LAS VEGAS, NEVADA - SEPTEMBER 25: Singer/songwriter Debbie Gibson attends the grand opening of MAGIC ... [+]
Debbie Gibson is quite aware of what you thought she was, a former teen pop star from a bygone era. Hell, I admitted to Gibson I never would have interviewed her in the past.
But that had nothing to do with Gibson, that was my stupidity and snobbery. Thankfully I came around, because this interview with Gibson on her excellent new album, The Body Remembers, is one of my favorites of the year thus far.
I am definitely not the only one recognizing the error of my ways and coming around to the fact that this one time teen pop star is an accomplished singer/songwriter/performer. Right now, Gibson is well aware that with her first album in 20 years she is enjoying a major career renaissance.
She appreciates it, and is very thankful for the support. But you will find, as I did speaking with Gibson, having gone through so much in the last few years to reach this point, the audience love is all gravy. She is just happy making music and being free to be the artist she wants to be in 2021.
And the use of the word artist is very deliberate. Gibson, who can wax poetic on Billy Joel, geek out on songwriting as well as anyone, and passionately talks about performing, is very much an artist as I learned in this fascinating conversation.
Steve Baltin: I like the shirt. What's your favorite David Bowie era?
Debbie Gibson: I'll go for the "Changes" era. So whatever would that be.
Baltin: Congratulations on the album. It's so much fun and you can feel how happy you were in making this record.
Gibson: What a nice compliment. Yeah, I was definitely pouring all my love into it, for sure.
Baltin: I just did interviews with both Billy Idol and Natalie Imbruglia that I felt would be really relevant to this. I've talked about this with so many artists, as you get older, you get more comfortable with yourself and it comes back to being about the music. Do you feel like that's been the case for you?
Gibson: A thousand percent. And by the way, going back to Billy Idol, and it's so amazing how much Miley Cyrus has acknowledged him and how that's brought him to a new audience. I love that about her because so many younger artists will walk around like they invented everything. And I was always about acknowledging who came before me. I remember sitting on a couch next to Lesley Gore on Good Morning America and being like, "That's Lesley freaking Gore. She did it first." I had that awe and respect. So I love that, I love seeing Billy Idol out there for this new audience. That does my heart so good. But yeah, I feel the same way. It's all about the music. I found out literally an hour ago we're up to a million streams in month one for my album, and to me what that means is people have listened to that music a million times. Getting the music to the people, for me is everything. So when this music was leaving the nest, it was like, "Oh my God." It really felt like the first album or two for me. Cause I cut all the vocals the same way I cut all my demo vocals from age 12 to 16, and it was just so personal. There were songs I was fairly rolling out of bed and in my nightgown and cutting a vocal that I thought was gonna just be a demo and it ended up being a final/ It just was all very organic.
Baltin It's been 20 years between albums. And you live a whole life in that time. So do you feel like in a way, this is showing people who you are for the first time?
Gibson: Yeah, I do. I think my life has always been grittier than people perceive it to be. Even when the first album came out, I don't know what people thought, but I came from a very lower to middle class family, and I was playing clubs to get that first single off the ground. And this is a heightened version of that in a way, in the sense that it's my label, and my very small team, and every victory feels so big right now. This is the life I've lived, and this music that's come out of it. I had a decade of life-threatening illness, a relationship that was like a marriage that had a beginning and an end. My mom and I parted ways in business after 25 years. That decade nearly killed me. And so in clawing my way out of that, I do feel like there is, I'll use the word again, a grit and an intensity in this music, along with the glossy pop elements that I've always loved and I'm unapologetic about. I love a big slick production, I love the horn section in "Love Don't Care." But I also love the parts where my voice, the vibrato isn't totally even, or the mike is a little distorted, or whatever those elements. I was very intentional about keeping that realness on board and not perfecting the\ soul out of everything. That's reflective of my life, 'cause I live in a very real raw way. So yeah, I do think that this album is reflective of that, I do hope people get that from that, but more than that, I hope it connects them to their life and it's giving them something they need right now. On one hand, listen, I'm very privileged to have music to get out of bed for every day. And I'm aware that not everyone has that passion to get out of bed for every day. Some people are going to a job, and they're hoping that eventually that job and the money they save will allow them to do the things that I get to do every day, because I've carved out this life for myself. So in that sense, I'm very lucky. But in another way, I do feel like I'm living in this moment the same way everyone else is. And I do feel like that music is connected to people and people's universal experience right now, in the same way it was on the first two albums.
