Pressing Play Brings out Best in Lincoln Navigator Designer Earl Lucas

Power up the iPhone, and find “Look Up” by Daley. Press play. The speaker in the corner of Earl Lucas’ office in the Lincoln design studio comes to life, and the Chief Exterior Designer can begin the process of creating a new Navigator. The first doodles become the earliest sketches for an all-new SUV for the 2018 model year.

Lucas might not be as obsessive as the lead character in the movie Baby Driver, where the getaway driver relies on his personal soundtrack to be the best at what he does, but there is a parallel. For the designer, a new vehicle project requires a new playlist.

“It’s important to have good music,” says Lucas, who also has fresh flowers in his office every day for the natural color and scent. “Music is a conduit to the creative space, to the zone where you figure things out. It’s inspiration.”

A lot of thought goes into the playlist. His process starts by going to music that he knows, but the 46-year-old Dallas native is always on the lookout for new additions and can be influenced by anything. Just talking about it, he calls up his Navigator playlist and finds “Let Go” by Everest, which he first heard on a Corona beer commercial. He relies on the SoundCloud app to find and identify new tunes.

“Music is always around me,” he says. “I am always trying to find the next song that I can put on while I’m drawing or need to concentrate.” It’s not background music. It needs to be loud. Out of courtesy, he usually dons headphones at work and at home where he is constantly doodling and does not want to disturb his wife or children.

“Drawing was a love of mine from a very young age,” he says. He grew up in Dallas and went to a performing arts high school where he became adept at making jewelry such as rings, pendants, and necklaces. When the College for Creative Studies of Detroit came recruiting, they offered him with a scholarship to study jewelry making in Detroit, and he accepted.

He moved to Detroit in 1989. “Within a year I knew I should have been doing car design,” he says. Lucas has drawn cars as well as well as comic book heroes since he was a child. His interior designer mom recognized his true affections—she redid the Spiderman motif in his bedroom with a cars.

“Growing up in Texas I didn’t know you could have a career sketching cars and they would pay you for that,” Lucas says. He credits God’s finger for putting him in the right place at the right time. Still at CSS, he switched his studies to car design, graduated, and got his first job with auto supplier Lear in Southfield, Michigan.

After a while, Lucas ended up back in Texas to work for a private firm designing airplane interiors for the Sultan of Brunei, one of the world’s richest men with a penchant for gold. When Lucas suggested gold beading around the windows, he was told: “why not add platinum beading as well?” The over-the-top experience of designing everything from cutlery to full interiors with expensive metals and materials was an invaluable training ground for a designer.

But cars were calling, so he returned to Detroit in 1999 to join Ford, where he worked on the Lincoln MKS. He was then assigned to the U.K. for three years, where he helped design the Ford Fiesta and Focus. Upon his return to Dearborn in 2013, he moved to the Lincoln studios to work on the first-generation MKX and has been with the luxury brand ever since.

 

The Navigator is a premium SUV, so the playlist has songs that are thought provoking with a degree of sophistication, class, and maturity without being stodgy.

“I’m always trying to find that space where the creativity is flowing,” Lucas says. Early in the design process he wants songs with a long intro because there is a lot of scribbling. “I need to explore a lot of different shapes to know which one to hone in on and polish it from there.”

Play some Daley, an artist he was introduced to in the U.K. Lucas likes the buildup in the song “Time Travel.” While Daley sings about time travel and the unknown, Lucas is roughing out sketches, transforming a blank sheet of paper into something.

Further down the playlist is Willie Nelson’s cover of “The Maker,” which is appreciated for the spiritual lyrics and the texture of the storyteller’s voice. For Lucas, designing a car tells a story, and the connection between an owner and a car can be brought out by listening to a love song and envisioning that relationship.

Black Coffee, a South African DJ that he discovered in the U.K., makes him feel sophisticated. Glass Animals allow him to picture himself driving a Navigator down a dark road, making a statement. And sometimes you have to rock out, hence some Audioslave “Like a Stone.” There is also some new Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The songs got him through sketches, clay models, and finally prototypes. When early designs did not resonate well at a consumer clinic in L.A., out came Liam Bailey’s “Sail With Ease” to provide reassurance the team was still on the correct path and must enjoy all moments, good and bad, when working on a significant vehicle such as a Navigator. “The song says relax, take a deep breath, sail with ease, keep going. It will be ok. We’ll get it,” he explains. “And eventually we did.”

Then comes “Traveller,” a more upbeat song by Black Coffee that further confirms the designer is a traveler on the right path, having done this before, and can reach that eureka moment.

“To tighten an illustration, I don’t need reflective music anymore,” he says. “I need something upbeat to add the details.” He plays some Jill Scott, a positive person, to celebrate the fact he has found the design and is thankful.

The Roots cover of instrumental called “Redford” is for the euphoric moment, when you can reflect on the accomplishment and feel a quiet confidence, relief, and success—an inner peace and happiness.

Lucas feels every designer has an obligation to remain creative, and many turn to music as a way to bring emotion to the fore. “If I don’t have good music with me or have the right songs, I can’t go to that place where the good ideas are,” he says. “Without music, I wouldn’t be any good.”

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