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Her new album, The Wanderer, offers further evidence that Summer has classily outlived the fad that once threatened to badge her. Rather than being dominated by the metallic hum of electronic synthesizers and a monotonous beat, The Wanderer features electric guitar playing by versatile musicians such as Jeff Baxter and Steve Lukather. The result is an album with a warm human feel.
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Newsday, 1981 |
| The Wanderer
is Donna Summer's most consistent album, and that alone would make it her best. But this disc does something more for Summer. By placing her firmly within a rock & roll context in which she thrives, The Wanderer clearly proves that she's an artist as well as a star. The result is music that exudes both strength and delight.
- Dave Marsh, Rolling Stone March 19, 1981 |
| On
The Wanderer, Summer, Moroder, Bellotte and Faltermeyer mesh more smoothly than ever, revealing (among other things) how shamelessly padded their early work was. But the LP also shows they've reached a peak where the pieces fall into place with a certain inevitability. This is a position of rare strength, and it's been achieved because, while collaboration remains the essence, Donna Summer is the controlling center, the single indispensable element.
Teamwork gives The Wanderer its remarkable consistency, but it's Summer who pulls everything together with such purposefulness that the album is finally a complete and convincing statement of innocence, faith, joy, terror and the ability to deal with life head on.
- Dave Marsh, Rolling Stone March 19, 1981 |
| The Wanderer
is less a breakthrough, however, than a consolidation of all the good points of Summer's recent records. It picks up the loose threads on albums like I Remember Yesterday, Once Upon A Time and Bad Girls, and weaves them into a personal sound and statement.
- Dave Marsh, Rolling Stone March 19, 1981 |
| Donna Summer has ridden out disco, and she is just fine, thanks. This is her best album yet with intricate melodies that sound like musical handstands and vocals that have the easy undulation of a water bed. The Wanderer is an informal concept album in which Summer's teasing sensuality is used as a point of departure. The album begins with a sexuality that is randy and raggedy at once, eases through various tales of love lost and remembered, and ends with a statement of faith and a hope for redemption. The range of the record is still a little too long for Summer's reach, but The Wanderer demonstrates that she's got the best shot at being the premier woman rocker of the 80's.
- Billboard Magazine, 1981 |
| With disco on the wane, Summer has again donned her traveling shoes at 31, and with this 10-song collection works her way to the top of femme fatale rock. Her smoother, more complex style, which appeared in pubescent form on last years Bad Girls, is here confidently sassy. And her heavenly aspirations, (she's among pop music's "born again" congregation) surface in a pleasing Pentecostal way in Looking Up, Running For Cover and the hypnotic I Believe in Jesus. Yet side by side with those are Breakdown and Nightlife, paeans to earthier delights. The album's clincher is Cold Love, which sizzles like a block of dry ice. Much credit for this impressive disc belongs to Summer's virtuoso producer, Giorgio Moroder.
- People Magazine, 1981 |
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This is the album where Miss Summer's fascinations - with dance rhythms, rock & roll, Christianity and the degradations of street life - coalesce. It is also the record on which she, and her production team (producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, arranger-engineer-keyboardist Harold Faltermeyer) begin to find a collective style which elevates the production team concept to the actual status of a band.
On Cold Love, The Wanderer, Who Do You Think You're Foolin' and the final, exultant I Believe in Jesus, Miss Summer simply demonstrates the whole labyrinth of pop music barriers, and emerges as one its leading artists.
Rock fans ought to listen up, especially those who think that, Private Idaho and Whip It are hot dance music. And hopefully Miss Summer's older followers will stick with her as she makes the final stages of her transition from disco icon to committed artist.
- Dave Marsh, King Features Syndicate, 1981 |
| Her
Running For Cover is a pessimistic vision of solitary life in the city, tagged to an appropriately nervous and jagged rock beat.
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Newsday, 1981 |
| Yet Donna Summer's journey from innocence to experience is built on such firm foundations that it's utterly without bitterness. Even in The Wanderer's most awesome and shattering love song, the brittle and brilliant Cold Love, she's triumphant: "Hope in the dark, love in the light/ I keep on looking for someone who's right."
- Dave Marsh, Rolling Stone March 19, 1981 |
| Summer's vocal phrasing remains as natural on rock-oriented songs such as Night Life and Cold Love as it was on her earlier disco hits.
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Newsday, 1981 |
| I Believe In Jesus is the first convincing gospel-based vocal performance of Summer's career. Based on the militant fundamentalist hymn Onward Christian Soldiers and the nursery rhyme Mary Had A Little Lamb, the composition escapes being cloying only by the narrowest of margins - a chorus so perfectly sung that to deny it is practically inconceivable: "I believe in Jesus you know I know him oh so well/ And I'm going to heaven by and by 'cause I've already been through hell."
- Dave Marsh, Rolling Stone March 19, 1981 |
| The Wanderer itself is the summation of these themes: musically and lyrically, it sets up what is to follow. Inevitably, the tune emerges as a declaration of independence - not only the independence from the business entanglements of past years but from creative pigeonholing and whatever fears the artist may have had.
- Dave Marsh, Rolling Stone March 19, 1981 |
| BONUS AUDIO CLIP: Donna talking about being "a wanderer" on The Hot Ones radio special. (March 6, 1983) |
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