Baltin: It's interesting that you talk about the grit of it, but I also found it very uplifting, because like I said, you feel your happiness in there. That's a very real reality in what's happening all over the world today. Even when you're happy, you have to acknowledge the fact that things are also really messed up out there.
Gibson: Right, and I can say the happy for me now comes from appreciating the happy. I'm not just happy on a surface level, I'm happy 'cause I've been through some crap. And I am so joyful now because I realized that this feeling of joy does not come along every day or every year. And so I think that's what people are feeling too, it's not just this Pollyanna little suburban White girl saying, "Everybody be happy." [Chuckle] It's, "Hey, if I can be happy right now, so can you, because I've been through some real stuff." And I think that's what people feel. Yeah.
(Her dog jumps on her lap)
Baltin: My dog has jumped forward at some point during the interview too. We are very, very appreciative of dogs.
Gibson: That's my Joey. He declined going on a play date with his brothers today, he was like, "No Mom, I wanna stay home with you," ..
Baltin: How many dogs do you have?
Gibson: I have three boy hot dogs. They're the best. I'm like, "It's their world, we just live in it." I love that I get to create a world for another being where they really do think the world is perfect and revolves around them. I'm like, "Why, why shouldn't they think that?" [chuckle]
Baltin: Are there particular moments that now you are appreciating much more because you went through the first time, then you went through the downtime, which everybody does, and now you're back to the upside?
Gibson: Oh yeah. Going back like two years to the mix tape tour that I did with NKOTB and Salt-N-Pepa, Naughty By Nature, Tiffany, I was acutely aware of the fact that I was on an arena tour. I had 15 minutes of stage time on a tour, so it wasn't my tour. But I got to feel all the feels of people singing my early hits in an arena, and I had a tour bus. The tour bus picked me up the first time, three days after my high school graduation on my dead end street in Long Island. And yes, I thought like, I thought you had a tour bus every time you put an album out. Little did I know, sometimes you had the tour van, sometimes you have the tour, like grueling flights and whatever. And so I made up my mind to look out that tour bus window a lot. I was like, "I am living everybody's fantasy," 'cause I think everybody has a rock star fantasy (chuckles). No matter who you are, what you do. I'm living the fantasy of watching America go by, out the window of a tour bus. And I kind of missed it the first time 'cause I was so in my head, I was eating myself alive with the stress of putting on a good show and keeping my voice healthy, I was just a very intense teenager. And so I made up my mind to savor every moment that was coming. And I knew that was the beginning of something, I knew that that exposure was the beginning of something, and I just felt like my own health and energy was shifting.
Baltin: How have you found that impacting things like the Vegas residency?
