ARTICLES & INTERVIEWS WITH DONNA SUMMER

THE WANDERER Disco legend Donna Summer continues her journey with a new best-of double disc and an autobiography by Jeremy Blacklow (from HX MAGAZINE, November, 2003)

Donna Summer doesn’t stay in one place very long. Judging by the legions of fans who turned out for her recent book signing at Barnes & Noble Chelsea, if Summer didn’t stay in motion, she’d be mobbed! But the living legend did take a few moments to chat with us about her best-of CD, The Journey: The Very Best of Donna Summer, and her autobiography, Ordinary Girl: The Journey. Did you know she was discovered while living as a hippie housewife in Munich, Germany, before going on to “Bad Girls,” “She Works Hard for the Money,” “On the Radio” and “I Feel Love” fame? Sounds like anything but ordinary to us.  What inspired you to write an autobiography now?  I had offers to do it - and I had put it off for a long time. I just felt like it was the right moment. I needed the book anyway because I had written Ordinary Girl: The Musical, and everybody kept saying, “Well, do you have a book?” And I didn’t. So I wound up seeing that it would be advantageous on all fronts to have the book. What will fans learn that they might not have known?  Lots of things! The history behind how things came about, from a different perspective. And they’ll see more about my background and how I actually came into fame - and how it affected my life.  Your career has always been surrounded by rumors - what’s the biggest misconception people have about Donna Summer?  That they think I’m a diva. I’m a much more down-to-earth person than people realize. I’m almost too down-to-earth.  The best-of CD contains a bonus disc of five extended dance remixes. Tell us about New York DJ Tony Moran’s mixwork for the new song “You’re So Beautiful.”  Well, Tony was in Nashville, and he came down and met with a friend of mine who is one of the co-writers on the song: Nathan DiGesare. We were just hanging out, and Nathan and I went into the studio, and I started jamming on the microphone, and I just started ab-libbing some words. This was about three years ago. And so Tony came in and said, “Let me take it home and work on it.” And actually, it took quite a while, because I wasn’t available all of the time. I went in and did some re-records on some of the vocals, and he did some demos. It went back and forth for about seven months. And Tony had since gone off on his own, and played it, and sampled it in a few clubs, which he promised me not to do by the way. [Laughing.] It was like having a new toy! But it got a good reception. And then he kept putting it out there. So, finally I ended up back on my old label, Universal. And they said, Let’s do it! And it ended up on this album. It’s been around, but it finally made its way home.  You had a couple of singles from films in the mid-’90s “Whenever There Is love” and “Melody of Love,” which became huge gay club songs and remain so to this day. Sadly, they didn’t make the cut for your new disc. Do you ever revisit them?  Sometimes. “Whenever There Is Love,” I don’t sing that often. But I do love that song! I actually really love that song. Bruce Roberts, another one of my co-writers, and I worked on that song together. I think that was from the movie Daylight. And “Melody of Love” - wow! - I just love that song as well. I wrote that...gosh!...so long ago. But it’s a great song, and yes, I occasionally do that song on stage.  And you’ve finally reunited with your longtime collaborator, Giorgio Moroder. How’s that been?  Great! We have a lovingly combative relationship. That’s the best way to describe it. We tease each other and poke fun at each other! We’ve been together for so long that we see each other as if we stopped the conversation five minutes ago and just came back. We don’t miss a beat. He’s like my big brother.  Are there still plans to stage that musical version of your life, also to be called Ordinary Girl?  Oh yeah! I would love to see it on stage! I think that there are a lot of talented kids in the world, and this would be a great project for them. I don’t know if, at this juncture, I would be in it. Initially, they wanted me to play in it, but there are better things I could do in my own time in terms of creation [of the show]. Maybe I would produce it, or co-produce it. But the music [for it] is wonderful.  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ordinary Girl: The Journey (Villard) and The Journey: The Very Best of Donna Summer (Universal) are out now.  Copyright ©1996-2003 Two Queens, Inc. All rights reserved. Interview originally printed on HX Magazine website Thanks to DS fan Fernando Zaike for gently scanning the pictures from the printed magazine