Celia “Dee” DeFazio, a senior at Jenkintown High School, a stage performer and an up-and-coming singer-songwriter, released her first single titled “Tympanum” on October 3 across all streaming platforms.
The Jenkintown native comes from a musically pedigreed family, which includes her father Pasquale “Pat” DeFazio, an Emmy award-winning producer, editor and director, a partner of the production company FRANK, and a guitarist with the Jenkintown-based Camera Thief. Tympanum was first written acoustically and then arranged and recorded with Celia’s father and uncle.
Honored with a Jenkintown Festival of the Arts‘ Johnson Street Stage Musician Spotlight on September 4, she’s also a protege and former piano student of Lisa Ridenour of Jenkintown’s Acoustic Keys, a duo which was recently honored with a 2023 Jenkintown Artist Laureate award on behalf of the Borough.
“Celia started taking piano lessons with Lisa Ridenour around the age of nine. It really sparked her interested in music,” Pat said. “She started writing original songs on the piano, and then kind of set it aside for a few years. She picked up a guitar a few years ago and ended up teaching herself. Over the span of a couple years she figured out chord patterns and song structure and started writing original music again.”
“I’ve grown up in a house full of music and I think that’s had a big influence on me. When I perform, it takes over me. It’s a very special feeling,” Celia, who goes by “Celia Dee” when performing, said. “I admire female artists whose lyrics are thoughtfully crafted such as Mitski and Fiona Apple, and I strive to create a style of my own inspired by theirs. When I write a song, I start with a general idea, but mostly I just let it form on its own as I go along. That’s one of my favorite things about music, its unpredictability.”
Combining indie, folk, and rock, Celia started singing Tympanum (which is actually a medical term for eardrum) at Jenkintown’s summer music series when she was 16. She wanted the song to be the first to represent her music.
“We started the recording process earlier this year with Ron DiSilvestro, who works at Studio 4 in Conshohocken,” Pat said. “We thought it might work better as a full-band piece, so we started arranging and making the song bigger. That’s what the single ended up being.”
“She’s excited. She has newer and older songs that she wants to release with an EP at some point,” he said.
“It has been such a fun journey to watch Celia develop into a fantastic musician, artist and person,” Ridenour said. “Celia has the rare ability to convert performance anxiety into confidence and strength on stage. She will be successful in anything she chooses to do and I cannot wait to watch her career unfold.”
The Jenkintown senior has been accepted to Savannah College of Art & Design and will be performing her music at Small Business Saturday on November 25 at Headhouse Shambles at 2nd & Lombard in Philadelphia.
Locally, Celia Dee can be found performing at the Jenkintown Holiday Market on Saturday, December 2 at Jenkintown Town Square, and playing Morticia in the Jenkintown Theater Arts’ production of The Addams Family on Thursday, November 16, Friday, November 17, and Saturday, November 18.
For more on Celia Dee, you can check out her Instagram & TikTok (@celia.dee.music). To listen to Tympanum, you can click here or play the video below:
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Cover art photos: Jon Adams, Jenkintown–based photographer; Portrait: Jenkintown Festival of the Arts