Although many know him from his personal and professional relationship with the late, great Donna Summer, and the hits he wrote for her — “Bad Girls” being one of the best known — Bruce Sudano’s career as a prolific songwriter who penned hits for such luminaries as Michael Jackson, Dolly Parton and Reba McEntire, among the many, were merely one aspect of a proficient solo career that continues to this day. It took root in the late ‘60s as a member of the band Alive N Kickin’, whose hit“Tighter, Tighter” was penned by none other than Tommy James. Following that, Sudano found success with the group Brooklyn Dreams, which, in turn, scored several top ten hits and a Grammy nomination to boot.

Sudano was subsequently signed as a solo artist to RCA Records, but after meeting Summer, he put his solo career on a hiatus that lasted until 2004. Ten individual outings have followed since, including his latest, Sketch Book, which came out earlier this year. Nevertheless, at age 78 he’s opted to take a long back to the beginning of his own individual output courtesy of the rerelease of Fugitive Kind, which, as fate would have it, was the only Sudano solo effort to feature contributions from Summer herself. 

“I never realized until many years later, the love song dialogue Donna and I created, at the

beginning of our relationship, between her Bad Girls album (1979) and my, soon to be re-

released, Fugitive Kind record (1980),” Sudano states in a press release. “For her part there was, ‘On My Honor’ (a song we co-wrote), ‘There Will Always Be A You,’ ‘All Through the Night,’ ‘My Baby Understands’ and ‘Our Love.’ From me, it was ‘Pretenders,’ ‘True Love’ (another song we co-wrote) and the title track itself, ‘Fugitive Kind,’ which chronicles both our attempts to escape from falling in love.”

Analog Hype Machine recently had the opportunity to chat with the ever-amiable Mr. Sudano, a man we’re happy to call a personal friend. He spoke to us by phone from his home in Los Angeles where he spends his time when he’s not in Italy with his wife Francesca, whom he married in 2000.  

“I've been here for a couple months,” Sudano said. “I was in Italy for about four months straight, and then I came back here in July, and now I'll be here for a minute. I just had my tenth grandchild last week. My daughter Amanda [who also happens to be a successful musician in her own right as half of the duo known as Johnnyswim] says it’s her fourth and and final child. So I figured I'd hang around here for that. Plus, I built a new studio at my house here in L.A. So that was kind of taking up a lot of my focus, and it basically just got completed two weeks ago.”

In addition, he’s concentrating his energies on spreading the word about the re-release of The Fugitive Kind, given that it originally hit store shelves some 45 years ago… in 1981 to be precise.

“It's just interesting for me to have to go back and focus on it because I hadn't really thought about it in so long, ”Sudano explained. “So then, going back and looking at it, it was like, ‘Not bad, Bruce.’”

Indeed, that seems an understatement. Each of the nine tracks offer an ideal example of true pop perfection in ways that still retain their appeal even today.

“At the time, there was so much going on in my life and at that particular moment that I kind of just put the record out, kept moving and didn't really think about it much,” he reflects. “So now I’m going back and looking at it and just revisiting the whole thing in my mind of exactly how it happened. I did four albums with Brooklyn Dreams from 1977 until 1980, and then we kind of disbanded, and it was at the same time that Donna and I had just gotten together. It was right about then that I found out that she was pregnant. Then I got this record deal. We were in L.A., but we had an apartment in Manhattan that we moved into in April of 1980. I started recording this album in May at Venture Sound Studio in Somerville, New Jersey, which was owned by a guy named Tony Camillo, a great musician, a great producer and great arranger. He was probably most famous for producing Gladys Knight in the Pips. We had a really good band that consisted of New Jersey musicians, and as I go back and listen to it now, I find it's just a really well-made record. I think everybody did a great job. The playing was great, and the mix is solid.”

It’s not only the playing, but the songs themselves that still resonate with Sudano. He co-wrote a number of them with Joe “Bean” Esposito, one of his bandmates from Brooklyn Dreams. “Neither one of us remember writing the songs,” Sudano admits. “But in listening to the album, I realized that there was a kind of a dialog in song that was going on between Donna and myself, between the songs that she had written about our relationship on her Bad Girls album, and the songs that I had written about our relationship on this album. It was kind of an interesting revelation to have at this point in time. In that moment, we were both going so fast, and there was so much going on in our lives. My daughter Brooklyn was born in January of 1981. We finished the album in July, and we got married in L.A. in July. It was just just an interesting experience to go back and to revisit something and trying to dig in the dirt of it and and come up with how did it all happened with all that was going on.”

