We Speak Music

Zecca Esquibel Guests On “If These Walls Could Talk” With Hosts Wendy Stuart and Tym Moss Wednesday, October 16th, 2024

Published

2 years ago

October 12, 2024

Who else but hosts Wendy Stuart and Tym Moss could “spill the tea” on their weekly show “If These Walls Could Talk” live from Pangea Restaurant on the Lower Eastside of NYC, with their unique style of honest, and emotional interviews, sharing the fascinating backstory of celebrities, entertainers, recording artists, writers and artists and bringing their audience along for a fantastic ride.

Zecca Esquibel will be a featured guest on “If These Walls Could Talk” with hosts Wendy Stuart and Tym Moss on Wednesday, October 16th, 2024 at 2 PM ET live from the infamous Pangea Restaurant.

Wendy Stuart is an author, celebrity interviewer, model, filmmaker and along with If These Walls Could Talk she hosts TriVersity Talk, a weekly web series with featured guests discussing their lives, activism and pressing issues in the LGBTQ Community.

Tym Moss is a popular NYC singer, actor, and radio/tv host who recently starred in the hit indie film “JUNK” to critical acclaim.

Zecca Esquibel was the keyboard player in the Cherry Vanilla band in early 1977, which also included Sting, Stewart Copeland and Louie Lepore.

Born in São Paulo, Brazil, composer, producer and arranger Zecca Esquibel’s first stage performance on piano was at Peabody Preparatory in Baltimore, Maryland at the age of 7. He spent his childhood and teens winning a daunting schedule of classical piano competitions until, inspired at Woodstock, he left home at 18 to become a rock musician. At the age of 23, in New York city, he received rave reviews for his performance in the landmark Off-Off-Broadway Gay musical “Lovers” in his basement loft on Church St. (The Basement Theater). KISS rehearsed their first National Tour there on alternate nights. Immediately after, he single-handedly founded a 16 floor live-in loft and rehearsal studio complex called The Music Building at 251 W 30th St. in Manhattan’s Garment District, which functioned for 40 years! Soon, Zecca was playing his first arena’s and colosseums with The Jimmy Castor Bunch (RCA). Disgusted with off-stage behavior, Zecca complained to his best friend, the late Sean Delaney (often called “the fifth KISS”), and Sean arranged an audition with Bowie alum Cherry Vanilla. Miles Copeland saw them in New York and invited Cherry, Zecca, and Cherry‘s new love, guitarist Louie Lepore, to come to London offering members of The Police to fill in as the missing musicians. The rest is well covered in Sting‘s “Broken Music“.

After 18 months of touring and recording in the US and Europe with Cherry Vanilla (RCA London), Zecca returned to New York and wrote the music for his own band GET WET (Boardwalk Records).His single “Just So Lonely” rose to #39 in Billboard’s Pop Chart and Top 10 overseas.

Zecca joined “downtown” performance artist John Kelly in 1994‘s “Far Cry From Bliss” (Danspace, NY), and he has accompanied Mr. Kelly in recitals as well as all four of his Joni Mitchell shows touring the US and Europe. Appearing in Drag as an 85 year old Georgia O’Keefe beside Kelly as Mitchell, they were the opening act for parts of Natalie Merchant’s 1999 Ophelia World Tour. He also played keys for blues legend Garland Jeffreys’ US and Canada tours from 2002 to 2007.

In 2019, Kelly and Zecca revived their Joni shows “sans perruque” (out of Drag) to sold out crowds in a residency at Joe’s Pub (Public Theater). In April, 2024, Zecca began performing with Penny Arcade in her “Art of Becoming”, again at Joe’s Pub.

Watch Zecca Esquibel on “If These Walls Could Talk” with hosts Wendy Stuart and Tym Moss on YouTube here:

Subscribe and listen to “If These Walls Could Talk” on Apple Podcasts/iTunes here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/if-these-walls-could-talk/id1561221158

We Speak Music

Col Darcy Unveils New Single ‘Pay Up’

Published

13 hours ago

August 4, 2026

Philomena Marie

Col Darcy’s ‘Pay Up’ arrives with the calm authority of an artist who has already learned that longevity is its own form of victory. The second single from ‘Redemption’, his forthcoming album, is a composed piece of independent hip-hop that places persistence, ambition and personal conviction at its centre. Rather than presenting success as spectacle, Darcy approaches it as something accumulated slowly, through experience, discipline and faith in one’s own direction.

That sense of earned perspective has been central to Darcy’s work from the beginning. As Caper, he drew national attention with ‘How Would You Like To Be Me?’, a politically charged anti-racism song whose influence eventually extended into cinema. Alongside ‘Opportunity’, the track appeared in Netflix’s A Second Chance: Rivals!, bringing Darcy’s writing to an audience well beyond the usual confines of Australian hip-hop. Yet his subsequent career has remained grounded in independence, with the acclaimed ‘Beautiful Hopeless’ further establishing his commitment to thoughtful writing and considered craft.

‘Pay Up’ continues that trajectory while revealing an artist interested in the emotional economics of perseverance. Darcy writes from the perspective of someone who has experienced the slow rewards of staying the course. The lyrics use sharp wordplay and layered metaphor to turn a familiar idea into something more personal. His delivery is particularly effective for its restraint. There is no need to overstate the message when the voice behind it sounds as though it has lived through the argument already.

The song also reflects the wider concerns of ‘Redemption’, a record shaped by travel, fatherhood, gratitude and renewed self-awareness. Much of the album was recorded in Bali, and the island’s atmosphere reportedly helped cultivate its more contemplative dimensions. That background lends ‘Pay Up’ an intriguing duality. It is a song about ambition, but not restless ambition. Its confidence feels less like hunger for external validation and more like an acceptance that the journey itself has meaning.

What emerges is a track that understands hip-hop as both music and testimony. Darcy’s influences, from Tupac Shakur and Eminem to Kendrick Lamar, belong to a lineage in which personal narrative can become social observation and self-examination can become communal language. ‘Pay Up’ honours that tradition while remaining contemporary in its presentation. As a statement of intent for ‘Redemption’, it suggests an artist who has found greater clarity without sacrificing his edge, and who understands that the most durable kind of success is the kind you build yourself.