprisingly, puts a large focus on mental health. She writes in-depth about feeling so anxious amid her career breakthrough that she couldn’t sit still at family dinners, whether heightened by worries that too much family focus was on her and not her sisters, or simply a schedule that had quickly transformed her life.

Anxiety persisted at varying levels over the years, and Gibson in the book captures the suffocating feelings of panic attacks, how seconds during them can feel endless. She writes about believing that extreme highs, not just lows, can be unsettling and that even success can be taken by the mind and body as trauma, given its demands.

“If you’re getting adrenally fatigued, you’re going to be in fight-or-flight all the time and your brain, your wiring is going to be off,” Gibson says. “The last thing teenagers in the ‘80s were embracing was going to a psychiatrist. That was like really to admit defeat at the time. And not only was it a stigma, it just wasn’t on the tip of anyone’s tongues to even think.”

The pressures of pop star life (or anyone’s?) seem to resonate eternally. In Netflix’s current juggernaut KPop Demon Hunters, HUNTR/X is the biggest musical act and all the members want to do is … sink into a break. Gibson can identify, and says that she’s “embraced all the unevenness of life, and that makes me a lot less anxious.” (Current Hot 100 No. 1 “Golden,” from the film, meanwhile, echoes her trademark emphasis on infectious melody.)

“Sometimes I’m doing interviews and I revert back to that kid in high school whose face would get flushed if the teacher asked me a question,” Gibson says. “We all take ourselves so seriously sometimes. Some days we’re just going to feel off. We all try to hold on to those days where it’s like, ‘I love how I feel. I feel calm. I feel energized.’

“But you can’t hang on to that every minute. You do your best with it.”

After Atlantic, New Waters

After Out of the Blue and Electric Youth, Gibson released two more albums on Atlantic Records: Anything Is Possible, in 1990, and Body Mind Soul, in 1993. Gibson chronicles in Eternally Electric that she had an eight-album deal but that she and the label mutually parted ways after those four.

“In hindsight, that was a lot to walk away from. I had a choice, but I didn’t even entertain the choice,” Gibson says. “I see it as: Record companies take a lot of gambles. It’s their checkbook, they’re fronting the money. But at the same time, 20-year-old girls are in a very transitional phase. Nobody knows who they are at 20, so Anything Is Possible reflected that.”

The album’s title cut hit the Hot 100’s top 40, while subsequent single “One Step Ahead” became a top 20 dance hit. Still, Gibson says of the set and its timing, “I think my audience was like, ‘I am leaving all the Debbie Gibson posters on my wall in my childhood bedroom … but I’m not taking them to college, nor am I taking those albums to college.’ ”

Body Mind Soul produced another Hot 100 hit, the sultry “Losin’ Myself.” Gibson writes in Eternally Electric that Atlantic executives pushed her out of her pop comfort zone for the LP, aligning it more with hit music’s R&B/hip-hop focus at the time. (“Right, cuz when you think urban, you think Debbie Gibson,” she eye-rolls in the book.)

When the album fell short of the success of her earlier works, Gibson details in the memoir that she didn’t feel the same support from Atlantic as before, even though it was the label that had directed her to tweak her sound.

“I could have been scarred from Body Mind Soul and the way I left Atlantic,” Gibson says. As ever, she finds positives. “I look back on that album fondly. It was disconnected from who I was at the time, but I think it came out great. I think it’s a well-crafted album. I love performing stuff from it now, because now I connect to it more.”

Gibson explains that “Losin’ Myself,” which she co-wrote and co-produced with pop/R&B hitmakers Carl Sturken and Evan Rogers, “was me vocally. It’s just that I really hadn’t lost myself over anybody in a relationship by that time. It was me playing a role, kind of — look, I was playing a role singing ‘Foolish Beat,’ too — but ‘Losin’ Myself’ was so sensual. I hadn’t really had that ownership of myself yet.

