Donna Summer

Does the drum break sound mighty familiar? For New Order's "Blue Monday," the band credited its stuttering drum-machine beat to Donna Summer’s 1979 track, "Our Love." Enjoy a full analysis here: tinyurl.com Originally released as a double album and widely agreed to be one of the best disco albums of all time, Bad Girls was nominated for Album of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

Summer wrote this song in 1977. When Summer played the demo track of the song for the head of Casablanca Records, Neil Bogart, he thought it was too rock for her and suggested the song would be more suitable for Labelle or Cher. This didn't go over well with Summer, since she wanted to record the song herself, so she shelved it. In 1979, an engineer named Steve Smith was looking through some tapes, trying to find some blank space to record when he came across the demo of this song. He reminded Summer of the song, which she had forgotten about, and he also told producer Giorgio Moroder about it. Moroder and Pete Bellotte, who are the team that produced "Love To Love You Baby," produced a new version of "Bad Girls" that became the hit two years after the song was written.

This is a cover of a sort of cosmic reggae song by Vangelis and Yes vocalist Jon Anderson, with producer Quincy Jones spotting the potential to punch it up to the pop charts by adding harder drums. He also rinsed his Rolodex to bring together the backing choir of dreams, featuring Lionel Richie, Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Brenda Russell, Christopher Cross, Dyan Cannon, James Ingram, Kenny Loggins, Peggy Lipton, Patti Austin, Michael McDonald, and Stevie Wonder. -- Brian Eno called this song "one of the high points of 20th century art." Here's the video: www.youtube.com

"I Feel Love" was a global smash, reaching No. 1 in several countries (including the UK, where its reign at the top lasted a full month) and rising to No. 6 in America. But its impact reached far beyond the disco scene in which singer Donna Summer and her producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte were already well established. Post-punk and new wave groups admired and appropriated its innovative sound, the maniacal precision of its grid-like groove of sequenced synth-pulses. pitchfork.com

Donna Summer was not a wild child in real life, but she often played a libidinous vixen in her songs. In "Hot Stuff," she's calling every guy she knows looking for some action. How did Summer pull it off? "That was easy," her husband, Bruce Sudano, told Songfacts. "She knew immediately what the character of the song was, because she was an actress who sang. She just jumped right on that and injected it with the rock and soul that that song required, quite naturally." www.songfacts.com

Donna Summer released "Winter Melody" in 1976 on her fourth studio album, Four Seasons of Love. By request from Wesley in the Central District!

Smash disco hits from 1976 -- kexp.org Donna Summer's fourth album and third concept album, telling the story of a love affair through the lens of the four seasons French DJ and producer sampled this for his 1996 "Super Discount" album

"I Feel Love" was a global smash, reaching No. 1 in several countries (including the UK, where its reign at the top lasted a full month) and rising to No. 6 in America. But its impact reached far beyond the disco scene in which singer Donna Summer and her producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte were already well established. Post-punk and new wave groups admired and appropriated its innovative sound, the maniacal precision of its grid-like groove of sequenced synth-pulses. pitchfork.com

Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder co-wrote this song and Moroder produced it. -- Summer had a difficult time coming up with the lyrics until another singer inadvertently gave her a jolt of inspiration. She told NPR's Fresh Air in 2003: "I was at the piano, and Stephen Bishop's record was on the top of the piano, and I looked at the record, and I know Stephen, and we've written together, and I'm like, you know, how would Stephen say this? What line would he come up - he's so clever. And all of a sudden, this one line came to me, and it was 'must have fallen out of a hole in your old brown overcoat,' and it was like a lightning bolt. OK, that's it. I knew who the person was. I knew who the person was in the song, I knew who she needed to be, I knew what she was going through, I knew what had to be said. And so as soon as I got all of the personal information on the character, I was able to go into the studio, stand on the microphone and sign the song pretty much verbatim, the way you hear it."