Donna Summer - Dim All The Lights

My favorite song on the superb Bad Girls album. I think that Donna Summer originally wrote it for Rod Stewart, but kept it for herself.

LP version (runs 4:40, tracks into next selection)

The original Casablanca Bad Girls CD sounds great. Here, it runs 4:40, at 120.5 BPM throughout (a live drummer playing to a click track), and tracks into the next selection. Casablanca's 2-CD Anthology (1993) is digitally identical to Bad Girls, but is faded early from 4:03 to 4:23.

Mercury's 2-CD Bad Girls Deluxe Edition (2003) runs 4:40, at 120.4 BPM throughout, tracks into the next selection, and is mastered with additional compression/limiting. I prefer the original CD.

45 edit (runs 3:56)

Here are instructions for recreating the 45 edit from the LP version on Bad Girls:

Segment 1
8 beats long (at 120 BPM; 4 beats long in the half-time tempo of the intro)
Extends from 0:00.0 to 0:04.2 of both the LP version and the 45 edit

Remove the 16 beats (at 120 BPM; 8 beats in the half time tempo of the intro) from 0:04.2 to 0:12.2 of the LP version.

Segment 2
333 beats long; begins on downbeat, ends on a snare
Extends from 0:04.2 to 2:50.0 of the 45 edit
Extends from 0:12.2 to 2:58.0 of the LP version

Remove the 32 beats from 2:58.0 to 3:13.9 of the LP version.

Segment 3
137 beats long, begins on a snare, ends on a downbeat on the word "heart"
Extends from 2:50.0 to 3:58.3 of the 45 edit
Extends from 3:13.9 to 4:22.1 of the LP version

Fade
26 beats long, begins and ends on a downbeat
Extends from 3:45.2 to 3:58.3 of the 45 edit
Extends from 4:09.2 to 4:22.1 of the LP version

I have the true 45 edit and fade on just two CDs:

• Warner Special Products' 2-CD Ultimate Party Album (1992; sounds very good, but possibly a slightly higher-generation tape source than some others)
• the 2-CD Journey The Very Best Of (2003; has extra compression/limiting)

Casablanca's On The Radio (copyright 1979) runs 120.2 BPM throughout, sounds fantastic, and includes special track-to-track segues that were made especially for the album. For "Dim All The Lights", it's possible to extract the true 45: Trim the opening downbeat to start past the end of the last "beep beep" from the previous track, "Bad Girls". And add a fade from 3:47 to 3:56. There are four discs that use the same analog transfer as On The Radio:

• Priority's Mega-Hits Dance Classics Vol. 12 (1993) fades from 4:02 to 4:12, making it 16 seconds longer than the 45, but you can still hear the end of "Bad Girls" and the beginning of "Sunset People"
• Casablanca Records Greatest Hits (1996) fades from 3:47 to 4:04, making it 8 seconds longer than the 45
• Time-Life's Sounds Of The Seventies Vol. 47 '70s Dance Party 1979-1981 (1997) is a differently-EQ'd digital clone of Casablanca Records Greatest Hits
• TM Century's GoldDisc 1735

Best Bets

For the LP version, go with the original Casablanca Bad Girls.

For the 45 edit, everything I listed sounds pretty good, if you want to make your own edit. In my own collection, I use the edit from Bad Girls, but only because I reverse-engineered it for this post.

Edited by crapfromthepast