Sunset People
Until a few minutes ago, I hadn't realize that this song (played occasionally on KBIG) was a Donna Summer track.
It's the last song on "Bad Girls," which was truly a surprise for me, since the title track is in a completely different style. Turns out the album "Bad Girls" was more than I realized:
Bad Girls marked the high-water mark in Donna Summer's career...spinning off four Top 40 singles....Producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte recognized that disco was going in different directions by the late '70s....The two-LP set was divided into four musically consistent sides, with the rocksteady beat of the first side giving way to a more traditional disco sound on the second side, followed by a third side of ballads, and a fourth side with a more electronic, synthesizer-driven sound that recalled Summer's 1977 hit "I Feel Love."...concluding with "Sunset People," one of Summer's best album-only tracks. The result was the artistic and commercial peak of her career and, arguably, of disco itself.
The BBC says its own thang (in its review of the deluxe edition of Bad Girls):
Working with several different writing teams, overseen by long-term producer Giorgio Moroder, Bad Girls was Summer's first entirely American album. It's a huge 15-track work encompassing rock, soul, showbiz and electronica....
The Moroder-controlled trilogy of "Our Love", "Lucky" and "Sunset People" - complete with its bizarre, unsettling time shifts - is where, beyond the key singles, the real beauty of the album remains: a music steeped in melancholy. Sharing an extremely similar feel to his then recently completed No.1 In Heaven with Sparks, these tracks are perfect advertisements for the lush sensuality of Moroder's arrangements, humanising machines in a manner that only Kraftwerk or, later Underworld, could attempt....
The second disc...proves why Summer is routinely cited as being the discerning disco goddess. The 8:15 original of ''I Feel Love'' proves to be the rightful high-water mark of her collaboration with Moroder....
Let's close with an observation from Larry Flick:
Listen closely, and you will hear the continued influence her music has on even the most cutting-edge new releases. How many trance jams are direct descendants of "I Feel Love" and "Sunset People?"
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