Donna's Crayons

I've been hopelessly in love with the Queen of Disco since I first discovered Donna Summer's music back in the '70s.  Her disco-era releases remain fundamental to the genre, from the 16 minute "Love To Love You Baby" (which helped popularize the extended mix), the synthesizer-driven "I Feel Love" (which birthed Eurodisco--and still sounds cutting-edge today), to the best of her dance music "concept" albums (Once Upon A Time, a modern retelling of the Cinderella tale, and Bad Girls, which tackles prostitution from the perspective of a streetwalker).  While her releases following the "death of disco" became infrequent and disappointing, her last album, Crayons, made a good case for the immortality of the Queen.  Thanks to PCPL's partnership with Freegal, one can get free and legal downloads of not only the entire album, but also remixed versions and a "bonus" track originally released only on iTunes and the European edition of Crayons.

Summer recorded only two albums and a few singles during the final decades of her life, as family and faith became the center of the Queen's realm after 1990.  Crayons, from 2008, was her last full-length recording and it not only returned Summer to the top of Billboard's dance chart for the first time in 20 years, the domestic and import versions of the album yielded a total of four number one hits on the dance chart.  While a good deal of Crayons is run-of-the-mill pop music, and her producer's use of vocal effects seems misguided given the strength of her singing (even as she approached the age of 60), the remixed versions of these singles bring out some of the best from these Crayons.

The album's lead-off single, "I'm A Fire," is actually its weakest, although Craig C.'s club mix (track #2 on the Freegal digital single) is a pretty fun taste of 21st century disco.  Things get more interesting with the subsequent CD singles, "Fame" and "Stamp Your Feet," and these are both available in complete digital editions featuring some strong remix work.  Ralphi Rosario's remix of "Fame" is a classic big room anthem of the sort he's been creating for years, full of shuffling, vaguely Latin percussion and a deep bubbling bass.  There are a slew of other remixes of "Fame," but Rosario's is far and away my choice as far as the groove goes.  The lyrics to "Fame" are noteworthy as well, as Summer recalls wanting fame from childhood, and regretting it now that paparazzi follow her every move.  "Stamp Your Feet" is your basic disco motivation song, calling on us to get our act together and get out on the floor.  The mix by DJ Escape and Tony Coluccio (track #5 on the single)  is the best here, rendering the song as smooth house music.

Bonus tracks on CDs are one of those things that annoy me, particularly when the bonus is a really good song but you can only get it on an expensive import version of the album.  Crayons is one of those beasts as the European version features an additional track, "It's Only Love (Land Of 1000 Dances)," which is one of Summer's best songs from the whole post-disco era.  But you had to pay quite a chunk to get it ... until Freegal and PCPL came to our rescue.  An inspired bit of synthesized Eurodisco, the song actually isn't a cover of the Chris Kenner-penned rock classic "Land Of 1000 Dances" in that Summer's track does not use the lyrics or melody of Kenner's song.  Instead, Summer references the older cut by repeating the phrase "the land of a thousand dances," which--ironically enough--never appears in the original or any covers of it.  Summer and her producer on the track, Sebastian Morton, concoct a lean synth-dance blend in which she sings with a refined passion not captured elsewhere on her last recordings.

Note:

In most cases Freegal gives little or no track information on Crayons and its related releases.  There are two versions of Crayons posted on the site, the US edition and the European (which includes "It's Only Love"), and each instance of the title in the text above links to the expanded euro version.  The digital singles usually offer only track number and duration to differentiate them, so whenever needed I provide parenthetical direction toward the mixes I recommend.  Just to keep things confusing, Freegal has posts of "It's Only Love" both as a single on its own--which is where my links will take you--and as part of the expanded edition of the album.