Tracks 3 and 4 from A Love Trilogy (1976)

Tracks 5 and 6 from Four Seasons Of Love (1976)

Track 16 from Donna Summer (1982)

Summer worked with Italian songwriter Giorgio Moroder from the very beginning, at first with British producer Pete Bellotte. But Summer and Moroder were both versatile talents and made music in many different styles, and her debut Lady of the Night had more of a pop/rock sound before they started to find a more danceable electronic sound that made her the Queen of Disco. 

Summer made some really great cohesive records, including the concept albums Four Seasons of Love and I Remember Yesterday and the double LPs Once Upon a Time and Bad Girls, and was right between Fleetwood Mac and ELO on my favorite album artists of the '70s list. A lot of these records run together with continuous transitions between tracks, so it was tough to pull out individual tracks without interrupting those grooves, I think there's only one or two abrupt cuts on here. In the '80s, Summer started to branch out with other producers including Quincy Jones, and I included a couple of those albums, but I decided to stick to just the first 10 years of Summer's career. I try to cover an artist's whole career when it makes sense to, but sometimes I really just want to focus on their prime years, especially for someone whose songs can be pretty long and make it harder to cram a lot of them into 80 minutes. 

Moroder's team of collaborators, the "Munich Machine," included lots of people who went on to do great things. German engineer Reinhold Mack produced huge records by Queen and Billy Squier, and English drummer Keith Forsey would make produce hits for Billy Idol and Simple Minds. And Icelandic keyboardist Thor Baldursson gets a mention in my book for his group Gaz, whose track "Sing Sing" features one of the most sampled breakbeats in Baltimore club music. 

The "MacArthur Park" suite that Alysa Liu skated to is from Live and More and I included a sweet song Summer wrote for her daughter that never appeared on a studio album, "Mimi's Song." "My Baby Understands," a great song, was sampled on Ne-Yo and Jamie Foxx's "She Got Her Own." "(If It) Hurts Just A Little" was sampled on a lot of dance tracks (Cassius, Deaf'N Dumb Crew, Love & Mind, etc.). "Sweet Romance" was sampled on a bunch of New York rap tracks (most prominently DJ Kay Slay and the Lox's "The Streetsweeper")