by Danny Colman
originally published on Rock On! This Week’s Sound Bites…12/11/2025 (NewJerseyStage.com)
“I’m fine thank you, I like to talk,” said ’80s pop icon Tiffany with a laugh as we had a face to face conversation at the 2Trax Studio of Deko Entertainment.
Those of us above the age of 50 remember Tiffany as the 14 year old girl who took a Tommy James & the Shondells song and made it a hit all over again, who had a brilliant marketing team that placed her doing shows in shopping malls all around the country in what was perhaps the most brilliant marketing scheme of this generation’s lifetime. Tiffany however, is far more than that young artist from the ’80s. She is a woman now rife with experience, a mom, a songwriter and someone who has broken free of that “Pop” mold; even though “I Think We’re Alone Now” has resurfaced on the most recent “Stranger Things” episode.
Recently, Tiffany sat down and discussed her past, future, Deko Entertainment and very busy present.
“I’m a busy bee,” she said with a laugh. “Pieces Of Me” was first and that kind of started the corner of my relationship with Deko but I was also kind of regrouping. I had an album called, “The Color of Silence” out in 2000 which kind of showed a little bit of an edge in my songwriting; it was like my big coming out “Adult” album if you will, meet the new Tiffany. It got great reviews but then I kind of stalled out and didn’t do a lot of work. I did some dance stuff, I went back a little bit and told my tales of being signed at 14 but prior to that having a whole life in country music and that is really where I got my start. So, building that back story, “Pieces Of Me” was my first venture back into the rock community and really telling my story there and what music means to me and how this little girl from Norwalk, California always wanted to have an edge to her and how I literally picked up the pieces from “The Color of Silence” and here I am today. Then of course, we released “Shadows” after that and we’re working off of “Shadows” new music but it was released at the end of 2019 and of course we all know what happened in 2020. So, I didn’t get a chance to tour it or really highlight it the way I had hoped but that’s OK. We’re going back and still living the music and doing new things like extending into dance music, “I Like The Rain” has a new dance single out that still has that edgy rocker vibe but we turned it in with a beat; we’re just having fun with the “Shadows” album.”
Always one to be pigeon holed because of the aforementioned pop sound and mall tours, Tiffany has struggled at times to break free from that stereotype. Her recent re-release of “I Think We’re Alone Now,” with its harder edge, is an example of what happens when you have the right people in your corner; something she has been searching for, seemingly for a very long time.
“I Think We’re Alone Now” we kept it a little edgy which was strategic, that has always been my dream but I have to say a big thank you to my producer Mark Alberici who is also my fiance now but at the time we started working together, he was just somebody who listened to me. I’ve worked with a lot of other producers who said, “Yeah, gosh you’ve got a voice and you should do this” and I’d say, “I want to do rock stuff” and they would say, “Oh yes, totally, we’ll go in the studio and we’ll do it” and then they’d whittle it back to a pop music and that was really because of money. They knew that they could sell it, it was an easy platform and why reinvent the wheel. So, my dreams were crushed and those projects just got canned because I was like, this isn’t even good music, we’re just throwing out pop crap and I don’t want to be a part of that; if I’m gonna go back and do pop music, it needs to be to the standards of what I was originally famous for at least. That wasn’t something my head was really into at the time and so, I canned a lot of projects and when I met Mark he said, “You should definitely do that, who is stopping you from doing that?” I was like, “Well, you know, there’s always perception and somehow I’ve been really bummed out about the projects not happening. I say things and I tell fans and get excited about it and then it doesn’t happen; I don’t know, maybe it’s something that won’t be attainable for me.” Well, he said, “Why don’t we just try it? There’s no hurt in trying it” and we started recording. The first songs we recorded were “Waste Of Time” and “Worlds Away” and they were really good and I thought, gosh; what do we do with that? They were everything I wanted and then we just kept building from there and we’ve been building ever since. So, I’m a very happy musician and a very happy vocalist to be able to show this side of myself now.”
Wanting a harder edge and selling it to your fan base and the general public can be difficult, especially when you are known for being a pop singer but Tiffany, if anything, is very persistent. When told people weren’t sold on her having a rock or edgy tone, she gladly accepts the challenge.
