Your favorite Donna Summer songs

I have most of the Moroder era albums but there's some I haven't played much, some only once. Donna Summer was fantastic, a great singer, but I have to be in the mood for disco type stuff. I love what I'm familiar with though. Favourites include

Love To Love You Baby
Try Me, I Know We Can Make It
Summer Fever
I Feel Love (of course!)

I love the early albums with full length long versions of songs. I'm not keen on Hot Stuff and Bad Girls.

 

Walk Away
Could It Be Magic
Can't Get To Sleep At Night
I Love You
Rumour Has It
I Feel Love
I Remember Yesterday
On The Radio
Heaven Knows
This Time I Know It's For Real
Love's About To Change My Heart
Dim All The Lights
Spring Affair

 

I found a Donna Summer 2CD comp in the trash along with a bunch of other CDs some time ago. Recently I put it on my iPod. I can't stop listening to disc 1! So this is my list with Sunset People being my favorite of the set;

 

All the classics of course but one later tune I think is really fantastic is When Love Cries.

 

Heaven Knows

An unjustly forgotten song. The first time I really sat up and thought wow, she really can sing, not just do disco crap.

 

"Starting Over Again." It was a #1 country hit for Dolly Parton back in 1980. I don't think Donna ever recorded it herself, but there are a few clips of her singing it live on YouTube.

 

Looks like Anthology, perhaps the best Donna compilation (altough the later Gold is good as well), should be criminal to throw something like that away...

 

Hot Stuff
On The Radio
Last Dance
I Feel Love
The Wanderer

 

Dim All The Lights, for which she has sole writing credit, is a great song.

But, it's the trio of tracks that close the Bad Girls album that are amazing to me. They were so ahead of their time.

Our Love
Lucky
Sunset People

 

Tough call, but if I had to pick one...

 

Hot Stuff
Bad Girls
She Works Hard For The Money

 

Yes, 1993 Anthology. Disc 2 isn't really doing anything for me though.

 

Got favorites (GoogleMusicPlaylist), of course, but last night I was listening to this one that doesn't get much mention:


Unconditional Love (1983, Mercury)

 

Donna Summer Day. Jamming to Sunset People on the way to work...

 

Donna recorded this short interview ten years ago in Germany. I'd never seen her this relaxed and informal. Among other things she talks about the 30th anniversary of the release of her biggest album (can it be 40 years?!), Bad Girls, the watershed dance single I Feel Love, MJ and how she collapsed during the recording of the duet with Streisand, Enough is Enough.

 

Here's the original recorded MacArthur Park by late actor, Richard Harris. Notice how the musical arrangement laid the groundwork for Giorgio Moroder's treatment -





Italian producer Giorgio Moroder would recall that he and his collaborator Pete Bellotte had been interested in the concept of either remixing a track – as yet undecided on – which had been a hit in the 1960s or else remaking a 1960s hit as a dance track: Moroder – "I remember that I was driving in... on the Hollywood Freeway, and I heard the original song [i.e. "MacArthur Park" by Richard Harris] on the radio. I thought: 'That's it – that's the song we've been looking for almost a year.'" Moroder asked Neil Bogart, president of Casablanca Records, to provide him with a copy of the Richard Harris version of "MacArthur Park" to serve as basis for Moroder's envisioned discofied reinvention: Bogart obliged with an 8-track tape containing Harris' version, which Moroder had to specially buy an 8-track player to hear.

Moroder readily identified "MacArthur Park" as (quote) "a great song for Donna – with all those high notes, it was perfect [for her]...First, I [located] a key that she could sing really high, but still with a big voice – that took an hour or two. I played a little piano and she sang it with my accompaniment. We found a key and we had Greg Mathieson do the arrangement – and then I did something very special" – that "something very special" being Moroder's recording of his own voice to form a choir heard behind Summer on the song's chorus: "I recorded about 20 seconds of all the notes, which I was able to sing on a 24-track. I made a loop of those notes, and put that loop in the [Solid State Logic] desk. I could form eight chords by having C-E-G right on the group. I played the chords by moving the track according to the chord that I needed." Of basing a discofied arrangement on the template for Webb's arrangement on the Harris version Moroder would recall: "To be honest, it was a very difficult song to [arrange], especially the brass, but we had the best musicians in town."

Summer's recording of "MacArthur Park", included as part of the "MacArthur Park Suite" on her double album Live and More, was eight minutes and forty seconds long. The shorter seven-inch vinyl single version – which omits the song's balladic second movement – afforded Summer her first #1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, also becoming the last of seven hit versions of compositions by Jimmy Webb to reach the Top Ten on the Hot 100, with "MacArthur Park" by Donna Summer being the only recording of a Webb composition to top the Hot 100.

The nearly 18-minute musical medley "MacArthur Park Suite" incorporated the original songs "One of a Kind" and "Heaven Knows", the latter being issued as the second single off Live and More. This medley was also sold as a 12-inch (30 cm) vinyl recording, and it stayed at number one on Billboard's Hot Dance Club Songs chart for five weeks in 1978.

- Wikipedia

 

The masterwork -



What gets me is that the track was performed by live studio musicians! Small wonder it has such a dynamic feel. I had assumed for years that Moroder had reproduced the sounds via synthesizers. It has to be one of the best studio productions of the Disco era.

 

My top 5:

1) Bad Girls
2) Hot Stuff
3) On the Radio
4) Sunset People
5) Walk Away

 

The Hot Stuff / Bad Girls 12" was the only disco record I ever bought. Great stuff!

 

Tokyo. Cus' that's where I live.

 

And for the ultimate fan: A new comprehensive 33CD box set, Encore, will bring together remastered versions all of Donna Summer‘s 17 studio albums and offer eight bonus discs of rarities and non-album material. That totals 25 CDs and a further eight discs offer a massive 109 bonus tracks (there are 329 tracks in total). These include seven-inch mixes, 12-inch mixes, non-album rarities and other one-off recordings. GBP 170.00 or USD $221.00. Encore is limited to 1500 copies and will be released on 27 March

 

Love To Love You Baby.

 

For me, it has to be I Feel Love. Still sounds astonishing after all this time!

 

I've just checked what's included and I'm speechless - all the 7" inch versions across all the labels in addition to all the albums remastered.

And then the 12" mixes across all decades; if only they'd thrown in the (I believe) UK Manifesto Records rejected remixes of "I Feel Love" by DJ Sneak and Glenn Underground as they're the definitive 90s mixes bar none.

 

Lady of the Night. I first heard it on shortwave radio via Radio Nederlands back when it was released.