Subscribe
now to receive all the new
music
Cellista creates,
including
15 back-catalog releases,
delivered instantly to you via the Bandcamp app for iOS and Android.
Learn more.
Every year, since I was 16 years old, my father the philosopher Frank Seeburger has written me a poem for my birthday. This is the poem he wrote for me in 2011, when I made the move back to the States, to downtown San Jose, after a long stint as an immigrant in France.
The backing piano was composed, played and recorded by Rykarda Parasol at Tiny Telephone in SF in September of 2015. It was recorded separately from the narration which Ms. Parasol recorded at her home in Paris in December of 2016.
Rykarda Parasol is one of the few people who seems to just get me as I am. Someone who can read a poem written by a father who just loves his daughter and wants to see her happy, and make it feel like family is on the other line, leaving a message of comfort and love.
The rotary dial and hang up noise is the actual Tiny Telephone, at the famous SF recording studio. Beau Sorenson who mastered this album, recorded this sound for me.
lyrics
Finding San Jose
by Frank Seeburger
Call it a brute sense of simple animal well-being.
Stuck in my memory is one recollection of it,
When I was back still going to college, I think.
I was riding in my 1959 bug-eyed Austin Healy Sprite
With the radio on but the convertible top down,
Driving up Evergreen Canyon road one bright morning,
And I didn’t have a care in the world.
Just then the words of the old song came to me—
Simon and Garfunkle singing “Feelin’ Groovy.”
And I did, for just that one endless moment.
Many years later, I also felt the very same thing
Once in Washington, D.C., when you were still a baby, in a carriage.
Pushing you along, walking beside your mother,
I felt—reminder of the one time past, and herald of any yet to come—
That same brute, simple sense of sheer animal well-being again,
As if God was in his heaven, and all was right with the world.
There have been other times, too, I’ve fleetingly felt the same.
The body itself somehow retains the knowledge, it seems,
Of how to go back there to that bodily well of animal well-being,
If I will just get out of the way and let it lead and guide me there.
And that, I think, may really be, at long last, the way to San Jose.
Cellista's penchant for performing music in unconventional spaces, and her devotion to collaborating with artists across mediums has led her to create unique performances that incorporate elements of classical music, improvisation, and visual art.
Atmospheric baroque instrumental pop from composer Luke Cissell—complex and carefully constructed but not without a sense of humor or light. Bandcamp New & Notable Jul 14, 2020
