In his essay ‘Cecilia 2’, journalist Eduardo Bravo vindicates the work of the singer who was amputated and forgotten for dealing with topics that were subversive during the last Franco era.
His editor told him that his was a book that would change things before it was published and, we refer to the facts, that is what happened. Cecilia, that icon of Spanish song from the 70s whose tragic and too early death elevated to myth, had a cursed album. One that even she ended up denying and that ended up plunged into silence despite being, according to critics, her best work. Now the journalist Eduardo Bravo claims its essence in Cecilia 2. The story of the album that could not be (Lengua de Trapo and Círculo de Bellas Artes), a work that has effectively managed to remove the singer’s second LP from ostracism. At least on Spotify.
“My relationship with Cecilia is that of a fan,” the author acknowledges over a video call. “I have always liked her, but that better-known Cecilia, the one from Lady, ladythat of A sprig of violets, I was starting to get tired. She is the most produced, the most commercial. We’ve been listening to those songs for 50 years and they’re a bit hackneyed., in my opinion. A little battered, too.”
Bravo notes a certain contradiction in the retrospective look at the musical identity of Evangelina Sobredo: “He died at the age of 27, but it seems as if those 50 years that have passed had come upon him. You listen A sprig of violets and it seems that a 70-year-old person wrote it.” But ah, there is that second album, Cecilia 2the cursed LP, recorded in 1973 three years before he died and that, in “a striptease emotional”, it does show “that twenty-year-old girl with tremendous success that has given her great freedom.
Cecilia 2 was born as a commission from C.B.S.the record company that discovered her, which renamed her after a song of the same name by Simon & Garfunkel and that launched her to stardom. The dazzling success of the first album required a second triumph as soon as possible. However, the company and the artist did not see things in the same way… “She sought to take advantage of the momentum to create an album that was much more her own, more personal and more political as well,” analyzes the journalist.
Cecilia’s idea was give “a kick to the establishment in the mouth”Bravo collects in his book the words of Evangelina Luis Gómez-Escolar’s former partner. And that’s why in My city preempts climate change with a voracious critique of gentrification long before such a word existed; in If it was not because he dares to commit suicide in a society governed by national Catholicism; and what to say about a million dreamswhich was first titled One million deadshe was still censored and was even taken to court where she argued, very seriously, that any reference to the Civil War in her lyrics was pure coincidence, that she was talking about the Six Day War that she had experienced firsthand in Jordan. .
“His way of managing conflict is very intelligent. He knew what he was doing and what environment he was moving in. He could have sulked or decided to end his project, but he never faced the conflicts head-on because he knew it would lose. A multinational or the apparatus of a dictatorial state were too powerful enemies. He adapted and looked for loopholes to maintain his creativity and freedom.. With that sweet tone and that naive image, he makes everything so beautiful that it comes in much more easily,” explains the author of this particular biography, a kind of documentary written based on interviews with all those involved, directly or indirectly, in the work. that he claims.
However, the real conflict came with the cover. Cecilia herself had allowed herself to be photographed in a room with a large crucifix and a bucolic four-poster bed holding a false pregnant belly. In her initial idea, her second album would take the title of her most feminist song, I will stay single, in which she vindicated her idea of being a single mother. “Imagine, in the year 73 women could not even open a checking account or work without the permission of their father, their brother or their husband. So that was something so absolutely groundbreaking that if it were published as is, Cecilia would possibly have spent a little time in the police station, or in prison, so that he understood the message,” says Bravo. The record company, of course, refused to accept the risk.
That was when Cecilia herself became disenchanted. The album no longer looked anything like what she had planned and she stopped fighting. The record company, for its part, abandoned the promotion, and the result was poor sales figures that did not correspond to the singer-songwriter’s previous success. “They didn’t know how to manage Cecilia’s best album,” laments the author. We said at the beginning that yours is a book that, before it was made public, had already changed things. And the fact is that the discographic neglect towards Cecilia 2 It continued to this day, in the Sony Music catalog. No reissues, no greatest hits compilations, nor any trace of the complete album on platforms. At least, until Bravo started asking why: “They never answered me, but suddenly they uploaded the album”.
The journalist says that he would never have been able to write this extract from Cecilia’s biography without the help of his sister, Teresa Sobredo, guardian of his legacy. She only made one request: that she not analyze her lyrics with current sensitivity, especially the feminism of I will stay single. Theirs is an eternal war against the politicization of an artist who was tremendously political 50 years ago. “Indeed, we do not know what Cecilia would think about the current situation. We do not know, for example, if she would give up A sprig of violetswhich is a beautiful love song but still portrays an abuser,” Bravo reflects. “What is clear is that the message of Cecilia 2 “It is so universal, so clairvoyant, that it continues to reach us today as it did in ’73.”
