This week, Jordan had the pleasure of interviewing one of our very talented BQE musicians, Luca Yeager, who discussed his past and upcoming projects out of his studio, The Ramen Shop. Check out the full interview below:
Jordan: Hey Luca! Let’s start with some background information. Would you mind telling me a little bit about you and the rest of your band?
Luca: Yeah uh, my name is Luca Yeager. I’m from Colorado up in the mountains and I moved to New York 4 years ago or so to go to NYU to study songwriting and composition. While there I met my current bass player and good friend and producer collaborator and all those things, Justin Ma. He also runs the studio with me. I’ve had a handful of drummers and musicians that I’ve worked with. Initially the band had five members. We had a piano player and a guitar player, but, uh, they both moved to Nashville. So now it’s just us and currently we’re playing with this drummer named Ethan Saffold, who Justin has known for… since before they moved to New York, they met “at Nerd Camp” somewhere. And so, yeah, we play together. We actually played a gig last night which was a lot of fun. And the two of them are absolutely incredible musicians.
Jordan: Amazing! Speaking of the band, how would you describe your music in three words?
Luca: Loud, definitely. There’s just three of us up there, but we all hit our instruments pretty hard. I’d say we’re electric, which I don’t know if you feel like I’m holding my nose up high, but we are, um, and then… simple, like, at the end of the day, we’re playing the blues a lot. Might not always be 12 bars and what not, but, yeah, not doing anything too complicated.
Jordan: Totally. Getting a little more into recent releases – what was the inspiration behind your most recent release “Better”?
Luca: Well, it’s a little bit of a story for that, if you will bear with me. I recorded that shortly after we got the studio space actually, and I came in. Everything was organized very differently. The drum kit was actually where you are right now and I wanted to just kind of see what I could do. I’ve been listening to a, at the time, I’m listening to a lot of Dan Auerbach, the guitarist from the Black Keys, and he has the song ‘Heartbroken in Disrepair’ that has his really grungy guitar on it with this tremolo on it. I just kind of wanna mess around with a similar tone and a similar vibe. So I played a guitar riff that was kind of similar-ish. I don’t think it’s too close. And I just recorded it, recorded a couple of takes of it. And then I copy and pasted it, which many of my teachers at school would have scolded me for. I did a little bass part for it. I wrote a chorus riff, which I also copy and pasted, and in about three hours of angst filled f**kery, sorry, I’m not supposed to curse, and I had the song. I wrote lyrics, recorded the drums and everything myself. And I’m not much of a drummer. That part definitely took the longest. And yeah, then I spent about another half an hour mixing it after the fact and it was just kind of done. I broke about every rule I could think of. The goal was to just not do what I was supposed to and come up with something fun. Yeah, I think it sort of worked, I don’t know. I like how it turned out. Cause as much as it is a very simple song that has sort of four chords that most throughout it, it doesn’t sound quite like other things I’ve heard before. I think.
Jordan: I love how you took inspiration from music that was already meaningful to you and put it into the song. Along those lines, who were some of your biggest inspirations in music?
Luca: I listen to a lot of older music, almost entirely stuff that was written and released before I was born. When I was a kid, a lot of Beatles and Rolling Stones, and also some Doors, although I didn’t really understand what the doors were about at the time. As I got older I listened to a lot more classic rock, just kind of a general 60’s 70’s. When I was in high school, I listened to a lot of Pink Floyd. They were probably the most, they definitely were the most influential on me through that period of my life, and still to this day. David Gilmour is probably my favorite guitar player. It’s hard to really say that I like anyone anymore, and to this day, it’s a lot of that same psychedelic late 60s rock, but there’s also some modern artists that I tend to listen to a lot and I take inspiration from. Someone I was listening to on my walk here actually is Michael Kiwanuka. He is, I think, lesser known than it makes sense to me, cause he has a fair amount of streams. I see his songs on TV shows, and stuff but if I bring his name up to musician friends of mine, no one knows who he is. He has, like, these, like 13 to 15 minute long Pink Floyd epics almost. Or, like, he writes his albums that are meant to be listened to as an album, which I appreciate a lot. So people like that.
Jordan: I definitely see the inspiration from those artists shine through in your work. I also feel drawn to projects that are best listened to in their entirety as an album. Are there any standout memories during the recording of your first full length album ‘The Free Trial’?
