Donna Summer was known as the Queen of Disco, but she was also a pioneer of EDM in the late 1970s. Two years after recording her breakthrough disco hit “Love to Love You Baby,” Summer dropped the groundbreaking electronic dance track “I Feel Love.”
The 1977 hit was ranked the best dance song of all time by Billboard, beating out Chic’s “Good Times,” Gloria Gaynor’s “ I Will Survive,” and Madonna’s “Vogue” for the top ranking.
Billboard credited the song for introducing “dance music, as we know it today” and described the song as “timeless.”
Written by Summer and her longtime collaborators Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, “I Feel Love” appeared on Summer’s fifth studio album, I Remember Yesterday. The song featured the extensive use of a Moog synthesizer.
Rolling Stone noted that “I Feel Love” was “meant to represent the future of music,” and that the single and Summer became “the de facto representatives of the bygone disco era and its iconic clubs, like Studio 54, as well.”
While not Summer’s biggest U.S. hit—that honor would go to “Bad Girls,” which went to No. 1 for 5 weeks in 1979— “I Feel Love” peaked at no. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in November 1977 and reached No. 1 in the U.K. and several other countries.
Donna Summer’s hit was fueled by a last-minute call from an astrologer
The songwriting session for “I Feel Love” marked “the first time Donna wanted to be involved in a lyric,” Bellotte told Pitchfork in a 20917 interview.
The music producer revealed that he stopped by Summer’s house to work on the lyrics, and she was on the phone for another hour and a half on a call to her astrologer.
Summer had been seeking psychic counseling about her relationship with her then-beau Peter Mühldorfer, as well as a new man she was interested in, singer-songwriter Bruce Sudano. The advisor gave her all she needed.
“Donna had fallen for Bruce, deeply,” Bellotte shared. “When she came downstairs, Donna announced that her astrologer had told her, ‘this is the man.’ That was the night ‘I Feel Love’ was written: When she’d changed her whole life. And it was the best thing that ever happened to her, she and Bruce were together for the rest of her life. So when Donna flew back to Munich to record the vocal, that was the feeling she gave the song.”
Summer married Sudano in 1980, three years after she first met him around the time she co-wrote “I Feel Love.” The couple shared two daughters, Brooklyn and Amanda, per People, and remained married until Summer’s death in 2012 at age 63. Sudano also managed Summer’s career and co-wrote her No. 1 hit “Bad Girls.”
‘I Feel Love’ was the sound of the future
In an interview, Moroder revealed that “I Feel Love” was meant to be the sound of the “future” on Summer’s 1977 concept album.
“I definitely wanted to explore it as a whole concept and come up with a sound that was of the future,” he told Library of Congress in 2015. “I did it by only using synthesizers, because I thought it was the instrument that would be used in the future–be the instrument of the future. We used it, and only it, to create all the sounds. …. Everything except the voice was created by the Moog.”
As for the lyrics, he added, “We always shared the credit for the song—Donna, Pete, and I. I did the music, and Donna and Pete wrote the lyrics, but I don’t know how that broke down between them.”
“I Feel Love” has been covered and sampled by Bronski Beat, Sam Smith,Beyonceand more.
Moroder told Variety that “nothing is as good” as the original version of “I Feel Love.”
“The sound was bold, very difficult to create, a moment in time where everything was right – the sound, tempo and melody was perfect,” he said. “Whenever I hear ‘I Feel Love’ I still think it is powerful. And I’ve heard every version of it.”
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