Q&A: Lucky Me on Cultivating Community and the Release of Their Debut EP ‘Just Left The Party’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY FAITH LUEVANOS ☆
Photo by Bryce Glenn
LA-BASED INDIE ROCK BAND LUCKY ME HAVE UNVEILED THEIR DEBUT EP JUST LEFT THE PARTY—The EP brings listeners along with Connor Rivaldo and Kyle Briskin as they recount the experience of a night out and the comedown after leaving the party, all the way until they make it home. For Lucky Me, music has always been about more than just performing; it’s about creating a sense of community within their music, a world that people can step into.
Just Left The Party captures the existential highs and lows of living in LA, where the only time you have to reflect on them is after midnight, after another night of beautiful chaos in the city. Late nights and fleeting connections are the fuel for the six-track EP, draped in a Strokes-like sound and paired with recurring visual motifs.
For Rivaldo and Briskin, the release of the EP marks something of an ending and a beginning. With some of the EP’s ideas a couple of years in the making, finally putting the finished project into the world has allowed Lucky Me to close one chapter while opening another. For the past year, the two have shared one common goal: to create a community again within LA’s live music scene. It’s no secret that the pandemic negatively changed the way that people view live music and concert etiquette, and Lucky Me wants to reverse that. They’ve brought their “parties” to infamous venues like Silverlake Lounge, Good Times at Davey Wayne’s and Gold Diggers, with each show pulling a larger and larger crowd.
Luna sat down with Lucky Me to discuss the making of Just Left The Party, finding inspiration in Joshua Tree, what Lucky Me hopes to build next and more. Read the full interview below.
Photo by Bryce Glenn
LUNA: First of all, congrats on the release of your EP! I’m sure this was a long time coming, so how are you feeling now that the project is out?
CONNOR RIVALDO: I'd say it would be the first end of [an] era for Lucky Me. A lot of [the songs], as far as ideas go, are even three years old at this point, so putting them out, it does give them a new life, and I think it's really nice and refreshing to be able to live through listeners and everyone else experiencing them for the first time, even though we've experienced them for years now. It’s a bit of a weight off the shoulders like, “Okay, now we can start to catch up with ourselves in real time with the ideas that we're working on now.” I'm just happy that they're out and we put together an actual body of work rather than a bunch of singles.
KYLE BRISKIN: I feel like the general consensus with the songs leading up to the EP was, when you have songs for a long time, and you're listening to them, you get tired of them, and you're like, “Okay, how many times like do I need to listen through this?” But then when you do release them, it definitely brings you back to that same excitement when you first wrote them and you're listening through them the first couple weeks. It's been a long time coming, and we're stoked that they're out. The release show was super fun to play and see people's reactions.
LUNA: Were there any interpretations of the EP that you found interesting or different than intended?
BRISKIN: “Midnight” is the first track on the EP, and that was the first song of our set. I remember when we were going out, people were really excited. Some people were singing the lyrics, so it seems like people were already picking up on the vibes of everything. We use this disco ball motif throughout all of our EP pictures, and we had one on stage with us, and it's cool that you see the themes that we've been trying to use. People are recognizing it, understanding, “Okay, this is Just Left The Party. It's this whole world.”
RIVALDO: The point of it is to have your own interpretation of art. These songs naturally came together to form this throughline that was not intentional in any way. But then it started taking on its own life, and we were like, “Okay, this project's a vessel for this concept of ‘just left the party,’” and almost every song tells a story, from the top to the bottom of the track list. It's in an order that tells a story of what happens after you leave the bar, or you just left the party. The project is about what happened. It's the existential feelings of leaving the party and the bar and being stuck in this loop of LA, so I feel like people have picked up on that and recognize that that's what it's about.
Actually, I've heard really interesting expansions on the throughline where people are connecting even more things, adding even more to the story. That's a very special thing, and it's very telling that you know people get it and can relate to it because we're writing from the heart here. We're writing from experience, and if you've ever gone out in LA, ever socialized in LA, then you probably can relate to something on this.
LUNA: The EP ends with “Way Back Home.” The rawness of it makes me think of the moment of catching the sunrise after a long night out, the walk back to the car at the end of the night. How did this song fall into place as the closing statement?
RIVALDO: We debated making it an interlude in the middle of the project, but the more I was listening and trying to figure out the order of the tracks, I started realizing that it tells the story from “Midnight” when you first leave the party, and then by the end, you find your “Way Back Home.” It’s almost like end credits, but it leaves things unresolved. It’s a raw song.
BRISKIN: I feel like it naturally fit in place too, because when we wrote the song, we went out to Joshua Tree. We actually worked on finishing writing “S’il Vous Plait” on that trip, which was our first song release. So that tells you how long ago this was. We wrote it late one night out in the desert, in the house we were staying in, and it was not a planned thing. We were up late, thinking of some new things to work on, shooting some video content stuff, and drinking wine or tequila.
RIVALDO: Both.
BRISKIN: It just started later in the night, and it was towards the end of the trip. So thinking about when we made it, it makes sense. It closes everything together. It’s very human.
LUNA: Human, that’s a great word for it. I think it’s really interesting that you made an album about an LA experience while out in the desert and away from it. How did taking a break from the noise allow you to better reflect on it?
