Big Ten-Inch Record #21
Nerdy Girl — Nerdy Girl
(from the 10″ EP Nerdy Girl, No Life Records 1994)
When I knew Cecil Castellucci, she was a grown woman who still slept on Star Wars sheets. (Not that I ever saw them, mind, but she told me about them.) A native of Montreal who went by the nom de twee-pop of Cecil Seaskull, she more or less was Nerdy Girl, who released a handful of records in the mid-’90s. This song about her childhood Star Wars fixation was her signature tune, but my other favorite was always “Single Bed,” from Nerdy Girl’s sole full-length, 1996’s Twist Her. After she dropped the Nerdy Girl moniker, Cecil released an album around 1998 called Whoever, and then we pretty much fell out of contact. (Frankly, I fell out of contact with a lot of people around 1998 — it was a really bad year.) I googled her just now out of curiosity, and I learned that she lives in Los Angeles now, where she’s had several young adult novels published. People tended to have extreme reactions about Nerdy Girl: I knew some people who found both the diary-entry quality of Cecil’s lyrics and her undeniably polarizing voice just the height of preciousness. Me, I have to admire someone who starts a project with a very specific aesthetic, stays true to it for as long as it’s viable and then retires it when she’s taken it as far as it can go.
–Stewart Mason
