Eddie Lu YaoJing entered his new international chapter with the weight of a decade-plus career already behind him, shaped by China’s television, recorded-music and commercial production industries. In this interview, the composer, producer and music director opens up about the discipline of writing under pressure, the reality behind working with culturally significant names such as Han Hong, Zhao Lusi, Zheng Kai and Qin Hailu, and why New York felt like the right place to test his creative language in a new context. He also discusses The Next Hits / 新桂潮, his project reframing regional Chinese folk voices through R&B, pop, electronic textures and cinematic sound, while reflecting on preservation, reinvention and the challenge of carrying an established career into a different music ecosystem.
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Welcome to A&R Factory, Eddie Lu YaoJing. It’s a pleasure speaking to a man of a myriad of talents; we’re looking to hear about where your career is heading next after amassing acclaim as a composer, producer and music director and relocating to New York. You’ve spent more than a decade inside China’s television and recorded-music industries, where music has to survive huge deadlines, major personalities and mass audiences. What is the reality of that world that people outside the industry would never imagine?
Answer: The reality is that the work is often far less romantic than people imagine. You may be writing or producing for a scene that changes overnight, with very tight delivery windows, several layers of feedback and many people depending on the music being finished on time.
At that scale, creativity exists inside a production system. You learn to make strong creative decisions quickly, communicate across different roles, stay flexible when the director, producer or artist needs something different, and still keep the work moving toward completion.
In that environment, reliability becomes part of the art. A beautiful idea is not enough if it cannot survive revisions, production pressure and a real deadline. That discipline shaped me as much as any musical training did.
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Your credits connect you to names such as Han Hong, Zhao Lusi, Zheng Kai and Qin Hailu. When you are working around artists and actors with that level of cultural weight, does the level of progression in your career feel surreal or earned?
Answer: Both, in different ways. When I was younger, working around artists with that level of cultural visibility could feel surreal, because they were people I had already known through television, recordings and popular culture.
But once you are in the studio or inside a production, the feeling changes very quickly. Everybody is there to solve the same creative problem.
Over time, I stopped thinking of those moments as symbols of status and started seeing them as the result of many years of work, relationships and trust. I still appreciate the significance of those collaborations, but I also know how much invisible work sits behind them.
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You have lived several creative lives at once: composer, producer, music director, songwriter and recording professional. Where do you feel your creative passion come alive the most?
Answer: The place where I feel most alive is the point where composition and production meet.
I enjoy writing melodies and harmony, but I also love shaping the entire emotional world around them — the arrangement, the vocal performance, the sound, the pacing and the final details that make a piece feel complete.
Over time, that has made me think increasingly like a creative producer: not only about the musical idea itself, but about how every element can work together to bring that idea fully to life.
I do not naturally separate the songwriter, composer and producer parts of my brain. For me, they are different ways of answering the same question: what does this piece need in order to communicate clearly and become a finished work?
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Television music often has to hit emotion before the audience has even processed what they are seeing. How do you write music that can steer feeling so quickly without making it feel obvious or manipulative?
Answer: I try not to tell the audience what to feel; I try to create the conditions in which the feeling can arrive naturally.
In television, that often means restraint. A small motif, a change in harmony, a texture entering at the right moment, or even a deliberate silence can be more powerful than a large melody.
I usually begin with the dramatic function of the scene rather than with the music itself: what has changed emotionally, whose point of view matters, and what should remain unspoken?
If the music is doing work that the actors and the story are already doing well, it is probably too much. The best screen music can guide emotion without calling attention to the fact that it is guiding it.
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After becoming established in China, moving into a new international chapter in New York is a bold reset rather than a simple relocation. What part of you wanted the challenge of starting again in a city where nobody owes you recognition?
Answer: I would not describe New York as erasing what came before or forcing me to become a beginner again. I see it more as testing everything I have built in a new context.
After many years inside China’s entertainment and content industries, I came here with more than credits or a catalogue. I brought with me a way of thinking and working — an instinct for connecting creativity with execution, adapting under pressure, and carrying an idea all the way through to a finished work.
Working across different kinds of productions also taught me to think beyond my individual role and to understand how music, sound, visual content and the wider production process can support one another.
What interests me now is discovering how that experience changes when it meets different creative cultures, audiences and ways of working.
New York is attractive because so many musical languages and professional worlds exist side by side here. I bring more than fifteen years of experience with me, but I still have to listen, adapt, meet new people and earn trust again.
That combination of accumulated experience and a completely new context is creatively exciting to me.
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Was there any part of the industry which gave you a massive culture shock after moving to New York?
Answer: The biggest difference for me has been how decentralized the industry feels. In China, especially in film and television, I was used to fairly defined production structures, large teams and very fast chains of execution. In New York, I see many more independent artists, producers, small teams and project-based collaborations building their own paths at the same time. Relationships still matter enormously, but the way those relationships form can be much more informal and fragmented. I would not say one system is better than the other. What surprised me was how much initiative is expected from the individual — not only creatively, but also in building community, finding collaborators and creating opportunities rather than waiting for a formal structure to appear.
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You’re clearly still tied to your roots with your recent work, The Next Hits / 新桂潮. placing regional Chinese folk vocal traditions inside chillstep, synthwave, future bass and cinematic pop. What did you hear in those folk voices that made you want to pull them into a contemporary electronic frame?
Answer: What attracted me to those voices was not simply that they sounded “traditional”; it was the character inside them. The phrasing, the tonal movement and the raw human texture carry a kind of memory that polished contemporary vocals often do not.
I did not want to place folk material in a museum.
I wanted to hear what would happen if that emotional DNA met the production language I naturally use — R&B, pop, electronic textures and cinematic sound.
The goal is not to make the old material sound modern for the sake of novelty, but to let two musical worlds reveal something new in each other.
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When you work with traditional musical material, there is always a tension between preservation and reinvention. How do you decide what must remain untouched, and what can be transformed until it speaks to a completely new audience?
Answer: I try to protect the part that carries identity, and transform the part that belongs to context.
Sometimes the identity is in the melodic contour; sometimes it is in the pronunciation, rhythm, ornamentation or the emotional way a phrase is delivered. Those are the elements I am careful with, because if you remove them the source can become only decoration.
Around that core, I am much freer with harmony, arrangement, sound design, tempo and structure.
I also try to avoid using traditional material simply as an exotic color. Reinvention works best when there is respect and curiosity on both sides — when the contemporary production genuinely listens to the original material instead of just placing a beat underneath it.
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What do you want people in New York to understand about the scale, discipline and imagination you are bringing with you from China?
Answer: I would like people in New York to understand that I am not arriving with only a style or a catalogue.
I am bringing a production mindset shaped by years inside China’s content industries — a way of thinking that connects creativity with execution, and ideas with finished work.
Working across film, television, recorded music and live entertainment taught me to think beyond my individual role: to understand how music lives inside a larger production, how different creative disciplines interact, how decisions have to survive pressure and change, and how an idea ultimately reaches an audience.
For me, the internationalization of China’s content industry is not only about Chinese aesthetics travelling overseas. There is also a creative discipline and a production culture that can travel — the scale, speed, adaptability and ability to turn ambitious ideas into finished work.
That experience has become part of who I am as a creator.
I want to bring it into conversation with New York’s much more decentralized creative culture, while also allowing this city to change the way I think and create.
Find out more about Eddie Lu YaoJing via his official website.
Interview by Amelia Vandergast
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