The Number Ones: Debbie Gibson’s “Lost In Your Eyes”

 

According to one of our musical sources:

As the “Lost In Your Eyes” video opens, Debbie Gibson plays piano. The ornate little flourish that she’s playing isn’t actually part of “Lost In Your Eyes,” Gibson’s second and final #1 hit. Instead, that little piece of showmanship functions a bit like the tap-dancing intro of Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up” video. It serves as an announcement, or maybe a reminder, that this person is talented.

For Debbie Gibson, this was a subtle bit of positioning. When Gibson first rose to fame in 1987, she was part of a mini-wave of teenage dance-pop stars. But unlike virtually all of her contemporaries, Gibson wrote her own songs, without help. When Gibson’s ballad “Foolish Beat” reached #1 in the summer of 1988, she became the youngest person ever to write, produce, and perform a chart-topping hit. Compared to that, playing piano is small potatoes.

In showing Gibson playing that piano, “Lost In Your Eyes” video director Jim Yukich, who had already made a bunch of Phil Collins videos and who would later direct the 1994 Double Dragon movie, sent a message that Debbie Gibson was not like these other pop kids. The song itself said something similar. Every teenage pop star sang ballads, but few of them worked quite as hard as Gibson to make something that sounded smooth and professional and adult.

When she recorded her 1989 sophomore album Electric Youth, Debbie Gibson presumably knew what she was up against. Gibson was a transcendent dance-pop singer, but dance-pop singers in the ’80s did not typically enjoy long careers. Like so many other club-music stars, Debbie Gibson had her biggest hits with ballads. “Lost In Your Eyes” is total adult-contempo mush, and I always get bummed out when singers who excel at fun, energetic music turn towards that stuff. But Debbie Gibson was pretty good at adult-contempo mush, too.

Gibson wrote “Lost In Your Eyes” while she was still touring behind her debut album Out Of The Blue. Before Gibson recorded the song, she sang it at her shows, and it got good responses. She’s said that she didn’t have anyone really in mind when she sang it, and I think you can hear that in the song. “Lost In Your Eyes” is a textbook love song, and I don’t detect a whole lot of lived experience in it. The lyrics are light on specifics.

“Lost In Your Eyes” would turn out to be Debbie Gibson’s last top-10 hit. She followed that single with “Electric Youth,” which peaked at #11. “No More Rhyme,” the next one, only made it to #17. A year later, Gibson came out with her album Anything Is Possible, and she used a co-writer for the first time: Lamont Dozier, who’d co-written countless Motown classics and who’d just worked with Phil Collins on “Two Hearts.” The album’s title-track lead single, one of the songs that Gibson wrote with Dozier, peaked at #26. By the time she released 1993’s Body Mind Soul, Gibson had gone full adult-contempo. That album’s single “Losin’ Myself” peaked at #86, and Gibson hasn’t been on the Hot 100 since.

By that time, though, Gibson’s focus had shifted elsewhere. In 1992, Gibson made her Broadway debut, playing Eponine in Les Misérables. After that, Gibson starred in West End and Broadway revivals of Grease, and she’s done a ton of stage-musical stuff since then, both on Broadway and in various regional productions. This just makes sense. There was always a whole lot of theater kid in her voice. The pivot was a smart one, too, since she later admitted that she’d been using a lot of Xanax to deal with anxiety. The pop-star life is not a terribly safe or healthy one. I don’t know too much about stage actors, but the seem like a more well-adjusted bunch.

Gibson has done other stuff, too. She’s starred in two different installments of the low-budget made-for-cable Mega Shark series. I haven’t seen those, but the fact that she’s in two of them means that she managed to avoid getting eaten by the mega shark in at least one, which seems like an achievement. Gibson also co-starred in 2011’s similarly themed Mega Python Vs. Gatoroid with her former pop-chart contemporary Tiffany. (Unfortunately, Debbie Gibson and Tiffany did not play the mega python and the gatoroid.) Gibson has also done some reality TV — Celebrity Apprentice, Dancing With The Stars — and she’s lately been on the ’80s and ’90s nostalgia circuit, which drew big crowds before the pandemic and which will probably once again draw big crowds very soon. Later this summer, Gibson will play a Vegas residency, and she’ll also release The Body Remembers, her first album of new songs in a decade.

Debbie Gibson seems like a nice, fun lady. She definitely appears to be handling herself a whole lot better than just about every former teenage pop star. I like her.

GRADE: 6/10