The title track is especially meaningful Sudano says. “That was about what was going on in  our relationship. We were both independent people, chasing our careers, and now we've bumped into each other. We both resisted having a relationship take over our lives. So making a relationship number one over our careers was really the struggle that we both had. Most of our lives it was like ‘I'm sorry, I love you, but my career comes first.’ ‘Fugitive Kind’ is basically the story of how we went through that. The message of the song is that you can't run forever like the fugitive kind.”

While there there are several songs on the on the album that find Summer singing background (as “Donna Sudano”), the track titled “Pretenders” is unique in that it finds the two sharing the lead vocal.

“There was a point where we maybe to a fault resisted the temptation to trade off each other, or to make it seem like we're we we're trying to be capitalize on Donna's fame,” Sudano explains.  “So we took the secondary route, and listed her on the credits as Donna Sudano.”

It was Sudano’s first solo endeavor, and for many years, at least until the new millennium, it appeared like it would be his last.  “The interesting thing regarding this album was that after it was released, I decided that I'm not going to be a solo artist,” he reflects. “I'm just going to be a songwriter because it was too much to maintain Donna's career, have a family, and have me also trying to go out on my own and pursue my career. My original inspiration and desire really was always to be a songwriter, not so much to have to be the guy to go out and be the solo artist. So I basically put down that aspect of my life until Donna passed away, which was when I picked it back up and started recording again on my own, putting records out and playing gigs.”

Sudano notes that songwriting was always an inherent part of his career, even early on. “In collaboration with Brooklyn Dreams, I did a lot of the songwriting, but while I was there, I leaned more towards R&B because of the great singing of the guys. Joe Bean and Eddie had been part of a vocal group that basically did the Temptations, with all those vocals, all that choreography. Alive N’ Kickin’ was more in the realm of the Rolling Stones. But when you grow up in Brooklyn like I did, you're exposed to all the Black music, and that certainly influenced me. I had an affinity for it and a love for it. But when I got out on my own, I leaned more on the pop, rock, boozier side of things. That’s certainly been the case as I've progressed in my career.”

Sudano said his current goal is to make his earlier albums available once again and reintroduce the public to his earlier efforts as a singer/songwriter. The Fugitive Kind was the element that was still missing. “In a sense, it's a a very interesting piece of the puzzle because it shows me as a solo artist for the first time and where I was in that moment and what I had come out of and where I am now,” he maintains. “So this is the last piece of the puzzle. The other thing about this record is that it's my version of ‘Starting Over Again,’ which is a song that Donna and I wrote for my parents who were getting a divorce at the time. That song’s finally making an appearance as well.”

Sudano also offers an interesting anecdote in terms of how the song was put together.

“If you listen to Dolly Parton's version, or if you listen to Donna singing it on YouTube on the Johnny Carson show, or you listen to Reba McEntire’'s version of the song, all those versions contain the bridge of the song that I wrote. If you listen to my version of the song on this album, the bridge of the song is a Beatles song. It's ‘She's Leaving Home.’ That idea came from Jimmy Ienner, who was the head of the record company. He was like, ‘Hey Bruce, forget your bridge, let's put the Beatles in there.’ So then, when we went back to look at the album and knew we were re-releasing it, and I'm thinking I guess we got permission to use the Beatles’ song. I went back to my attorneys, but nobody could confirm that we had gotten permission. No record company was even claiming that they owned the record. So what we ended up doing is making an edit for the bridge. We've taken the vocals out, and there's just an instrumental piece where, in your mind, when you listen to it, you can sing ‘She's Leaving Home’ if you’d like to.”

Dolly Parton’s recent passing brought up another memory. The song Summer and Sudano wrote for his parents during their divorce, “Staring Over Again,” gave her a number one country hit.

“She was our neighbor in Nashville,” Sudano recalled. “There were a couple of times at different events that we’d run into her. I always said that Donna and Dolly had very similar personalities. They had the very same kind of creative energy, the same empathetic, generous hearts. I've always said this. But what struck me was that Donna passed in a similar way. Nobody knew that Donna was sick, and with Dolly, it was basically the same thing.

As for the future, Sudano said that when he returns to Italy, he’ll start working on new material. He mentioned that he also has a few shows booked there in the coming months. After that, he’ll return to the States and perform and generally carry on for as long as he can. He also plans to record another new album as well.

“As long as I have something to say, and as long as I'm inspired to say it, I’ll continue making music,” Sudano insists. “I think as long as you keep living and staying engaged with life, you're gonna have thoughts and feelings about things. And my way of interpreting those thoughts and feelings is always by writing a song.”