Donna Summer
Lady of the Night

THE REVIEW

A little introduction to clarify the bio-artistic context, even for those who know this musician and performer only as a pioneer of Disco music. The golden period of Donna Summer's production reaches its peak and conclusion with the double LP 'Once upon a Time'. Many other albums will follow which, while confirming the singer's popularity through different decades, will not replicate the wonders left by the LPs of the first half of the Seventies. But what are these beautiful and important moments? On this page, I will talk about the first LP, which was quickly and unjustly forgotten. In this album, there are none of the "heavy rotation" hits; it will only be after this "test" album that the successes of "Love to Love You" and "A Love Trilogy" will emerge, driven by the famous and best-selling singles "Love to Love You" and "Try Me, I Know We Can Make It", both songs having a dual edition: the fifteen-minute version for the LP and the approximately 4-minute version for the single. But there's a "but". In the countless compilations of Donna's tracks, no track from this first album is ever included, which was curiously distributed only in the Netherlands, where many LPs came from, as Phillips was there to print and distribute them. Before the commercial explosion, Donna's songs circulated in the Netherlands, with the luckiest reaching Belgium, Germany, and France. But despite this curious preamble, "Lady of the Night" is a much more than dignified album, albeit quite far from the standard that will characterize her subsequent chapters.

From a technical standpoint, it's a very sweetened and soft folk-rock, but not yet dance or techno, even though Moroder and Bellotte were already co-authors (along with Donna herself). What will instead become a trademark is the lightness, the immediacy of the tracks. Little snapshots of everyday life, naive lyrics, and catchy and often irresistible melodies. On this, Moroder and Donna will base a winning formula that will lead them to make a best-selling of each and I mean EVERY single, simply because from the LPs of their collaboration, you could pull out a song like a rabbit out of a hat: it would be a #1 in the Dance chart, there's no Prince holding it back. This LP is thus a never-replicated moment; if you don't know it, it will show you "Another Side of" Donna Summer, with her songs free from the baroque and electronic entanglements of the future. Last note: let's not forget that in this LP, as in all the other beautiful albums of the collaboration with Moroder, the voice will be as determinant as the musical inventions, Donna's interpretations often saving unexceptional songs, or, more often, making unique a track that already presented a sophisticated and effective instrumentation.

The title-track that opens the album is a lovely song that provides a pretext for the versatile singer's vocal exercise. "Born to Die" has a very simple but attractive, irresistible guitar riff. Let's be clear: no one expects technicality, but in its own way, this track is a small-great masterpiece, the best track, the one that sets the standard from which fortunately the other pieces do not stray. In fact, "Friends" is not a song so different from the first two: the intrusive melody and the vocal interpretation make a simple and endearing piece special. "Hostage" is the single extracted, it moves in the same steps as the other three tracks, it's certainly the most recognizable, the most daring in terms of compositional inventions, but in the long run, it is the first to become cloying and repetitive, something that's hard to happen to that naive guitar riff of "Born to Die".

These are the tracks that struck me, and I wrote the review mainly because I'm sure this LP has slipped away from many of you and also because, as I said before, it's an opportunity to listen to a different Donna from the disco icon. If you don't know her or know her and don't like her, I recommend recovering all she has done from this first LP up to the masterpiece "Once upon a Time", I've tried not to get carried away even though I'm crazy about this and a couple of her other magical albums.

Goodbye!