Hello everyone I hope you’ve had a lovely week! On this week’s Lydia’s Girls I have another original girl for you all. She’s been featured on Lydia’s Girls 3 and Lydia’s Girls Greatest Hits. She is the amazing, beautiful Donna Lewis! Born in Cardiff, Wales, Donna was born into a musical family with a father who played jazz-style piano and guitar. At the age of six Donna was playing piano and by fourteen writing her own songs. She attended Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and taught music in Sussex for a year. After that she started singing in a bar band in Birmingham, UK, and set up a home studio where she recorded demos. More and more people began to notice her singing as she continued to perform live. Then in 1994 the chairman for Atlantic Records, Doug Morris, heard Donna’s demo of I Love You Always Forever and signed her on the spot. Donna has had many albums: Now In A Minute (1996), Blue Planet (1998), Be Still (2002), In The Pink (2008), and Brand New Day (2015). She has also released a number of singles from 1996 through 2020.
As you can already see by the title, I will be focusing on Donna’s biggest hit I Love You Always Forever. This song is featured on her first album, Now In A Minute, which is an amazing album. My dad knew how much I loved Donna’s hit that he gave me her whole album. Donna wrote the song based on the novel, Love for Lydia, by H. E. Bates. Originally the song was going to be titled Lydia. Now is that a coincidence or what! This song was meant to be a Lydia’s Girls song. Besides the fact that this song did so well in the music charts, I truly believe that this song is a work of art. At the beginning of the song there is a synthesizer playing the whole note of the chords; It is simple but beautiful. Then there are sound effects that sound like the traffic in a city. By the second verse the main beat of the song comes in and Donna is able to make this song something that people can dance to while also keeping it meaningful. I love all the lyrics in this song because each line is perfectly written. In one of my songwriting classes I remember the phrase being said to make every line count. This means that you should not use random words to fill up a space but rather make those words mean something. Here are some of my favorite lyrics in the song: “Feels like I’m standing in a timeless dream. Of light mist, of pale amber rose. Feels like I’m lost in a deep cloud of heavenly scent, touching, discovering you.” What a way to start the song; it has so much imagery that you can really see what she’s singing about. Another one of my favorites is: “You’ve got the most stumbling blue eyes I’ve ever seen. You’ve got me almost wilting away. As we lay there under a blue sky with pure white stars. It’s all the sweetness, magical time.” I love how she uses the word ‘stumbling’ in this. It is such a unique way of expressing how it makes her feel. This is such a genius lyric.
If you haven’t heard this song before I highly recommend that you listen to it this very second. You will not be disappointed; my dad knew that this song deserved to be on Lydia’s Girls.
Author: Lydia MacDavid
Chief Editor: Jacob Tomeny
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