There has never been a question of Tiffany's talent. After signing to MCA at fourteen, she became the youngest female artist to top the Billboard charts with a debut album. Twenty-four years later her version of Tommy James and the Shondells' I Think We're Alone Now can still be heard on the radio. She released four more albums through MCA and has sold more than fifteen million albums worldwide. Though she found immense success as a pop artist, Tiffany's heart has always been in country music.
In 2000 she released The Color of Silence and even though it was a critical success people were still unable to see her as anything other than ‘that girl from the mall'. So in a bold move Tiffany shed her clothes and scored the cover of playboy. She used the press of playboy to promote her music and finally shed her squeaky clean image. "The color of silence was my debut as a lyricist," she says. "It meant a lot to me. I will always treasure the experience. I think we got a lot a great music out of it and songwriting has become really great therapy for me."
In 2004 she released a dance album Dust off and Dance and has had three top twenty singles on Billboards hot 100 dance charts since then, but still dance is not her passion. "I did it for the fans. I was doing something they requested me to do. I put my heart and soul into it, but I never wanted to be a dance artist. Truthfully I don't see, for me as a singer, a lot of longevity in the dance world. I look at the young twenty-somethings that have great bodies and beautiful faces and I don't know where I stand in the dance world. I can't be anything other than what I am."
In 2007 she released another pop rock album Just Me where once again she received critical-acclaim as a songwriter. "I've done a lot of great projects for small labels and they're really great, but they never go anywhere," she laughs.
In January Tiffany released the single Serpentine for the Syfy original movie Mega Python Vs. Gateroid, which she stared in with fellow eighties teen idol Deborah Gibson. "It was hard to write a song with Gateroid or Mega Python in the lyrics, so we soon abandoned that idea. Serpentine is about Deborah's character. It's about a really cool bewitching girl in the bayou. Chris Donahue (the producer) came up with the title and I kind of took it from there. It came quite easy, he wrote a line, I wrote a line, and I really fell in love with the song."
On March 01, 2011 Tiffany finally realized her dream of a country release with her eighth studio album Rose Tattoo through her own record label Only the Girl, Inc. "I really didn't overextend myself here in Nashville. Once I put the feelers out that I was doing the album, first it was finding the right producer which was Chris Roberts and I had already written a few songs to do in my writing showcases. I really plugged myself here in Nashville as more as a songwriter."
Tiffany wrote seven of the eight songs and as far as her favorites on the album Tiffany states that she loves to perform Love You Good. "It's a different song written about a Cajun witch. Tommy Wright brought it to me. We're both True Blood fans and he wrote it and said we should pitch it to the show. It was not meant to be on the album, but was something I would sing out in Nashville. But, it grew on me. I started to mess around vocally with it and make it my own. I knew it had to be on the album. It's like a character in a fantasy song. I think people will really like it, because nobody does that really. It's very haunting and makes you want to rock out a little bit. I think that's the one song for me that I get to be a little more serious and just kind of tell a story. I love the reaction it gets."
"He Won't Miss Me is the most sentimental for me," she states. "It's the one I really have to get prepared to sing. It's where I feel most vulnerable on this album, because I did write it and it's about my personal experiences." She tells a story about a fan she caught singing the words with her recently at a performance at 12th & Porter and how it almost made her cry. "I actually messed up on the words for a second," she states. "I Think We're Alone Now, I always love when people sing it with me, but I'm not so shocked. I kind of depend on that now and it's a great feeling. But, to be ten days out on the new album and to have someone so intently singing the song with me, it touched me deeply. It really did. It's an awesome feeling and I don't think I've felt that on the other albums."
Of this project, Tiffany states. "This music feels like a good fit. I'm not worried about where I stand. Where it's going to go on the industry scale? I don't know. I have high hopes but, I'm just so happy that this is the base. I feel very encourage to continue to creating music and to grow as a songwriter and just keep plugging along. "
By Kenyth Mogan
Photo Credits: Amanda Van Sandt
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