Philadelphia Weekly

The last time you saw Michael Imperioli, his Sopranos character Christopher Moltisanti was being suffocated to death by Tony Soprano in the fourth-to-last episode of the hit mob drama. On Wednesday night at Silk City, Imperioli will be in a slightly less perilous situation--fronting his new band La Dolce Vita for an audience he hopes to, well, slay.

The 41-year-old actor and musician sings and plays guitar in the New York City rock trio, which is rounded out by drummer Olmo Tighe and bassist Elijah Amitin. PW caught up with Imperioli over the phone from his Manhattan home earlier this week.

So how many shows have you guys done so far?

"Close to 20, I guess. We formed two years ago, and then we played our first show in June 2006, and that was kind of a one-off thing we did in Lisbon, