Ilya Popenko is a longtime multidisciplinary artist. Born in the USSR, he emigrated to New York at 16 and still resides there to this day. Tomorrow, Ilya will release his latest single as a solo artist, “The Horse is Not Mine,” which is named after an old Russian idiom to deny one’s responsibility in a situation that goes, “I am not me, and the horse is not mine.”

Ilya answered some questions which Post-Burnout sent him via email in preparation for this release, and here is what he told us.
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Hi Ilya. I was wondering if you could give us some background on yourself for the uninitiated. How did you become a musician, who were your influences, and what acts have you played in?
I never thought of myself as a musician. I have a fine arts degree, and I mostly juggle photography and filmmaking. Music was more of an innocent hobby for me until one of my friends heard my solo home recordings on MySpace and offered to play something together. Another friend, who happened to stand nearby and overheard the conversation, decided to join us as well. Since then, the whole thing snowballed, and my band Mad Meg has been either touring, performing locally, or recording consistently for the past God-knows-how-many years. Being supported and inspired by the people I play or have played with made me more prolific as a songwriter and more focused on music. Their skill and creative input have elevated my songwriting to a new level.

As far as my influences, I’ve always gravitated toward acts like Tom Waits, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Psychedelic Furs, Morphine, Gogol Bordello, Jonathan Richman, as well as some classic rock, punk, and a bunch of different Soviet music.

What made you decide to release music as a solo act, and how does your solo music differ from other acts you have performed with?
Along with working with the band, which I love, I’ve always recorded stuff at home just because it’s more immediate, it’s faster, it allows more room for experimentation, and it involves less compromise. As a band, it takes us a few rehearsals to arrange each song, then it takes a bunch of live shows to polish it and take it to a point where everyone is comfortable with their parts, and then we need to collect enough songs and money to get a studio to record everything at once. It’s usually followed by weeks of editing, mixing, and mastering. Just talking about it makes me exhausted. As a solo artist, I can sometimes write, arrange, record, mix, and release a song all in one day. The downside of working this fast, however, is releasing songs that you get bored with after a month or so. Many don’t pass the test of time, but sometimes there are gems in this pile of crap that you churn out. Stylistically my solo stuff is a bit more minimal and less rock. It has more electronic sounds and acoustic guitars. 

Your latest single is “The Horse is Not Mine,” which is a sombre and almost-Spaghetti-Western-sounding track which invokes a Russian expression in which one denies responsibility in a situation. What inspired the track and how do you think it stands out from your past releases?
This song is about this very frustrating realisation that you can never really see the world through other people’s eyes. Anything that you think they see or think is just you projecting your own experiences onto them. That makes you feel kinda lonely and isolated. It feels very two-dimensional. The chorus of the song doesn’t necessarily have a direct lyrical connection with the verses; it’s more associative. I wouldn’t read too much into it. I just like how verbatim translations of proverbs from other languages take them out of context and make them sound absurd and poetic.

I’m not sure if it stands out from my other solo releases. All of them are practically the same song with slight variations in style and lyrics.

Given your inclination towards literary references in Mad Meg, did Nikolai Gogol’s short story “The Nose” influence the track or its titling, or is that purely coincidental?
The fact that this phrase was coined by Gogol was news to me. I hadn’t done any research prior to writing the song, but when I saw your question, I looked into it and found no evidence of that. From what I understand, the phrase comes from 19th-century Russian coachmen who were occasionally hired by thieves to transport stolen goods. When stopped by the police, this is something they would say to the cops. [Editor’s Note: For my cursory research into the phrase, I saw that its coinage was credited to this short story. I apologise if this is not the case]

As a visual artist, how do you feel the images surrounding the release complement the song itself?
In an ideal world, I would want to illustrate every song that I write with a video. I think the visuals are a part of the song as much as everything else. This is our second collaboration with the director Mykola Metin and animator Katya Mezentseva, and I think it came out pretty good. We decided to really lean into the horse imagery even though horses have nothing to do with the message of the song. I like how absurd and childish it is. 

The single releases this Friday. After that, what do you have planned for the rest of 2024?
Since I’m not motivated enough to build a nuclear fallout shelter in preparation for WWIII, I’m just going to keep doing what I usually do. This year I’m releasing two of my films: a feature documentary called Roll Bus Roll: A Jeffrey Lewis Documentary, and a narrative short film, Carry On. The doc premiered at Slamdance Film Festival this January and is expected to be doing the festival circuit for the rest of the year, in search of distribution. The fate of the short is to be determined. Also, I’ve been working on this miniseries of interviews about New York called “Last Night Was Crazy.” Hopefully, I’ll figure out a way to put it out into the world as well. 

As far as music, we’re waiting for our bassist/manager to come out of prison. He’s due to be released in several months. Without him, the band is too disorganized to function in a normal fashion, though we try. Once things get back to normal, I have a bunch of new songs that I’d like to start performing with the band. I also want to collaborate with other performers—especially vocalists—to spice up our sound a bit, because ideally I just want to chill and have other people do stuff on my behalf.

Ilya Popenko’s latest single, “The Horse is Not Mine,” will be available on all streaming platforms from tomorrow. You can keep up-to-date with Ilya and his work on his website and Instagram page.