Diva Divo - Dance Magazine

In the music industry, “Icon” is a title tossed around just a bit too lightly.

But even when her hair is too mussed to hold a crown, Donna Summer is most certainly a dancing queen.

“You’re making me laugh right now,” says Summer, speaking by phone from her Nashville home, when first asked if she considers herself to inhabit the role of an Icon. “Here I am, laying in bed… I look like I’ve been here for months!”

“I don’t look like an Icon right now,” she continues, her good-natured laugh nearly bursting through the line. “I understand what people perhaps mean by it [the title ‘Icon’], in terms of longevity and these songs that have sustained themselves for long periods of time.”

“But I don’t feel like an Icon,” she adds humbly. “No, I feel like a woman who needs some sleep!”

Who could blame her? The summer has seen a whirlwind of success for Summer, who recently released Crayons – her highly anticipated first album of original material in 17 years! – to critical and commercial acclaim. Crayons bowed at #17 on the Billboard charts, the highest debut yet in the diva’s nearly forty-year career, and its two lead singles - the club-serviced “I’m a Fire” and the radio-promoted “Stamp Your Feet” – both became #1 club hits, removing any doubt that Donna’s dance floor legacy wouldn’t extend into yet another decade awaiting her conquer.

There is truly no way to overstate the impact that Donna Summer has had on popular music in general, and dance music in particular: five Grammy Awards (in categories ranging from Dance to Rock, Inspirational to R&B); named the eighth most successful female recording artist in history by Billboard; twenty Top 40 mainstream hits like “Hot Stuff,” “She Works Hard for the Money,” and “Bad Girl”; and eighteen #1 Club smashes, from her first American single “Love to Love You Baby” in 1975 to her most recent, “Stamp Your Feet” in 2008. She is a seminal recording artist and songwriter, and has arguably been the most pivotal figure in bringing club culture to a mainstream pop audience.

Indeed, while Donna Summer has enjoyed a storied career built on genre-defying doses of pop, R&B, and more, the nightclub has always been her established dominion, and “Queen of Disco” the title that Her Majesty wears with pride.

“I don’t find it limiting at all. I find it a great compliment!” says Summer, when asked if she has ever felt pigeonholed by the label. “I always say, it’s nice to be the Queen of something,” she chuckles. “Why not disco?”

And yet when Summer was preparing to record her latest album, one that would be her first of all new material since 1991’s Mistaken Identities, the initial direction was to be considerably different than the final product would suggest.

“They wanted me to do an oldies album,” explains Summer of Burgundy Records, an imprint of Sony/BMG Entertainment that focuses on established career artists like Summer, Gloria Estefan, and Julio Iglesias. Summer says the label pursued her for a year and a half with the idea of a standards collection of beloved audience favorites, the kind of easy listening tunes that are infrequently dredged from their musical retirement so that one artist or another can spin their own interpretation. Such an idea could surely highlight Summer’s powerful voice, but would prove creatively frustrating to a songwriter whose pen was bursting with new thoughts.

“I said, ‘Look, I’m a songwriter,’” says Summer. “You wouldn’t turn to Billy Joel… or Paul McCartney… and tell him to go and do a collection of standards. I’m an artist. If I was Rembrandt or Picasso, you wouldn’t tell me to copy someone else’s work.”

Summer, after all, is an artist who is truly inimitable. And as an artist, she says, her mission is clear.