Gibson: As recently as doing the shows the last few weeks at the Venetian and when I was on Broadway, I was living in Manhattan, and I loved knowing I had a dressing room sitting there in a Broadway theater that was mine, had my name on it. And I haven't had that in a very long time, and I was like, "Wow, I'm a Vegas resident, and I'm doing this mini residency, and I've got this dressing room. And just the glam. Again, apart from the show and the logistics of the show and doing a great job and the music, that's just freaking cool. I wanted to enjoy that feeling of that being cool, and that little showbiz girl in me who always loved that part of it. That is glamorous to me, to have that dressing room and my friends flying in from everywhere to see the show, and being able to entertain them in that dressing room. So like that, there's such a romance to all of that, and it's so not wasted on me. And nor is it wasted on me, having the incredible gift of a partner, a comrade to share the stage with. We've been on parallel paths since we're teenagers, Joey [McIntyre] and I. And I was, again like, God, for the little girl who grew up watching Donny & Marie every Friday night, I'm headlining kind of as a Donny & Marie-esque duo, as half of that duo, and none of it's wasted on me. I celebrate all of it. It's mind-boggling that this is my life. I pinch myself daily. And again, just more so now than ever. Like you said, I know it doesn't happen every day. And I'm celebrating cause I'm an optimist, but I'm a realist. It's like this moment could last a month, a year or forever, but there could be a shoe that drops and people could just suddenly not think I'm cool again, if they're thinking I'm cool now, and the door might not be as open in a year or two or 10 or whatever. So I am enjoying this moment, saying, "This is the moment that's here now, and things are resonating now, and I'm gonna suck every ounce of joy out of it."
Baltin: That's a very interesting thing that exists in this industry, is if you can stay around and be a survivor, you stay cool. So have you found that people do show you a different respect and appreciation now?
Gibson: Yes, it's so interesting. I feel like, yes, there are definitely a lot of people that take their cue from public perception. And so they go, "Oh, it's cool to like Debbie Gibson again, or it's cool to like her now." I've always been very psychologically aware and perception aware, and so I've know when it's just been kind of like, "Oh, I'm on his radio line up bill, concert bill." And it's like, "Oh, we had to put her on. " I'm aware. Even just the other night I introduced Journey at the iHeart Festival with Joey and with Ryan Seacrest. I've worked with Ryan over the years, but all of a sudden there's more of a sense like people are now my peers, and I'm their peer. It's a different feeling. And like Marco Mendoza comes up to me backstage and goes, "Oh my God, Debbie Gibson." And I'm like, "For real?" There's a lot of love from real musicians. I always sense that a lot of the real musicians have always known I'm a songwriter. I remember doing the Sanremo Festival with the Def Leppard guys in '89, and there was a lot of love and respect and I felt, and it was lovely. But yeah, it does feel like that again now. I feel like it's just a matter of time going by. 'Cause first I was a teen queen, then I was a former teen queen, and then people start calling you an icon. And when they start calling you an icon, and I'm not calling myself that, 'cause I think that'd be very self-important (chuckles). But when 35 years has gone by, people flip a perception chip and they can accept you in a different light. And so that's a lovely feeling.. And that has been happening. Yeah, and I do think like I was an underdog in a lot of ways for so long. So when Rob Sheffield wrote the Rolling Stone piece, it was like he was out to shout from the rooftops about wanting me to have my props. And I've gotten so used to not really being given my props I cried after I hung up with him doing that interview, because I was so overwhelmed that somebody so meaningful to music would care so much about how I was perceived. I felt like I won the lottery. So it's nice that I had already found my own sense of self-worth, I didn't feel like I needed accolades. And now accolades are coming, and it's just a big gift. I'm just very grateful, I'm enjoying it for what it is.
Baltin: When you're enjoying something more, I think everybody picks up on that. So are you finding that from the audiences as well?
Gibson: I think that, yes, the audience felt the joy and the audience felt my grounded-ness. I'm just grounded in who I am, I'm comfortable in my own skin, and so that brings a level of connectedness to people. And the way I see them. I remember Cher saying, "People don't want to meet me, they want to know I met them." People want to be seen. And I literally and figuratively see people. I follow my audience on Instagram, I know who they are, I know where they work, I know if they have pets, I know if they have kids, I see them and I talk to them. I don't talk at them. And I had like my ex-boyfriend, my mom, they used to always give me the loving, constructive criticism, trying to get me to break things down to where I am now, but again, you can evolve at someone else's pace. So in my own evolution, I'm now at a place where I am not in a heightened state on stage, I am really with people. And I think that that's what starts taking a performance to a whole new level. It's the grounded-ness. And I always do a portion of my show where I'm at the piano and I take requests from the audience. I ended up bringing people on stage, singing to a couple, bringing up a little girl, whatever. You have to be really present. And that's what I loved about working with Joey too, and I always said that to him, I'm like, "You really show up night after night." I don't want t see the same show twice. And I don't want to put the same show on two nights in a row. I've always been of that mindset, but I'm there to an extreme now, and it feels really empowering and really comfortable and really deeply confident.
