Another local piece on Donna Summer...

The queen of disco is back, ready to defend her music
Donna Summer has started to rekindle her musical career
Tony Lofaro, Canwest News Service
Published: Thursday, August 07, 2008
DONNA SUMMER
River Rock Show Theatre, Richmond
Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m.

Donna Summer recently released her first collection of original material in 17 years.

Before disco died in the early 1980s, it created a stable of true superstars -- Gloria Gaynor, the Bee Gees, K.C. and the Sunshine Band. None was bigger than Donna Summer, the undisputed "Queen of Disco," who burst onto the scene in 1975 with her hit Love to Love You, Baby, and rode the disco wave as far as she could.

She continued to tour and record through the 1980s, cranking out hits such as She Works Hard for the Money and This Time I Know It's For Real, but in recent years has kept a relatively low profile. That's just the way she wanted it, she said in a recent interview.

"I was touring every other year, raising my kids, painting," she said of her life over the past decade. "I wrote a book during that time and I was just living life."
Now she's back, at the River Rock Show Theatre Friday and Saturday nights.
There's nothing strange about her long absence from the stage, she said. Just think of it like cooking.

"You take a pot and put it on high and it gets to the point of almost burning. That's where I was. Then I had to turn that fire down and turned it to a low burner. So I've been simmering."

Twenty or so years ago, when that pot started to burn, the personal demands of success just got to be too much, she said.

"I couldn't do it. I'm a life person, I like to live," she said. "I'm not about just being successful, because success is a business in terms of you having to feed that animal all the time. I just don't have the patience for that."

There have been sporadic appearances in the 20 years since, but her life was largely private. She raised three daughters -- Mimi, Amanda and Brooklyn -- and wrote an autobiography titled Ordinary Girl: The Journey. She's been married to Bruce Sudano, once a member of the band Brooklyn Dreams, for 28 years.

But she worked hard for her success, and she's not about to let it fade away. She has released her first disc of original material in 17 years, Crayons, and has appeared on the talk show circuit promoting the album. Why come back now? Well, she said, it was time to be busy again.

"After the kids leave and everything seems to be moving really well you're sitting there looking at TV and you're thinking to yourself, 'This is nice. I like this, but it's kind of quiet'."

Summer said she needed to get busy with songwriting, and she co-wrote many of the tunes on Crayons. It's not a disco-themed album and it explores different styles of music.

As well as the reggae-tinged title track, sung with Ziggy Marley, there's the Brazilian-flavoured Drivin' Down Brazil and the more pop sensibility of Stamp Your Feet and Science of Love. The one pure disco song is the pounding, synthesized I'm A Fire.
"Crayons has duplicitous meanings. One of them is that I am out of the [disco] box, and no two songs should be the same," she said, explaining why she ventured into other styles of music.

Summer said her stage show will be a combination of newer material and her disco hits. She knows the fans want the hits, but believes new music must be included.
"It's always a balance and sometimes that's hard. I like to give the audience a sampling of everything, and hopefully other things will wow them enough that they will not realize we're taking any time to play a different song, they'll just feel that they already know it," she said.

Summer has often gone to bat to defend disco from its detractors who attacked it as being musically bankrupt. She preferred to label disco as "happy music," especially for what it delivered to people in troubling times.

"Coming out of the Vietnam War and the period before that and all the other things that were going on, I just think people were ready to dance. They were ready to enjoy . . . I came about at that moment in that wave of music [and] I was the first to hit the shore."

She has no regrets about being part of disco.

"There was a lot of backlash against the music," she said. "I think it came out of different reasons, but less to do with the music. If you'd like to compare notes with any other form of music, just technically, dance music is definitely not the weakest format.
"When they were using a lot of strings and all that stuff . . . that's like modern classical music in its own way. It wasn't trite by any means."