| I Remember Yesterday finally revealed Summer as not just a centerfold gasp but a brassy pop/soul stylist in the Bette Midler-Melissa Manchester mold. But the album's signal achievement was I Feel Love, in which they underlined Summer's dreamy vocals with jittery, diamond-hard synthesizer rhythms accented by a whiplash.
-
Rolling Stone January 12, 1978
|
| I Remember Yesterday was a random sampler of twentieth-century pop vocal styles, from the Hollywood "jazz age" title track to the electronic reverie of "I Feel Love," the album's biggest single.
- Rolling Stone, March 23, 1978 |
| Side 1's playful take on music of the past makes the listener realize that Donna can deliver. Whether it's a salute to the Big Band Sound (I Remember Yesterday), The Supremes (Back In Love Again), or a trip to a German Beer Garden (Love's Unkind), in these songs Donna is having a blast of a good time and is taking us all along.
- Ken Allan, March 2001 |
| Cut of the month is Love's Unkind a remake of Then He Kissed Me
that I prefer to the original for the way it's solo saxophone opens a window in the wall of sound.
-
Robert Christgau, critic for The Village Voice |
| I had worked with Donna Summer on what I would consider conventional disco albums before even thinking of using a
synthesizer. We were going after a concept album, as in I Remember Yesterday where we deliberately utilized techniques of the past to key each song to a different time- one from the '30s, another from the '40s; one with the Motown sound, another like Phil Spector. When we decided on a futuristic sound I thought the only way was to use a synthesizer. It's nearly impossible to compose with a synthesizer. By its nature, improvisations are much easier, so I went into the studio and recorded I Feel Love as it was composed. All I used was an electronic bass line and an electronic drum. That's the big
difference between normal and electronic recording. With a normal recording we start with four or five musicians to lay down the rhythm tracks, then we add all the dubs. With electronic music I start with the bass line. I know the first 64 bars are a certain amount of chords and I start laying down the bass line with these chords. Then I put on a second sound, a polyphonic sound, which fills in the whole thing. Then I add particulars- most of the time electronic drums- and then slowly start doing the overdubs and all the little effects. The last thing is the melody. With I Feel Love the melody came to me as I repeated the bass line. The whole composition and recording process took a little more than a day. None of us thought it would become such a huge hit, let alone change the face of disco as it did.
- Giorgio Moroder, Feature Magazine 1979 |
| On I Feel Love:
I had already had experience with the original Moog
synthesisers, so I contacted this guy who owned one of the
large early models. It was all quite natural and normal for
me. I simply instructed him about what programmings I
needed. I didn't even think to notice that for the large
audience this was perhaps a very new sound. We did the
whole thing in a day
- Giorgio Moroder, New Musical Express December 1978 |
| BONUS AUDIO CLIP: David Bowie talking about I Feel Love on VH1's Disco Explosion, 1996 |
 |
|
| BONUS AUDIO CLIP: VH1's 100 Greatest Dance Hits segment on I Feel Love featuring comments by Giorgio Moroder, Tom Moulton and Donna. Narrated by Harry Anderson. |
|
|
| I heard I Feel Love on the radio yesterday...and I swear that could be a hit if it were released today. It STILL sounds fresh and new... still ground-breaking.
- Eldo Estes, AOL messageboard March 21, 2002
|
| On I Feel Love:
Giorgio brought me these popcorn tracks he'd recorded and I said, "What the hell is this, Giorgio?" I finished it sort of as a joke.
- Donna Summer, Rolling Stone March 23, 1978
|
|
I Feel Love was in its own time cutting-edge. As simple as that song is, people still regard it as a forerunner of a whole movement.
We tried to write other lyrics to the song, but it just crowded the beauty of what it was technologically. It's simple – just the lyric "I feel love", but it's something that anybody can sing, all over the world.
- Donna Summer, The Telegraph June 24, 2004
|
| On I Feel Love:
You know when Pete Bellotte and I began writing that song we started with a lot of words and then we hit on ‘I feel love’ and realized that was it. It was like a chant. And then the rest we wrote in like two minutes and we looked at each other and I said ‘Pete I think that’s it’ and I was kind of difficult to go ‘is that really it?’ Could it be that simple? But that was it. It’s like when you’re doing a painting – you just have to know when to stop cause if you keep going it just becomes a mess. But I Feel Love was just one of those songs where we knew it didn’t need too much humanity to it because it was all about the technology. I mean you guys hear all this new stuff all the time now – but you have to understand that at the time there was nothing like it, nothing. It was very seductive and right on the cutting edge of the technology of the time, because Giorgio was obsessed with all the new machines coming out. And just the excitement of that – you can still feel that in the song.
- Donna Summer, Attitude August 2004
|