“I get a little chuckle out of that and hope for that response because the music is good and I’m really living it, it’s really organic and sincere. I wrote the lyrics and again, it’s what I wanted to see myself doing and I’ve been in rooms where I’ve had the people with the crossed arms and the Megadeth or Metallica shirts and they’re sitting there going, “Tiffany, really? We’ll see about this” and before you know it they’re getting this softer look on their face or a little head nod or two and I’m like, “It’s coming, I’m breaking you down (Laughs)” and then they meet me; I’ve done a lot of early morning radio and that’s always like the shock jocks who are gonna get whatever they can get in there like jabs or whatever. I laugh if it’s funny, I don’t even care if it’s about me, I’m like, “That was funny” and they kind of go, “Wow, you’re nothing that I expected you to be. You’re very real and you are a lifer. You’ve had a lot of life experience as a musician and it’s coming through your music now and I get it, I get the whole package” and I take that as a compliment.”
Getting to this point and having things go in the direction she wanted wasn’t always easy. So, how freeing was it to find a producer who was on the same page and threw caution to the wind in order to allow her to develop?
“I mean, there is a thing in Nashville, everybody says, “Let’s write” and you hope that it’s gonna be OK because it’s a writer’s town, a musician’s town and I went back to Nashville from Los Angeles to pick up my writing career and to grow as an artist there. I’m very happy that I made the cut and people there do know me as a songwriter. I did a lot of showcases and singer songwriter showcases and I grew as a person but you never know when you make these writing appointments with people if it’s gonna be good or not and it’s kind of awkward if you know the person and then it’s just not happening. So, you kind of go, “Maybe, let’s go get tacos (Laughs)” because you really don’t know what to do. I kind of felt like that when I first sat with Mark. I saw what he was doing with his own band and his love for music, we had a lot in common but you just don’t know. Then he sent over that first track and it was like, whoa, this is really good. That was “Worlds Away” and I remember sitting on my porch having a cup of coffee and thinking, OK, I really need to hit him back with some really pretty good lyrics; this has to come and I need this to come now. I just started writing and within a couple of hours or so I thought, OK, I have something pretty good, I won’t be embarrassed, let’s send that over (Laughs). Then we made an appointment to write in Nashville and it got better and better. I don’t play an instrument so I always feel a little handicapped; I play piano very badly, Mark is teaching me more but I always felt like that was a handicap for me because I can’t “Speak the language” but I hear these melodies and I feel these lyrics, they come through me and I know what fits, what doesn’t and what I want to say. So, I get a little insecure when I’m writing with people but on that day I felt good and I was like, here you go, tag you back! That was done and we had a song and then we worked on a couple of other songs and they just kept getting bigger and better. Then, by the time we were three songs in it was like, I think this is something, I think we should do an album. This is definitely a good thing; to have three great songs on even some albums today you’re lucky. I come from the ’80s when it was cut after cut if you were lucky and that’s what you strived for and nowadays, sometimes you’ll have two or three songs and the rest are all fillers and that’s OK but we had three really good solid songs and I thought, “Oh God, if we can get another one or so off of that, that’s hold your head up high time” and that’s what my fans want from me and I think we’ve done more than that on “Pieces Of Me” and “Shadows.”
