Donna Summer
Love To Love You Baby

Donna Summer's first international album, "Love to Love You Baby" (1975) contains all those ingredients that would soon make the late '70s disco music great. The lyrics, based on few whispered, hypnotic, seductive phrases, feature Donna Summer pleasantly confined in an ethereal and sensual falsetto. The rhythm & blues arrangement, softened by an orchestral base, immediately reveals Giorgio Moroder's signature as he manages to bring Summer's vibrations, tremors, and emotions to their peak. The choirs, typical of the arrangements of those years, unify everything, making Donna's presence even more ethereal and unreachable.

Summer (whose real name is LaDonna Adrianne Gaines) appears as an elusive and distant muse, yet at the same time close, sensual, and magnetic. The story goes that the first version of this piece was sent by Giorgio Moroder to Neil Bogart, then president of Casablanca Records, a label that would later recruit the best talents of disco music. After listening to an initial version, he decided to propose it at a party he organized himself. The success was so immediate that Bogart requested Moroder to extend the length of the piece. With dimmed lights, candlelight flickers, Moroder at the control panel, the definitive 16:48 version was born, which would occupy the entire first side of the eponymous album. "Love to Love You Baby" would become a classic of disco music and one of the most sensual, erotic pieces in international discography.

The following side of the record opens with "Full of Emptiness", which had already appeared on Donna Summer's previous, practically unknown album "The Lady of the Night", a ballad that seems to evoke the country folk atmospheres characteristic of the first record. "Need a Man Blues", a lively rhythm & blues piece, simple, immediate, and irresistible, follows with "Whispering Waves" where Donna highlights her splendid voice, without abandoning the falsetto that would be a characteristic of her interpretation for a long time. "Pandora's Box", among the best pieces in her entire discography, is a full rhythm & blues style ballad with prominent piano, where Donna frees herself from her subdued interpretation to explode in all her strength and beauty.

A final mention deserves the album cover. In the cover photo, Donna Summer appears simple and sensual, in a pose that leaves considerable room for the imagination. In an era not yet dominated by videos and the notable power of mass media, album covers were of considerable importance in constructing an artist's image. In this case, a splendid combination is created between the erotic charge of the piece and the cover image. On the back, Donna appears lying and relaxed, in a timeless scenario, splendid, inevitably destined to become the one true great protagonist of those years.