Donna Summer

A voice performed lying on the floor, imagining Marilyn Monroe, lifted an unknown singer from Munich to No. 2 on the American charts. The nearly 17-minute version that came to fill an entire side of the record at Neil Bogart's request is the song's true face.

• She barely uses a chest-driven voice, singing almost in a whisper in a high, half-breathy head resonance (head voice). It is a voice that deliberately hides the power honed in church in order to play a role.
• Over a bass drum stamping evenly on every beat (four-on-the-floor), a bass riff circling in the low register holds up the backbone of the groove for all 17 minutes.
• Again and again the singing stops and long instrumental stretches of only strings, guitar and percussion return. This structure, drawn out so that dancers would never have to stop, later became the model for the long club version (extended mix).
• Rather than delivering the lyrics clearly, the voice builds atmosphere out of sighs and gasps. This boldness made some broadcasters reluctant to air it.

It was the closing track of a concept album that crossed the eras, the one that stood for the future. A recording whose backing was made almost entirely by machines, it is regarded as the starting point of electronic dance music.

• The heart of the song is a bassline in which a Moog synthesizer repeats the same figure like a machine. A short echo (delay) on the sound fills the gaps between the notes, creating a tight, galloping pulse.
• Though almost all the backing was made on synthesizers, the story goes that the bass drum pounding underneath was the one sound actually played, by the drummer Keith Forsey.
• The vocal floats lightly in the high register, stacked in several layers. A human voice laid dreamlike over cold machine sound creates a mood closer to ecstasy than to sensuality.
• Instead of the traditional verse-chorus build, it piles up tension by gradually opening and closing the timbre of the sound and adding new layers. That is why it never grows dull, even though the song never takes a dramatic turn.

The theme of a film in which she appeared as a singer, it brought her both the Academy Award for Best Original Song and her first Grammy. It became a byword for the last song played before disco-era clubs closed their doors.

• For nearly the first 2 minutes it is a slow ballad supported by piano and strings. The heart of the song is the moment when, after she has sung low and soft, the tempo suddenly doubles and it flips into disco.
• The voice that husbanded its breath in the slow section turns, once the fast section begins, into a powerful, chest-ringing sound (belting). Here the strength she learned in gospel truly shows itself for the first time.
• Midway through, the song slows down once more and then builds back up, giving dancers both a moment to catch their breath and a final explosion.
• In the closing stretch, a modulation up a step heightens the climb toward the end.

The first No. 1 from her peak album “Bad Girls,” it won her the Grammy for female rock vocal, created that very year. It is the point where her roots in a Boston rock band met disco.

• Over disco's steady beat, an electric guitar lays down a sharp riff. The guitar solo midway through was played by Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, the guitarist from Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers.
• Her voice, the very opposite of the whisper in “Love to Love You Baby,” drives forward in a rough, forceful chest voice. Its grain is so different that it is hard to believe it is the same singer.
• An interlocking, repeating rhythm of bass and synthesizer sustains the tension throughout, and on every chorus the backing vocals chase after her as if in reply, holding the ear fast.
• This crossover, binding disco and rock in a single song, is cited as the reason she survived on rock radio too in 1979, as the backlash against disco grew.

When this duet with Barbra Streisand rose to No. 1, it proved that her voice could reach beyond disco and stand beside the great traditional vocalists.

• Over a slow piano-accompanied opening, the two singers trade the song line by line. Streisand's clear, rounded tone stands in contrast to her deeply gospel-hued voice.
• Its structure, a ballad that suddenly shifts tempo into disco, resembles “Last Dance.” It was co-written by the same songwriter, Paul Jabara.
• The final passage, in which the two hold a single note together for as long as they can, is the song's most famous moment. It sounds like a contest to see who can last longer.
• In the club version, which runs more than 11 minutes, the dance-rhythm sections stretch out far longer.

She wrote it after seeing a restroom attendant dozing from exhaustion at an awards-show after-party. Instead of the “First Lady of Love” label, it became her signature song of the 1980s, singing of the weariness of working women.

• From the opening, a sturdy riff of interlocking synthesizer and guitar repeats like a march. It is the tight 1980s pop sound crafted by producer Michael Omartian.
• She sings neither in a whisper nor in exaggerated high notes, but in a firm, clear middle register. Fitting the subject, it is a delivery that sounds like a work song.
• The music video, telling the story of a working woman's day, aired often on MTV. It is frequently cited because videos by Black female singers were rare on MTV at the time.
• The chorus trades short chants with the backing singers, built so that concert audiences can easily sing along.

After a hiatus in the late 1980s, this was the song that brought her back to the charts in partnership with a British production team. She also took a songwriting credit herself.

• Stock Aitken Waterman's trademark bright synthesizers and drum machines race on without pause. It is as if the mechanical pulse of the Munich years had been reborn, some 10 years later, as British dance pop.
• The vocal opens in a light, buoyant tone with less force than in her prime, then soars freely by the time it reaches the chorus.
• A short, repeating chorus appears early in the song, built to lodge in the ear on first listen. It was the formula with which this team swept the British charts at the time.