Australian singles charts:
Cecilia entered the Kent charts on 11 May 1970 peaked at #6. The song was #46 on the Top 100 of 1970.
Album:
The song is on Bridge Over Troubled Water which debuted at #1 on the Kent album charts on 6 April 1970. It held the #1 spot 15 times between April and September.
Songwriter:
Paul Simon
Producers:
Roy Halee, Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel
Record label of Australian release:
CBS
BONUS CLIP BELOW: Paul Simon on how the drum beat on Cecilia was created
Wikipedia:
Paul Simon has suggested that the ‘Cecilia’ of the title refers to St. Cecilia, patron saint of music in the Catholic tradition, and thus the song might refer to the frustration of fleeting inspiration in songwriting, the vagaries of musical fame or in a wider sense the absurdity of pop culture. The song is generally interpreted as a lament over a capricious lover who causes both anguish and jubilation to the singer..
Read more: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_(Simon_&_Garfunkel_song)
Songfacts:
Not too much should be read into the lyrics of this song. As Paul Simon explained in an interview with Rolling Stone: “Every day I’d come back from the studio, working on whatever we were working on, and I’d play this pounding thing. So then I said, ‘Let’s make a record out of that.’ So we copied it over and extended it double the amount, so now we have three minutes of track, and the track is great. So now I pick up the guitar and I start to go, ‘Well, this will be like the guitar part’ – dung chicka dung chicka dung, and lyrics were virtually the first lines I said: ‘You’re breakin’ my heart, I’m down on my knees.’ They’re not lines at all, but it was right for that song, and I like that. It was like a little piece of magical fluff, but it works.”
Read more: www.songfacts.com/facts/simon-garfunkel/cecilia
This song is also on our Spotify playlist Bang a Gong – the 70s
Find more songs to enjoy: Bang a Gong song finder
BONUS CLIP
Paul Simon tells Howard Stern how the drum beat on Cecilia was created
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