The Donna Summer love story Dolly Parton turned into a #1: ‘Fugitive Kind’ finally streams

There is a song at the heart of Bruce Sudano’s debut album that tells you almost everything about why the record was made. “Starting Over Again,” co-written with Donna Summer, is about the gentle wreckage of a separation — drawn, in part, from the divorce of Sudano’s own parents. Before his version could reach listeners, Dolly Parton had already taken it to the top of the US country charts. The album it was supposed to lead had never been released on digital platforms. Until now.

The title Fugitive Kind was not chosen lightly. Sudano wrote these songs while falling in love with one of the most famous women in pop music — his future wife, the woman behind “Bad Girls” and “Hot Stuff,” a partner he had already found through the group Brooklyn Dreams. The album maps the emotional logic of that moment: someone who sees clearly what they want and is, for a while, afraid of committing to it. The tracks move through romantic vulnerability, emotional self-protection, the dynamics of partnership before trust is fully established. It is, in the most specific sense, a record about what it felt like to be in love with Donna Summer.

Donna Summer, Bruce Sudano and Giorgio Moroder at an event in Beverly Hills — Donna Summer, Bruce Sudano and Giorgio Moroder in Beverly Hills. Photo: Wolfgang Moroder / CC BY-SA 3.0.

Sudano had already earned his place in the history of those years. As a founding member of Brooklyn Dreams — the group that worked with Summer across several key recordings — he co-wrote “Bad Girls,” the Grammy-nominated disco track that spent five weeks at number one in the United States in 1979. The group also featured on Summer’s 1977 hit “Heaven Knows,” which reached number four on the US charts. Fugitive Kind was recorded at Venture Sound Studio in Somerville, New Jersey, between May and July 1980, in the months immediately before Sudano and Summer married.

The fortunes of “Starting Over Again” tell the album’s strange parallel story. Parton recorded the song for her 1980 album Dolly, Dolly, Dolly and took it to number one on the US country charts — before Sudano’s version had even been released. The album came out on RCA Records in 1981 and has remained unavailable in digital format ever since. In 1995, Reba McEntire returned to the same song, extending its life once more. The digital release of Fugitive Kind — the record that carried the original — is set for October 9.

Sudano, who has long maintained a connection with Italy and continues to spend time there, is represented for the release by ROUGE Promozione Musicale. Forty-five years on, the album that was written as a private reckoning with love finally reaches the audience it was always meant for.

Tags: music-en1, Dolly Parton, Donna Summer, Brooklyn Dreams, Bruce Sudano, digital releases