“All of the songs on “Pieces Of Me” or even “Shadows” are just from living with experiences; from making mistakes to saying goodbye to relationships or having people close to me that were going through a lot of change in their life,” she went on. “Whether that be their career or their kid going off to college and being, I don’t want to say empty nesters but like; what do I do now that my days are different? Now I have to really evaluate myself. All those things I’ve been saying that I’ll put off until later because I’m doing for others right now. A lot of times when you take those variables out of the equation, it’s just you. You have to really look at yourself and think, am I living the life I want to? Do I look the way I want to? Am I eating the way I want to? Am I being nice? I think that I hit those walls many times doing these albums and leading up to these albums in personal relationships, in my career and with my son who is about to go to college. I was like, oh it’s happening to me. I never really went on the road because I wanted to be a stay at home mom for him. That was a certain part of my life that wasn’t going to be forever and I didn’t want to be traveling the world and not having any of those memories with him. I felt like, once I had a child, this was my choice to be Tiffany but he needs a mom as well. I tried to balance that a little bit by touring only in the summers and then that got harder and harder and I had some family members who were very ill as well so I started taking some time off and that led to me not touring that much for five years. I embraced that with other things. I opened up my own boutique in Nashville called “Tiffany’s Boutique” at the time and I learned about retail and other things to keep me grounded at home and the money coming in and I really loved that experience because it was something different. That mall tour made me a mean shopaholic so I knew how to go out and buy clothes and brand myself in that and I learned so many different avenues in Nashville other than just music; which is still my home today and it has probably given me a greater love for Nashville because of the entrepreneurial small business there. I embrace that with my community a lot and I always support that. Again just going back and saying, gee, Elijah is going to be out the door, that’s gonna give me a lot of free time; what do I want to do with that? Do I want to go back full-time in the music industry? What good and bad is there? I know there is gonna be some great stuff because I have a wonderful fan base and I love that but that means going on the road and leaving my home again. That means me finding a label or partnership that will embrace the new me because I don’t want to be just Tiffany from “I Think We’re Alone Now” singing the hits and that’s it. I would love to do new music and pair that with that. So, I have my standards a little bit and I really evaluated that. So, that was all happening while writing this album, that all came out while dissecting myself. I also had some deaths in my life that I didn’t expect, losing people that I thought would be with me forever. You think you heal from that stuff and then it happens, you drive down a road and then a song comes on and then you’re in tears and you have to pull over but that’s just life and it happened to me consistently for five years. I lost a lot of my family members, some to addiction and again, it came out of nowhere and it wasn’t expected. That definitely shows on this album when I write from some darker places or from some loneliness but it’s real. Driving here on the 12 hour drive, we were talking and listening to a lot of different music and it’s a great time to find new artists and not to dis anybody but we were listening to some albums from these very accomplished artists and we were like, “They were so much better when they were broke and heartbroken (Laughs). Now they are really successful, rich and happy and the music has changed.” There really is something with my kind, musicians can be kind of dark people. They can be people with a hole a lot of times and music fills it up so it was kind of a chuckle listening to these albums and going, “Gosh, they were so much better after that divorce when they were really sad (Laughs)!” Maybe that’s just my type of personality but I love happy music as well; I did the opposite. I wasn’t really a songwriter when I first started recording, I wrote some poetry but nobody cared, I wasn’t groomed to write on the albums but nobody cared and I was doing it all behind the scenes. I don’t want to say I came out with a lot of positive songs but for the most part it was kind of happy pop music and when I did start to write music it was with my band mates who just gave me a platform. They were like, “You wanna write music?” I was like, “OK” and it was like this, in the living room, it was so much fun. I wasn’t writing for an album, there was no pressure, I was just writing it for me with people and musicians that I loved and we had a good time. We started a weekly writer’s night in my living room. We started getting together having some drinks, some bar-b-que or whatever we were gonna do and songs came out of it and I thought, oh, I’m learning to write songs and I’ve got this little arsenal of songs and it’s fun. So, when I went to Nashville, I felt confident enough to say, yeah, I’d like to write stuff but again, there were always those questions. “You’ve got a new album out? Is this gonna be on an album? What’s your label?” Then they would start talking and talking and I was like, “No, it’s just for me, is that OK (Laughs)? I don’t mean to be unprofessional but…” Eventually that did lead to albums but there is something in the writing process that if you can bring it from yourself or from those experiences, I think it just lays out and you can really hear it in the music.”
Writing, recording, creating are all good but without a label who allows freedom and gives an artist support, it can be very difficult. So, how has it been working with Deko Entertainment?
