“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.” Debbie Gibson poses for a portrait in her home in 1988. Joe McNally/Getty Images 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