Luca: Honestly, kind of just all of it. It’s a mostly live album, so we were in a studio a bit bigger than this, where there were five of us. We were all in a room. I was kind of blocked off so there wasn’t much bleed in the mic. I ended up actually recording the vocals on about half the songs, but everything is one take. Everything except for the vocals is, yeah, all that same take. The feeling of just being in that room with these musicians. And while we played some of these songs before together, some of them we hadn’t really played before we got to the studio. We just… it was electrifying. It was really fun to do. Like, I remember the song, ‘Breaking Down’, which I wrote after having an anxiety attack a couple years ago. When I got to the studio and we played it, and like we’d rehearsed it some and it felt good and what not, but we get there and it goes into this kind of big outro solo where I’m going for it and my headphones fall off halfway through it. I’m just going off of what the drums are doing in the other room that I can kind of hear through the glass. Afterwards, I was slumped in the chair like this and Justin looked over at me and he goes, let’s take five. I think about that sometimes because it was like, that wouldn’t have happened, I don’t think, if we had just been tracking the drums, the bass, and then I want to play the guitar solo. I feel like you can hear that.
Jordan: Yeah, one of my favorite things about hearing the story behind recording and creating the music is you can listen back and try to hear all of those moments in the track. Sticking with the album a bit more, do you have a favorite off of the album or a track you feel specifically proud of?
Luca: I do like them all. Actually, I’ve been thinking about it recently because I’ve been writing new music, recording new music, and putting some new things out. I think someday I do wanna go back and re-record a lot of those older songs. But I think ‘Burn Ashes’ is the one that really sticks out to me. On that record, it’s written much more like an old folk song. It doesn’t really have a clear chorus. It has kind of a tagline that happens a few times and just kind of builds and builds and builds. Then I had this incredible singer come do this, these crazy vocal riffs in the end and it just kind of gets so explosive towards the end. Yeah. That song isn’t really about anything specific, but just kind of a feeling of not really knowing where you are, which I still can relate to. So.
Jordan: Yeah, I can definitely relate to that also. Being that you were a student at NYU and have seen some of the evolution here for a few years, what do you think is the best thing about the New York Music scene in 2025?
Luca: It’s alive. I don’t know. I initially moved here in 2020 and then went back to Colorado cause it was the fall of 2020 and it was New York. And then I came back a year later, in 2021, and I was in a music community, a bunch of songwriters and performers and no one was performing. I had a band at the time. We were called the 6th Floor, you can look us up. We put one song out. We were a group of six songwriters in a band. We were kind of the first people in our community that started getting around and doing stuff. Like everything was open at that point for the most part, but it didn’t really have that feeling of what I thought New York was. I mean, I came to New York a few times when I was younger, but I never really experienced that and it feels like four years later now, almost, that it has an energy that is palpable that we can, you know, really go out. Like every week a friend of mine is playing a show and I think that’s really cool.
Jordan: It really is such a crazy thing to think about music in New York coming out of covid when no one was able to go anywhere and how much that really brought the city back together in a way. Before I let you get back to work, are there any projects on the horizon?
Luca: Yeah, I so I put my song ‘Better’ out a little while ago, I have another song called ‘Right Or Wrong’ that is currently done, or I’m trying to convince myself that it’s done, and I have a few other songs that I’m working on and in the midst of recording right now, and a few more that are being written. You know, it’s kind of cascading. It’s all centralized around this idea of the end of the world. Not to be too melodramatic, and not like an Armageddon kind of end of the world, but in the sense of, I feel like my generation kind of has this feeling right now that whether it’s, you know, due to how overbearing social media can be, or if it’s, you know, how disconnected we are, or if it’s political things… Whatever it is, it kind of feels like the world that we existed in doesn’t really exist anymore. If that makes any sense. I know I’m still figuring out how to express the feeling, hence writing songs. Um. So, yeah, that’s the current product. I don’t know if it’ll end up being called ‘The End of the World’, but that’s what I’m working with at the moment.
Jordan: That all sounds really exciting! Well, thanks so much for sitting down and talking to me about everything going on at The Ramen Shop.
Make sure to follow Luca on instagram @thelucayeagerband and check out their spotify here:
