....never really followed Donna until a few months ago. I'm more into current dance/house music. However, at a wedding reception, they played 'Last Dance'....well I began exploring her music a little further, and here is the newest release! I absolutely love it, but then I found the Anthology CD (1993) and it's much better- same material as this release but the edits are longer, plus there's even more of 'the very best' on the Anthology.

Anyhoo, not a bad buy for $12, I've bought four more albums since this one...Donna's awesome! This release is good for listeners who aren't too familiar with her (like I was)...it's a nice snapshot of her overall music career, and the liner notes and bio inside the cover pretty much give you a nice briefing. Her 70s music is much better than her 80s stuff....check out her albums "Love to Love You Baby" "Four Seasons of Love" and "Love Trilogy"....makes you want to envision disco balls and everyone packing the dancefloor in their platform shoes and big hair!

Buy it! I'm collecting everything the woman has done.

This album is a terrific compilation of Donna Summer's greatest hits. The album has primarily the disco songs that made her a smash success such as "Love To Love You Baby," "Hot Stuff," "Bad Girls," "Last Dance," and "Dim All The Lights." You also get her classic duet with Barbra Streisand, "No More Tears (Enough Is Enough);" and a group called Brooklyn Dreams helped Donna out on background vocals for "Heaven Knows." There are twenty (yes, twenty) songs on this single CD, so you don't get many 12" extended versions of the songs. To compensate for that loss, however, there is a second bonus CD included inside the jewel case with remixes of some great songs including "Hot Stuff," "I Feel Love," and "You're So Beautiful."

The remastering work was well done; the sound quality is excellent in both my regular CD stereo at home as well as in my portable CD player. This highlights the richness, sexiness and electricity in Donna's voice. Her voice is exciting and always leaves the listener wanting more!

The liner notes are great. There's an extensive essay by Brian Chin, quite a few color photos of Donna, song credits and listings of where each song charted at its' peak of popularity after its' initial release. I also liked the excerpts from Donna's autobiography called Ordinary Girl: The Journey. The extra bonus CD comes inside the regular sized jewel case, however, so you need to carefully pull it out as to not break the plastic case. (They manufactured the CD jewel case this way to save a few bucks on production costs, no doubt.)

Summer fans also hear her great "crossover" songs into something that is more like mainstream pop. You get "She Works Hard For The Money" and "This Time I Know It's for Real." Donna performs a sublime rendition of "I Will Go With You" and there are two "new recordings" by Donna called "That's The Way" and "Dream-a-lot's Theme (I Will Live For Love)."

Overall, the songs Donna sings are the best and this CD is excellent proof of that. The melodies are catchy and the musical arrangements impressed me. Congratulations are due both to Donna for her outstanding accomplishments in the field of music over decades of time and to the other people who helped produce this electric album.

I highly recommend this album as an excellent starter album for people who want to get to be more familiar with Donna Summer's talent. This CD is also great for disco fans, pop fans and even fans of dance music in general.

This album is called "The Journey, The Very Best Of Donna Summer," as if they are somehow implying that Donna's work is done and this is some type of complete and final retrospective. However, I for one will bet that for Donna Summer, the journey to produce great exciting music is far from over.

This latest Greatest Hits package is a great overview of Summer's past and present. Universal has released this package as a great companion piece for Donna's new Autobiography "Ordinary Girl" The digitally remastered singles sounds better than ever.
Global pop music at its best.
Plus it is a 2 disc set, with great bonus tracks. The Amazon track listing is incorrect. this is the correct listing:

Disk 1:
Love To Love You Baby 3.22

Could It Be Magic 3.54

I Feel Love 3.46

I Love You 3.18

Last Dance 3.19

MacArthur Park 3.56

Heaven Knows 3.39

Hot Stuff 3.50

Bad Girls 3.57

Dim All The Lights 3.58

No More Tears (Enough Is Enough) Duet with Barbra Streisand 4.48

On The Radio 4.05

The Wanderer 3.46

Love Is In Control (Finger On The Trigger) 4.19

State Of Independence 4.25

She Works Hard For The Money 4.10

This Time I Know It's For Real 3.36

I Will Go With You (Con Te Partiro) 4.08

That's The Way 3.52 (new recording)

Dream-A-Lot's Theme (I Will Live For Love) 4.52 (new recording)

disk 2
I Feel Love 12" single remix (8:10)

Hot Stuff 12" single remix (6:40)

This Time I Know It's For Real 12" single extended remix (7:22)

