Lyric
Your baby,
Is no such thing,
The adult king of ignorance is reigning,
On every gay parade.
Your princess is the next in line,
To abdicate her father.
The Queen is in the council house,
Counting ways,
To justify the hate.
She’s seen ya,
Cecilia,
She’s seen ya for what you are.
She wants you,
To be a man,
Who understands that love holds no conditions.
On who you want to be.
Everything you try to stop,
Begins another heartache.
Everything is simple here.
Can’t you see,
That love is blind?
She’s seen ya,
Cecilia,
She’s seen ya for what you are.
Is wrong,
Change your mind if not your heart.
And if you don’t believe,
She will wish you were,
Someone that she can’t recall,
Never quite recall.
No matter what you do.
Story
I’d had the chords to the verse of this song for many years, and came up with the chorus and middle back in about 2010, when I wasn’t really writing songs any more. A friend who was a drummer in a prog rock band that had split up got to me to try playing with him in the early teens, but it didn’t work. This was the one song that we tried (still without lyrics), but we just weren’t compatible. He got his prog guitarist involved and you could see the lack of enthusiasm for this song written across his face.
When Dave was lodging with me ten years or so ago we dug it out and had another go where it resided, still massively unfinished on his computer as Rob Song 2. When I finally got a DAW and started using it properly in 2017 the song came back to life as I took it, tried to knock it into shape and failed. I finally upped the tempo, came up with the lead guitar line and started singing over the chords where it started to really become today’s song.
Once I had demoed it, Dave and Stu both came up with great tweaks and I especially like Stu’s bass line that adds tension with each passing bar in the chorus.
The lyrics as they often do started as just putting random lyrics down to get the melody line, but “She sees ya, Cecilia” just wouldn’t shift. The middle eight ending led me towards someone being too afraid to tell someone you loved them, but the subject eventually became this issue of parents having a distaste for their children’s sexuality, even when they reach adulthood.
I do remember Dave was not keen on keeping the title as Cecilia, but nothing else seemed right and we stuck to it. Cecilia is not a real person, but the story and the baffling attitude of parents not unconditionally loving their children is very much a real topic.
I think we’re at peace with the name now!