07/02/2024
Donna Summer, a Dorchester girl who went to Jeremiah Burke High School, was honored at the Grammy Awards. 'Bout time! This story also has a link about the making of her giant hit, "I Feel Love," "where the eighties began." We remember reading an interview where she was afraid the whole time she was recording of what her Boston church going parents would think!
Excepts
“‘I Feel Love’ stripped out the flowery aspects of disco and really gave it a streamlined drive,” says Vince Aletti, the first critic to take disco seriously. In the club music column he wrote for Record World at the time, Aletti compared “I Feel Love” to “Trans-Europe Express/Metal on Metal” by Kraftwerk, another prophetic piece of electronic trance-dance that convulsed crowds in the more adventurous clubs.
A [recording] session, Bellotte recalls, involved the vivacious singer coming in and talking for several hours—she loved to gossip, joke, and chat about what was going on in her life—before realizing that time had flown and she had to dash off. She would then lay down her vocal in just one or two takes. Her variegated work experience—rock, gospel, musical theater, light opera—gave her a wide range of modes to draw on, and “she loved doing funny voices,” recalls Bellotte. “I’ve sung gospel and Broadway all my life and you have to have a belting voice for that,” Summer told Rolling Stone in 1978. “They categorize me as a black act, which is not the truth. I’m not even a soul singer. I’m more a pop singer.”
For “I Feel Love,” Summer pushed beyond the softcore of “Love to Love You Baby” with a vocal that sounds more unearthly than earthy. She uses what’s known as a “head voice,” breathy and angelic, as opposed to the husky “chest voice” you associate with grainy, groin-y R&B. The “love” in “I Feel Love” is closer to an out-of-body experience than hot between-the-sheets action. As Vince Aletti puts it, “It’s like she’s coming from some other place.”
The song’s feeling of suspension from time, of being lost in a loop of ecstasy or reverie, also comes from the incredibly simple and short lyric, in which phrases like “heaven knows” or “fallin’ free” are each repeated five times.
Gladys Knight, Tammy Wynette, and the Clark Sisters are also being recognized by the Recording Academy
