Paste spoke with the New York-based musician and actor about how his trio’s new album, Diamond Vehicle, draws on Buddhist philosophy and massive guitar sounds.
It didn’t take long after he first picked up a guitar for Michael Imperioli to join a band. The guitar was a nylon-string acoustic, because that’s what he could afford as a 19- or 20-year-old drama school student in Manhattan in the mid-‘80s. The band was a no-wave-inspired instrumental trio with no singer. If playing an acoustic guitar in what amounts to a noise band seems like a curious choice, well, yes. “I just put a mic in front of the nylon-string acoustic guitar and eventually bought a little pickup that I glued onto it and then would make kind of strange sounds out of the amplifier,” Imperioli says on a video call, chuckling at the memory. “It didn’t make any sense, but I didn’t know that. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.”
Imperioli has figured out a few things since then, keeping hold of music as a singer and guitar player even as his acting career blossomed with roles in Goodfellas, The Sopranos and The White Lotus, among other projects. Though it took him some time to find a workable balance between acting and music, ZOPA, the band he fronts with Olmo Tighe on drums and Elijah Amitin on bass, has been more active than ever over the past few years. After a debut LP that came out in 2020, the trio returned this month with Diamond Vehicle, a seven-track, 46-minute collection of songs with burly guitars, a taut rhythm section and lyrics that often reflect ideas from Tibetan Buddhism, which Imperioli began practicing in 2008. In Tibetan, “zopa” translates to “patience.”
“There’s a lot of Buddhist influence on this record, both sound-wise and lyrically, just because it’s something that’s become more part of my view of everything,” says Imperioli, who’s wearing a strand of chunky prayer beads that are visible at the neck of his black t-shirt. “If I’m writing a song, I’m going to write about stuff that’s important to me, that has resonance, stuff that is present, that is on my mind now, in the moment.”
One song, “Love and Other Forms of Violence,” includes what is known as the White Tara mantra, a prayer associated with longevity and wisdom that the band members sing toward the end of the track. The tune alternates between stripped-down and savage, as Imperioli’s fat guitar tone on the verses erupts into a spray of distortion on the chorus while Amitin sings tight backing harmonies. Other songs, including the sleek, imposing opener “A Still Life” and “Red Sky,” which rides on the movement of Amitin’s thick bassline, draw more indirectly on Buddhist themes. (There’s also a cover interpolating the Velvet Underground’s “Ocean” and “Heroin.”) “In a lot of the songs, it represents a path, which it is: a path to working with your afflictive emotions,” Imperioli says. Then he cracks a smile: “You’ve got to write about something.”
Though ZOPA came together 20 years ago, Imperioli and Tighe go back even further. They met when both were cast in the 1994 film Postcards from America. Imperioli was 25 at the time, and Tighe was eight. A decade or so later, in 2005, Imperioli learned from Tighe’s older brother that Olmo had become a drummer. Intrigued, Imperioli tracked him down at work, at the Strand bookstore in New York, and invited him to jam on a few songs Imperioli had written with the intention of staking out a middle ground between Dinosaur Jr. and Galaxie 500. Afterward, Tighe suggested they bring in a bassist he had been playing with since they were 12, and Amitin turned up at the next session. The three played their first show a year later, and in 2012 recorded songs for La Dolce Vita, their first album, which ZOPA ended up shelving when Imperioli and his family moved from New York to Santa Barbara, Calif. “At the time, we didn’t really have a way of getting it out, and we weren’t with a label,” Imperioli says. “We weren’t really sure what the best way to do it was.”
It took the COVID-19 pandemic to open a path forward. With plenty of free time on his hands during the initial lockdown, Imperioli became active on social media, where he would post about music. When it emerged that his band had an album’s worth of songs ready to go, the New Jersey indie label Mt. Crushmore offered to release it on vinyl, and La Dolce Vita came out in July 2020. Later that year, after the youngest of his three kids started college, Imperioli and his wife decided to move back to New York, and ZOPA reconvened in 2021. “It just kind of fell into place quite naturally and easily,” says Imperioli, who had played a bit separately with Tighe and Amitin during the intervening years when one or the other would accompany him at public readings for his 2018 novel The Perfume Burned His Eyes. “We just started writing together again very quickly, like immediately.”
Before long, they were in a New Jersey studio with the producer John Agnello (Dinosaur Jr., the Hold Steady, Waxahatchee), working on songs for Diamond Vehicle. “The flow of the sessions was very good,” says Agnello, who co-produced the album with Amitin. “There was a lot of impressive stuff going on with them making the record. They had a good sense of what they wanted to accomplish, and they pushed boundaries. My respect for them is very high as a band.”
The sessions flowed in part because of the way the members of ZOPA work together. Though musical ideas can originate with any one of the band members, they work together to develop them into songs. The trio’s collaboration is built around consensus and the respect each has for his bandmates. If anyone has doubts about the music, a song title, whatever, the band tries a different approach. “Every decision we make has to be three yeses or three nos, rather than two against one or something like that, which works a lot better,” Imperioli says. “That happened kind of naturally. It was like, okay, well, if you’re not on board, then maybe we shouldn’t do that. Maybe we should try something else.”
Eric R. Danton has been contributing to Paste since 2013. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and Pitchfork, among other publications. He writes Freak Scene, a newsletter about music in Western Massachusetts and Connecticut.