Baltin: When you think back then to being a fan is there an artist or a couple of artists that you think of who were those sort of inspiration as performers?
Gibson: For me, it's Billy Joel. He's my all-time favorite. He never lost contact with that guy in the piano bar that just wants to play his songs for people, and I just never felt like he got too big for his britches. That's why he packs stadiums still, and that's why he packs the Garden and that residency. I know there are more, but he's the person that sprung to mind.
Baltin: So a two-part question for you both as a songwriter and a performer. First of all, as the songwriter side, what one Billy Joel song do you wish you had written, and why?
Gibson: One of my favorite Billy Joel songs is "Vienna." But I don't think I was ever gonna write it, it's just like his own unique brand of poetry." Just The Way You Are" comes to mind only because I'm such a love song, songwriting fanatic. So that's a song I'm not gonna say I could have written, but it's more in my songwriter wheelhouse. But, God, there are so many. I'm thinking of so many right now, they're all flooding in. "Only The Good Die Young" is a favorite. But to me no one's ever written a song like Billy Joel, and no one ever will. Every song is a three-act play.
Baltin: From the performer side, what's the one Billy song you would love to duet with him with?
Gibson: It's so funny, I played a little "My Life" on stage the other night, which was really fun. Because someone threw out they wanted to hear Elton [John's] "Your Song" so I played it. And then I go, "Oh my God, well now I have to play Billy," and played a little "My Life." Which was so fun. Okay, duet? Hold on, this is a very important question (chuckles). There are so many good ones. I've always wanted to write with him. But he's such a solo writer, so I don't know if he would do that. I feel like we could do a mean "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant." But I did get to do "Keeping The Faith" with him on stage at the Coliseum, he invited me up to do it with him. And he gave me the grand piano down front, he said, "I'll be on the keyboard in the back," and he went up stage to the keyboard and played it by ear one night, and it was crazy. I was like 20 years old. Incredible life moment. We sought out, "we," as in my parents and I, sought out his piano teacher on Long Island, Morton Estrin, who passed a couple of years ago. 'Cause I was like, "I want a Billy caliber teacher. " My parents used to drive us a half hour to see Morton Estrin because he was the best.
Baltin: Every artist is a perfectionist, so you come close to the moments that you want, but you never, of course, as an artist can be satisfied. So, for you, wanting to write in a more non-traditional song structure and get more daring, are there moments on The Body Remembers where you feel like you got closest to where you want to go, that you then can look as being building blocks for the next record? Which hopefully isn't 20 years away, by the way.
Gibson: Oh, I love that question. Yeah, [chuckle] no it won't be. In fact, the second album is beyond half written. You see how I called it the second album? Because this album feels like a first album of a new chapter, and I do that all the time, it's a Freudian slip. But I would say the song "Strings" comes closest to that. To incorporate that spoken word verse. Which was in a weird way like Macklemore influenced, but then because the production and arrangement are more like traditional cinematic, like almost like movie score, I love Thomas Newman. It traveled into some other land. So that song for sure had its own non-traditional structure. That song is not structured. I was literally like, "Where on earth did this quirky song come from?" I had no idea, but I just followed it down the rabbit hole. I always like, "Serve the song, serve the song," and just served the song with the right people who worked on the arrangement and production. I'm thrilled with that one. It's so from my soul..
