It's almost redundant to say that this is Summer's finest LP. Her career is a story in which each chapter tops the last, from her escape from the seeming dead end of the novelty hit, "Love to Love You Baby," to the breakthrough of Bad Girls. The Wanderer is less a breakthrough, however, than a consolidation of all the good points
Read More
of Summer's recent records. It picks up the loose threads on albums like
I Remember Yesterday, Once upon a Time and
Bad Girls and weaves them into a personal sound and statement.
It shouldn't be too surprising that Donna Summer's most mature sound is based on rock & roll. While she's certainly been shaped by black culture, Summer has never been especially comfortable with the gospel phrasing of such soul singers as Mavis Staples and Aretha Franklin. Though her vocal touch is lighter, the relentless groove of her music is harder. In her best songs, she echoes Carla Thomas' "Gee Whiz" and Darlene Love's "Today I Met the Boy I'm Gonna Marry" far more than Aretha Franklin's "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Loved You)." These traits were revealed as early as I Remember Yesterday (brimming with girl-group homage), and they explode in The Wanderer's "Who Do You Think You're Foolin'," in which Summer attains the pinnacle of hard-boiled romanticism that Darlene Love expressed in some of Phil Spector's finest productions.
But that, too, is a misleading analogy, since it suggests that Summer is a producer's protégé. She isn't–and not only because she's always had a hand in writing her best numbers. More important than Donna Summer's solo writing is her collaborative work, as a performer and writer, with the studio team of producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte and the very underrated engineer-arranger-keyboardist Harold Faltermeyer. Together, this quartet functions as a rock band in much the same way that Steely Dan's Walter Becker, Donald Fagen and Gary Katz do. Whether or not they ever appear onstage as a unit is irrelevant. What's really crucial are the slashing, Who-style power chords of, say, "Cold Love," which Summer punches across like the ultimate Anglo-rock singer, and the absolute seamlessness of The Wanderer's material. (Though she rarely writes as explicitly about infidelity and physical love as Bellotte does, it would otherwise be almost impossible to guess which of these compositions was written by whom.)
On The Wanderer, Summer, Moroder, Bellotte and Faltermeyer mesh more smoothly than ever, revealing (among other things) how shamelessly padded their early work was. But th