Dream-A-Lot's Theme (I Will Live For Love) (D. Summer/N. DiGesare) 12" extended remix (Approximately 10 minutes) Remixed by Giorgio Moroder and Chris Cox, produced by Giorgio Moroder

You're So Beautiful (D. Summer/T. Moran/N. DiGesare) Ultimate Club mix (Approximately 10 minutes) Produced by Tony Moran and co-produced by Nathan DiGesare

The real big news here are the new Giorgio Moroder tracks and the underground club smash "(You Are) So Beautiful". "Beautiful" is already being played on KTU in NYC.
The Moroder tracks "Dream Alots Theme" and "Thats The Way" are even hotter. It makes you look forward to a full new CD from Summer in 2004. The CD is a great value and a great joy. This is for old and new fans. If you never owned a Donna Summer CD, check this one out and you will will want to buy her full CD's which contains the long versions of all of her classic hits.:) I just got my tickets for the Madison Square Garden show. :) I hope she does "Beautiful".

With the countless Donna Summer compilations around, you would think that Universal would opt for a compilation that would give fans something more than what they already have. This compilation once again features the heavily cut versions of songs. It's main attraction is the inclusion (on the Australian and UK edition only) of the hard to find single "Theme from the Deep". Overall, the best part of this CD is the second disc which includes the 12 inch version of "Love to Love You Baby" which is great to have. The other extended mixes on this disc are ok, although not sure why they included the patrick Cowley remix of "I feel love" over the original 12" mix.

My advice to anyone considering buying this, is to pass over this, and look at the more recent double CD titled "Donna Summer: Gold", it is truly amazing. It contains longer versions of most of the key singles, and features the correct single version of "love to love you baby". GOLD is worth every single penny ... and shows that record companies sometimes get it right.

One may hesitate picking up this particular compilation, as there have been many, many Donna Summer compilations released in the past decade. "Why would I pick up this one," you may ask. "What's so special about this one?" Well, here are a couple reasons why you should.

The Journey is, overall, a wonderfully concise overview of Donna's body of work. Not as exhaustive as her 1993 Anthology, and not as skimpy as the 1998 Greatest Hits or 2003 20th Century Masters CDs. In a nutshell, it's basically a revamping of 1994's Endless Summer, now covering her earliest US hit, 1975's Love To Love You Baby, and her last, 1999's I Will Go With You. The songs, the majority of which are in their radio edit versions, are remastered beautifully, and have never sounded better.

One of the catches to this CD, are the two new tracks which reunites Donna with her long-time collaborator, Giorgio Moroder. The two last worked on 1992's Carry On, and before that, 1981's I'm A Rainbow album. Both of the new tracks, in my opinion, are in a word -- stunning.

I Will Live For Love is just so wonderfully over the top, terribly Hi-NRG, but just so much fun to listen to! Follows the classic Donna style -- a slow ballad intro, which then transforms into a pumping dance track, in the vein of Last Dance, Dim All The Lights and Melody Of Love.

That's The Way is one of Donna's best songs in quite some time. It's such an intriguing number, quite an unusual entry in the Donna Summer canon. Everything about the song works: the mid-tempo, plodding beat, the reggae-styled guitar and percussion, and of course, Donna's vocals -- very, very sexy vocals. Not to mention the rather playful spoken passage in the middle... wherein Donna does a little bit of self-promotion. "I wanna love you baby, like you know I'm Donna Summer". Indeed!

This first pressing of The Journey also comes with a bonus CD featuring five 12" mixes, including Hot Stuff, I Feel Love and This Time I Know It's For Real. All of which are basic extended versions. The real treat are the remaining two tracks on the disc.

I Will Live For Love appears a second time, in remixed form, a 9-minute remix done by Giorgio Moroder and Chris Cox. Speaking personally, I prefer this slightly more subdued remix than the perhaps a bit too over-busy original version.

Also making its public debut is the Ultimate Club Mix of You're So Beautiful. A song that made the rounds on bootlegs earlier in the year, it finally gets the public release it deserved. Rather similar to the original bootleg mix, cleaned up, slightly adulterated with more synths and effects, and lengthened by almost 2 minutes. Personally, I have issues with Donna's vocals being so buried in the mix, and I still find it much too hard a mix for my liking. Personally, I would love to hear a more poppier-sounding mix of Beautiful -- something in the vein of the Tommy Musto vocal mix of The Power Of One, for instance.

Overall, Donna's "The Journey" is a tremendous value, combining her classic tunes with some new ones with her old collaborator, Giorgio Moroder, bringing her full-circle. The addition of the bonus remix CD is yet another reason to pick this compilation up without delay.