“I always say that the pop music audience’s BS meter is very finely tuned,” Gibson says. “Like, as an audience member, I want my pop performers pure. I don’t want to know it went through four chains of command to get to me.”

Gibson’s next album, Think With Your Heart, was released on EMI/SBK in 1995, and marked a return to her pure pop style, and with more ballads than before. Around that time, though, the label went through a leadership shakeup, stunting its promotion and potential chart impact. (First single “For Better or Worse” made inroads at adult contemporary radio.)

“Brian Koppelman, I always thank him for helping me make that album and validating my creativity at the time,” Gibson praises. “I am very lucky, because I have had these men in the music business — like Brian, and Fred Zarr [who produced six songs on Out of the Blue, including three with Gibson] — who really were the antithesis of the Svengali-type execs, and they’re just two of them. Lewis Martineé [who produced Out of the Blue’s “Play the Field”] texted me yesterday. There was so much respect and so much support for my vision.”

Gibson recalls that “Brian swooped in … ‘Let me just hear you and the piano … let’s get back to the music,’ and it really restored my faith in the system: ‘Oh, that’s the good part of the system.’ And here comes the bad part of the system again, which is if there’s a regime change, your project’s buried. Like, I’ve had that happen in film, in TV. That is just one of the things that happens, and you just have to kind of ride those waves.”

As with Body Mind Soul, Gibson considers Think With Your Heart key in her catalog. “To know that that album exists is amazing,” she says. “I did some of the songs from it this past year on tour — ‘Didn’t Have the Heart’ and ‘Dancin’ in My Mind’ — and it was really fun to revisit.”

From Glass Ceilings to Having a Glass

Gibson released her next albums Deborah, in 1997, and M.Y.O.B., in 2001, on her own labels. She writes in Eternally Electric of now-manager Moore getting the former in front windows at retail in Times Square. How? Moore simply asked, which led to that prominent placement, reinforcing Gibson and her inner circle’s resourcefulness throughout all stages of her career.

“There were a lot of things, as you read, especially in the middle decades, going through all the challenges I went through financially, health-wise, with my mom, with relationships,” Gibson says. “And, you know, those are forks in the road for people. And that’s when you find out what you’re made of. And, by the way, I don’t begrudge anyone in those moments to be like, ‘I’m out,’ because that’s better for some people, maybe. I’m just … that’s not me.

“And so revisiting that,” for Eternally Electric, Gibson says, “I was kind of like, dang, girl, are you done yet?! No? Okay, all right, you got another round left in you.”

In the memoir, Gibson recalls early suggestions that she should be marketed as Debbie G, and how a teenage artist writing and producing her own material made for unfamiliar territory for many involved. It’s surely helped lead to Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo and others controlling their careers, from the music to business sides, in more ways than might have been considered possible or acceptable years earlier.

“This generation’s singer-songwriters really are, I think, changing the landscape that we have now,” Gibson says. She adds with a laugh, “It feels like nobody told Beyoncé how to make her last record, right?

“I love that about music right now,” she marvels. “I hate when people go, ‘Everything great was done yesterday.’ I’m like, wow, you’re missing out on a lot if you think that way, because there’s so much great stuff happening.”

Late in the book, Gibson writes that she’s a glass-half-full person … and if that’s not enough, at least it’s better to have a glass! Plus, a good thing about getting more experience is you’re more equipped to deal with challenges.

“It’s like when you’ve had everything stripped away and you’ve rebuilt … I mean, I’ve rebuilt with help from others, but the help from others has come, too, from my own accountability to those people. And I don’t just mean financially, just in all the ways,” Gibson says.

“I was given that resilience. That’s, like, handed down to me. My dad’s in his upper years now and is always glass-half-full. He’s like, ‘Yeah, I went to the doctor today and I’m in a lot of pain’ … but he always has this happy-go-lucky sound to his voice,” Gibson shares.

“I grew up with different versions of resilience in my family. I am always humbled and grateful that I was given that gift to keep going.”