The label paired her with Stock Aitken Waterman, the British pop makers who had made so much of Kylie and Bananarama’s big 1980s hits.
DANCE THE DONA DONA SERIES
This Time I Know It’s For Real (from Another Place And Time)ĭue to a series of complicated issues with Geffen Records, who let her go before this album, Donna Summer ended up signed to Atlantic Records for Another Place And Time. Its title track is also a truly glorious song and does what many of Summer’s best singles do: it provides an incredibly relatable but under-represented human experience (in this case: the struggle of being a working woman) and turns it into a song that everyone is going to belt out in the club.
She Works Hard For The Money was Summer’s most successful album of the 1980s and for good reason: it’s probably her most consistently quality album of the decade. That familiarity with overly sincere but very robust music is never clearer than it is here: taking her ability to match Moroder’s synths and proving she can shout down any guitar too. Perhaps because Moroder had already been a bit of a glam rocker even in his disco days, Summer’s sound can translate quite well into the new decade (even if it doesn’t hold, in our opinion, a candle on her early work). She Works Hard For The Money (from She Works Hard For The Money)ĭonna Summer provided a song for the Moroder-produced Flashdance soundtrack, and yet it sounded nowhere near as Flashdance-y as this, the title track of her 1983 album. Put this on at any party, 45 years since its release, and watch the inhibitions disappear. This song is remembered as being camp, but it absolutely isn’t. You can really feel Summer’s experience of doing Hair in this moment: the way the voices undulate over the backing is just like the nude orgy at the end of Act One. Then there are the flutes! The flutes! Who knew that woodwinds could be softcore? Then the synths take over, edging you into the song’s greatest moment: at about eleven minutes, a chorus of angelic voices reprise the chorus. Just when you think the song is dying out, in come the funk riffs and we’re taken on an instrumental ride that is as good as the four minutes of Summer that came before it. It’s also – and this is easily forgotten – a truly symphonic masterpiece, whether you focus on the 20-something orgasms within it or not. It’s a song that spawned controversies, astonishment, intrigue and Donna Summer’s nickname of “The First Lady Of Love”. Thus “Love To Love You Baby” in its greatest form was born: the entire first half of the album of the same name and the song that turned Donna Summer into a US phenomenon.