Shake Your Love

Album: Out Of The Blue (1987)
Charted: 7 4
Play Video

Songfacts®:

  • "Shake Your Love" is Debbie Gibson's bouncy teen-pop take on infatuation. She is overwhelmed by her attraction and wants her love interest to "shake" their love loose and act on it.
  • Gibson wrote "Shake Your Love" when she was a teenager (about 14 years old for the demo, 17 at release). She'd yet to have a boyfriend, so she was imagining rather than living those intense relationships.
  • Gibson created the original demo for "Shake Your Love" in her family garage home studio with a keyboard, sequencer, drum machine, and four-track recorder. Gibson didn't have percussion back then, so she used Carvel ice cream sprinkles as shakers on her original homemade recording.

    Atlantic Records teamed Gibson with producer Fred Zarr, who took her garage demo and polished it into four minutes of neon heart-rush.

    "I wasn't fully programming then, Gibson recalled. "So I was playing all this stuff by hand, so if I made a mistake on the chord, I left it because it was just to kind of sketch out the song. Fred Zarr took this and elevated the heck out of it."
  • Released as the second single from Gibson's Out of the Blue album in 1987, "Shake Your Love" hit #4 in the US and became her second straight Top 5 single. It also gave her a proper UK breakthrough, peaking at #7, and it charted comfortably across Europe and in Canada.
  • In a 2025 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Gibson brought the exact Casio keyboard she used in 1983 to demo the song, and recreated the beat and melody live with it, while Fallon's house band, The Roots, gamely played along.

Comments

Be the first to comment...

Editor's Picks

Steve Cropper (Booker T & the MG's, Blues Brothers)

Steve Cropper (Booker T & the MG's, Blues Brothers)Songwriter Interviews

Steve Cropper on the making of "In the Midnight Hour," the chicken-wire scene in The Blues Brothers, and his 2021 album, Fire It Up.

Johnette Napolitano of Concrete Blonde

Johnette Napolitano of Concrete BlondeSongwriter Interviews

The singer/bassist for Concrete Blonde talks about how her songs come from clairvoyance, and takes us through the making of their hit "Joey."

Part of Their World: The Stories and Songs of 13 Disney Princesses

Part of Their World: The Stories and Songs of 13 Disney PrincessesSong Writing

From "Some Day My Prince Will Come" to "Let It Go" - how Disney princess songs (and the women who sing them) have evolved.

Gavin Rossdale On Lyric Inspirations and Bush's Album The Kingdom

Gavin Rossdale On Lyric Inspirations and Bush's Album The KingdomSongwriter Interviews

The Bush frontman on where he finds inspiration for lyrics, if his "machine head" is a guitar tuner, and the stories behind songs from the album The Kingdom.

Classic Metal

Classic MetalFact or Fiction

Ozzy, Guns N' Roses, Judas Priest and even Michael Bolton show up in this Classic Metal quiz.

Timothy B. Schmit

Timothy B. SchmitSongwriter Interviews

The longtime Eagle talks about soaring back to his solo career, and what he learned about songwriting in the group.