Nearly 40 Years After 'I Think We're Alone Now,' Tiffany Reimagines Her '80s Hits for a New Era (Exclusive)

The teen pop icon tells PEOPLE she's rerecording her most beloved songs for an upcoming greatest hits album

Tiffany Darwish has a new greatest hits album on the horizon. But the ’80s teen pop star better known as Tiffany isn’t just repackaging the original recordings of the biggest songs of her lengthy career.

Favorites like “I Think We’re Alone Now” and “I Saw Him Standing There” hit differently for the 52-year-old now, so she’s rerecording and reimagining them.

“The ’80s version of me, I was a little bit of a different person than I am now,” she tells PEOPLE. “I still love a lot of the same things, I still love a lot of the same songs. But I have a different take on them. They mean something different to me. I’ve lived through some of those lyrics I used to sing but didn’t know anything about. I was just singing a song.”

Tiffany was just 14 years old when her breakthrough cover of Tommy James and the Shondells’ 1967 hit “I Think We’re Alone Now” reached the top of the charts in 1987. She famously performed in malls because she was too young to take the stage at clubs and other more traditional music venues.

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Nearly four decades later, having performed all over the world, those early songs have evolved — as has Tiffany.

“They have more meaning to me, for sure,” she says. She cites “Could’ve Been,” the third single from her self-titled 1987 debut album, as a prime example.

“ ‘Could’ve Been’ is so beautiful, but I hadn’t even had a boyfriend at the time I recorded ‘Could’ve Been,’ ” she explains. “Now I’m gonna be 53 years old. I’ve been divorced, I’ve been heartbroken. There’s more of a life there.”

“Even the fun songs — I call them my party songs, when you put on a song and you’re getting ready and you’re all amped to go out,” she adds. “Again, it’s not as na?ve as maybe it used to be. You’re now going, ‘I’m going out on this first date, but I have my standards.’ It’s a different vibe.”

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That "vibe" on the upcoming greatest hits album, she says, is very much in keeping with the sound on her most recent album, 2022’s Shadows.

“I call it ‘rock retro,’ ” Tiffany says, “because it’s taken a long time for me to get this particular sound. It sounds really modern. It could be on the radio now, but yet it has this ’80s flare to it. And it took me a while to get that, to have the fun of the '80s — whatever that is, that magical instant, easy to digest choruses, a little anthemic — but definitely modern production. So, I think we nailed it on Shadows, so that is what I call my sound. I want that same thing on the greatest hits.”

“I want people to listen to it and go, ‘Totally the song I love, but now I’m wearing it as a new person, as an older person,’ ” she continues. “It’s got a little bit of me, the person that I’ve grown into, as well.”

The new recordings are also influenced by the way she performs the song live now.

“We’ve just tried a bunch of things,” she says. “When we do ['I Saw Him Standing There'] live now, we do it a little more rock 'n' roll. So, we’re gonna have a little bit of a battling guitar solo with a little modern production.”

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“The tricky part is really to go in the studio and make it a little something new, but keeping the integrity of the original song,” Tiffany adds. “There’ll be different little instrumental parts, there’ll be some lengthened versions.”

Fans who have seen Tiffany perform her recent RetroTonic shows know what she’s talking about. The set, which she’s bringing to the Agua Caliente Casino in Cathedral City, Calif., on Sept. 7 for a special double bill performance with fellow ’80s icon Taylor Dayne, features a mix of her biggest hits and fan favorites.

“This last year, it was like, 'OK, before we do the greatest hits, let’s go back and ask the fans what show they want,' " she says of the RetroTonic shows. “Let’s have a little moment with them and just try some of these songs out and pull from that to put on the greatest hits album. It really is just a walk down memory lane.”

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