“I almost wonder if I just needed that to be reminded to keep going,” New York-based rising star Izzy Escobar contemplates her sudden breakup and the heartwrenching ache that followed as a blessing in disguise. Being left just before an intercontinental trip not only inspired Escobar’s recent project, Sunny In London, but also awakened an inner urge to get out there, which culminated in an impromptu performance at London’s legendary jazz club Ronnie Scott’s.
Quietly wishing my breakup would turn out this way; strap in, this story high-key deserves a script of its own, with a book and movie adaptation. The 26-year-old Izzy Escobar answers from her base in New York, where the city is crawling with JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy look-alikes, thanks to the FX and Disney+ series Love Story craze.
Going right ahead to dissect the city’s notorious charm, Escobar compares the concrete jungle to the sunny center of Los Angeles, where she spent six years: “I lived in LA before and I was noticing that when I came to New York, I kept getting much more inspired, just because of the conversations I was hearing around me, because of the people I was meeting. It was a whole other world that was built upon authenticity, which I really appreciated,” she differentiates.
Though LA has nurtured Izzy Escobar in an inward-looking way, she explains what the city’s spaced-out geography meant for her state of mind: “I felt like LA allowed me to spend a lot of time with myself, in my room, with my keyboard. It was pretty self-isolating, but I also view LA as my point of self-realisation. It was like a more internal city, whereas in New York, I feel like everyone is so close together. There’s a subway, and everything is moving really quickly. It’s just naturally a more extroverted, communicative, community-built environment,” she summarises.
As she begins recounting her time in LA, where she taught music to young girls at UCLA, the discussion cannot continue without highlighting the importance and gratitude she feels toward the teachers in her life. “My teachers were the most formative people in my life. They taught me all the lessons of life through the lens of music,” Escobar specifically remarks her choir teacher, who was her first female teacher, and was at the top of her game with prestigious awards in Massachusetts. With a reminiscing smile, she lists some key phrases her teacher instilled in her: “Early is on time, on time is late, and late is hell. The one that always stayed with me was, ‘the music will save you every time.'”
“Now, when I’m given an opportunity or these new opportunities have arisen, I’m able to step up because they’ve given me so much love and preparation. I attribute almost everything to my teachers that I’ve had in my life,” she adds. Fast forward, it is Izzy Escobar who has been shaping the minds of young aspiring musicians for eight years in LA. Still, it has come to a point of a farewell, “yesterday was my last day of teaching my students,” she explains, “when it was time to move to New York, I couldn’t let go of all my students yet, I love teaching them so much. So I kept a few of them online. Those are the students I was teaching”.
Reflecting on her own education in classical music, she wonders how learning to play the violin has influenced her. She mentions the form of the Suzuki method and its high-pitch ear training, which set the groundwork and improved her understanding: “I think somewhere along the lines, I just realised I loved the feeling of when I would immerse myself in the sheet music and in music. I just felt so understood. I felt so seen. I felt so heard. I think I just kept leaning into that and never looked back.”
When singing Hannah Montana and Disney songs from Ariel and The Little Mermaid, Izzy Escobar let her shy personality go. She reveals, “I’ll be honest, I was quite shy as a kid in many ways. But when it came to singing, around five or six, I would go in the basement and just sing with my headphones or to a CD player. But no one knew that I sang.”
From singing when nobody could see her, Izzy Escobar is now proud to share her talents and listen to the voice that wants to be heard so badly. Her latest project, Sunny In London, is a prime example of an artist utilising their talent to express an ache in music rather than in words that may fail to truly convey the emotion of it all. In this case, Escobar taps into the sudden romantic independence to unleash the waterfall of heartbreak-fuelled disappointment. Sunny In London is a fresh start, a breaking point when Escobar takes back control of her narrative.
Instead of staying put and wallowing in her broken heart, Escobar packed her bags, and when solo on a trip to London, that was supposed to be a couples getaway. Even in the whirlwind of uncertainty and foreign environment, Escobar knew one thing for sure; she had to be in the studio: ” I had a session a day for two weeks. I just wrote my way through heartbreak every single day.’
Alone in London, lying and staring at the ceiling in bed in her Airbnb, Izzy Escobar decided to search for horn players in an urge to be around music. Feeling emotional, Izzy Escobar ended up at the iconic jazz club Ronnie Scott’s, and coincidentally met the owner at the bar. Expressing her love for singing, it wasn’t until she came back from the bathroom that the owner said, “It’s your turn, we’re going to put you on to go last.” Performing ‘Cry Me A River’ appropriately enough, she flushes with gratitude looking back at the new connections she made with all the talented jazz musicians, “all these synchronicities were happening,” she adds, “I feel like I needed to sing. Singing is how I express myself. So when I can’t perform or sing, sometimes it feels like a block.”
Released late last year, Sunny In London captures Escobar’s moment in time, her London escapades, and her elegant getting-over-someone splattered over modern jazz and soulful, striking storytelling. The standout track, ‘Gangster’s Wife,’ is Escobar’s refusal to dim one’s light for love. Instead, the track claps back, showing Escobar wanting to call her own shots. She elaborates: “I wrote ‘Gangster’s Wife’ out of an act of rebellion, a little bit, and created the character of Annie, who chose not to settle for someone who was going to make her feel smaller, but chose to walk into this world that was full of rebellion and a little bit of danger and also fun and excitement.”
Having grown into a confident woman who knows her worth, Izzy Escobar aimed to embody the same idealised strength and elegance of Jackie Kennedy as she sings on ‘Jackie O.’ As she dives into the track’s inspiration and relevance to her personal life, Escobar does not forget to mention how Jackie Kennedy held up our country during a time of instability and crisis: “The song was almost a manifestation of the woman I want to become. Ironically enough, I feel like it is somewhatof a mantra for me to sing because I have developed so much since I wrote that song. I want to continue to walk in that same path,” she shares.
Two women, discussing the process of becoming, as women, and as women with passion, Escobar lists books that acted as aid with studying visualisaion and manifestation: “One of them was Lana Del Rey’s recommendation Think And Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. I would carry that book everywhere. It was in the studio with me, in my purse every single day. I was also reading Autobiography of a Yogi at the same time, which is the story of Yogananda. These books touched on this idea deeply: “if you think it, you are it” and visualising who you want to become. I think the process is half visualisationand half discipline. You still have to make the decisions as your own character, and is that aligned with who I’m envisioning in my head?” she poses a self-reflective question.
Sunny in London is a metaphor for finding light in a dark place; Escobar clears out the EP title and introduces the final installment of this chapter before she heads on tour across Europe and the UK. She graces the world with Sunny In London (Acoustic), the 8-track long project as it was initially imagined and developed, simple, instrumental. “I felt like a good song is when you can strip it down to basics, and I wanted to go back to my roots, honestly,” she announces.
Hailing from New York, Izzy Escobar is a true artist who tirelessly pursues creative expression and infuses it with a dose of life experience, full of vulnerable and heartbreaking truths. Sunny In London does not submit to pain; it struts forward, faster, with a head held up high, and with a bit of jazz.
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Words: Karolina Kramplova
Photographer: Nico Ramirez