“Very, very easy,” she said with a sigh of relief. “I come up with these ideas because I’m always thinking of stuff and it always happens around 4 a.m. which is probably not a good time to make life decisions but they just come to me and I’m like, oh yeah, I want to do that, yup, I wanna go there, I need to do this, I’d like to do that song or, I think the next thing for me is and during COVID we were all shut down, I thought, why not do a Christmas song? The world was falling apart and I had never done any kind of Christmas song and my good friend Margie Hauser, we had started to write something and then kind of abandoned it and she went back to L.A. and I was like, why not do this now? So, I called Charlie and I was like, “Charlie, I’ve got a song for you” and so I pitched my spiel and Charlie was like, “Sure, not a problem, let’s do it.” Then it was the same thing after “Masked Singer” which was a big platform for me in the UK and for all of my global fans and it was a great show to be a part of and I had done Robbie Williams “Angels” as well and I called Charlie and said, “I think we need to put this out as a single. I think it’s something my fans would love and it gives a little life in between the next project I’m doing” and he said, “Sure, not a problem.” So, it’s really refreshing to work with people who are easy, who understand it, who make it a simple and fun process. I mean, I come from where you sit down and have all the talks and all the meetings and then nothing happens and then someone loses their job and you get a new person who says, “What is it you want to do?” Then you have to go through all of that again and then they’re like, “OK, great, maybe 18 to 24 months from now” and I’m like, “18 to 24 months!? This music won’t even be relevant by then, are you kidding me? No!” So, that’s the reality of a lot of this and not to dis others and how they roll that out but for me as a small independent and somebody who is on the fly, I like to get it done. My fans are amazing, they want to be attached to my music and have me grow all of the time. So, it’s very refreshing to work with a label that sees that vision and then can follow that out and get it to the masses and roll it out professionally. That’s where I was before I met Deko and it was really discouraging me as an artist because I thought, well, by the time I do my record, then get it into somebody’s hands, then get on somebody’s calendar it can take up to three years and that’s a lot of time and then you hope and pray that they won’t lose interest or your A&R guy doesn’t lose his job and you’re stuck with somebody who says, “I’m not really feeling this, we’d like to rework this” and it’s heartbreaking because it’s your craft, this is your soul, who you are, your identity and what you want your fans to know about you right now. So, I feel it’s a timely thing; it doesn’t need to be rushed but it needs to be handled, respected and put out to the best of the ability and walked through while you’re still living in that situation and you’re still passionate about the cause (Laughs)”
Recently, she released singles, one of which has a definite edge to it, whether it’s because of the dance mix, the subject matter or her desire to continue breaking free from the mold of her past; regardless, it is pure Tiffany.
“I Like The Rain,” I wrote about this character, a girl who is so not like me who is really embracing her dysfunction. I’m not, I’m a Libra and so if I have anything, I dissect and try to perfect it and all of that. This girl is much more free. She is like, yeah, I’ve made bad choices, and? She’s like a really good “Lifetime” movie and she’s this girl who is like, I like the rain, I like the chaos and keeps choosing it. The track, in a fun way, lightens up that way of thinking and having it as a dance single is even better because we dance it out. I watch a lot of “48 Hours” and “Forensic Files” and I was watching a lot of these females who just continued to pick bad choices and were going places where they knew it wasn’t gonna end pretty but it was their life. You can say well, it’s because of finances or where they lived; no, I was watching ones who were perfectly seeking out drama. This song came out of that so, when I chose the visual for this single we were looking at doing artwork and all these different cool things, maybe rain on the ground, I mean, I talked to my graphic artist and we were thinking of doing all of these things. I have this picture that I had taken of me in a bathroom in the UK on a really hot day where I just played with my makeup, where I did this really crazy eye shadow brought on by watching these girls who have this really quirky hair and they are just working it. I had never seen that kind of makeup before, yes, in the ’80s but now I see all these young girls and they are just having fun and I thought, I wonder if that style would look good on me? So, I went up and did it and took pictures and then I thought, what about that picture? It’s very dramatic, it’s nothing you’d think of as Tiffany. I know some of my fans will be like, “Why did you do that to your face?” I love that, go ahead, don’t like it, I don’t care, I’ve become the “I Like The Rain” girl, a little rebellious. So, that was the picture we chose and I’m really thrilled with it and It’s conversation on chat groups now. They are like, why did she do that? She’s so pretty and some people are like, “Why did she do it?” I knew it, she has that edge, is she gonna be more dramatic like Adam Lambert?” Now I’ve got all this to live up to or not, I don’t know which way we’re gonna go (Laughs).”
To see more of what Tiffany’s up to, please visit https://tiffanytunes.com/ or www.dekoentrtainment.