Debbie Gibson

Born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, Debbie Gibson was a musical overachiever from the start. She began piano lessons at age 5, wrote her first song that same year, and by fifth grade had composed a full opera.

As a teenager in her family's converted garage on Long Island, Debbie Gibson was not only writing and singing her own songs but also engineering them with whatever she could find around the house. Before she got her hands on professional equipment, her setup was pure DIY: a Casio keyboard, a row of cassette players lined up on the ironing board, and even a container of Carvel ice cream sprinkles for percussion. Her mom eventually borrowed money from "Cousin Joe" to buy a 4-track tape recorder, but until then Gibson's demos were stitched together with tape splices and ingenuity.

When Gibson first met with Atlantic Records execs, including Ahmet Ertegun, she came prepared in the most teenage way possible. At just 16, she'd already written about 100 songs, each on its own cassette. She walked into the meeting with a brown paper lunch bag full of tapes, dumped them onto the desk, and declared: "Here's my album."