BRISKIN: When we decided to go out there originally, we wanted to get in a place that felt quiet.LA is so crazy and noisy all the time, very overstimulating, and I've always loved Joshua Tree. When we were out there, we were like, "Oh, this feels really good to be out here and making music.” Obviously, too, we love Queens of the Stone Age who are from there. Arctic Monkeys have recorded out there, and there's a lot of great music that's made out there. So we were like, “How can we tap into that and let it dictate our sound or the art. It's just a place that's called us back a few times now, where we enjoy going out there and basically set up in this Airbnb.
RIVALDO: Maybe it's cliché, but it's so true. The desert calls you. There's an energy to it. I've never experienced or felt the feeling that I feel when you step outside and it's so quiet, and just watching something blow in the breeze is 10 times more satisfying and peaceful, and you really are able to disconnect from everything else. This EP is about being stuck in the loop of LA. It was important that we were able to force ourselves out of it in a completely opposite energy and space. We were able to reflect, but then also get in a new kind of rhythm and mindset where we just eat, sleep and breathe the music and the vibes, so I feel like Joshua Tree is just a really good place to do that.
LUNA: Are there any other places that you’d like to record in?
RIVALDO: I want to one day record an album in a super old aristocratic castle somewhere in France or Italy. I want to lose track of time. The goal is to make an album and not be rushed to do it.
BRISKIN: There are so many dream places I'd want to record, and being in nature definitely unlocks a side of creativity where you're not distracted. But it's funny—some songs in our catalog are just a reflection of what's going on in our daily lives. We're constantly staying busy and working jobs. There are some times when Connor and I get done working, and then we're like, “Okay, we're gonna work on music tonight,” and some of those songs we get together literally after our jobs at night. That time and that place reflect in the song somehow. It was a time where we were just like, “Okay, we're gonna get together and not go out Friday night, and we're just gonna drink wine at the house and try and make this song.” My dream places to record are in Paris. There's a studio called Motorbass that Phoenix did an album at.
RIVALDO: Everything has its different moments. Like, maybe this guitar part Kyle came up with when we were in his room drinking wine five months ago, but then we did the drums and vocals out in the desert six months after, and everything's kind of split up like that. I think we're at a point now where we're definitely capable of intentionally having studio time, but also, as much as we could try and plan something with intention, we don't want to eliminate the element of magic from the process.
LUNA: I love that each song has different timestamps of different memories within them. The first time we spoke, about a year ago, you both mentioned that your goal with Lucky Me is to cultivate community. Since then, you’ve played many shows that pull huge crowds and feel more like parties. Is that still the goal? Or has it shifted?
RIVALDO: Community and bringing people together is always the goal, and will always be. What's the point of anything else? Obviously we make music and are in a band because we want to make music and we want to play shows, but it's just as much for everyone else as it is [for] us. I appreciate you saying that. Yes, we have been gradually cultivating an in-person community, and it's slowly working, and we're seeing it happen. But there's still not as much of a scene out here for what we're doing that we'd like to see, so we're still trying. We're trying to be at the forefront of that, and it's starting. People are learning. People are starting to come to more shows, and people are telling their friends and bringing their friends to the show. It's snowballing slowly.
BRISKIN: The Shellshaker shows were super fun. Those first few that we had at Silverlake Lounge, we were like, “Holy crap! This is the biggest, most packed room we’ve played in LA,” and it was really cool to see that because the hard thing about this day and age is the music is rapidly changing. So many people are on Instagram Reels or TikTok, and that's how they discover music. How do you convert that into getting people to go out and support local bands? When I lived in Nashville, that was such a big core part of the community. Everyone was going out and supporting each other and different bands. We're definitely still figuring out how we can build something like that here in LA. I get it; LA is so much bigger of a city, it's hard to always be able to make everything.
We're super grateful for Shellshaker for having us do those shows, and they're awesome. We have seen a really cool increase of people finding our music who are driving out from the desert to come see us on a Thursday night in Silver Lake, and that's super cool. It's not an easy feat. We have a big thing we're trying to accomplish with reviving the LA music scene and having something where more people are coming out and we're all going to each other's shows and teaming up with each other.
Photo by Cameron Driskill
RIVALDO: At our EP release show the other day, some people came up to me to take a photo with me and said that they found us on TikTok. So, it works; you just gotta keep doing it. This is a first, but this girl Bella, she’s super sweet; she lives in Omaha, Nebraska, and she flew to LA to come see us. It makes me so happy. She’s also getting her second Lucky Me tattoo. People don’t fly across the country to come see you if you suck (laughs). I think that’s a really encouraging thing that people are willing to drive and now fly to come see us. It means the absolute world to us.
LUNA: Now that the EP is out and you guys can breathe for a bit, what’s next for you?
RIVALDO: Tomorrow I’m flying back to Arkansas and then I’m going on a family trip with my parents to Malta and then the motherland, Sicily. Kyle and I were even talking before this interview that we’re both still going to be nonstop.
We’ve been working so hard for so long, and especially over the past few weeks leading up to this release, so we’re definitely looking forward to actually being able to feel the weight lifted off the shoulders a little bit, but we’re also keeping the momentum high. We have a whole bunch of content that we’ve just shot that is being edited and a handful of visualizers. Once we’re both back in town, I think we’ll start getting back into the new ideas. I think it’d be really cool to let people listen to this EP, but there’s no reason to stop or slow down. Let’s keep things happening.
BRISKIN: I think the goal is to have another EP out by the end of the year. We really want to tour, so connecting with other LA bands and talking about that sort of stuff. I think in 2027, a Lucky Me tour is in the works, and constantly putting out new music and figuring out how to build this band scene back up here. Maybe there are other undiscovered or untapped venues that LA may have to offer where we can figure out where to throw events.
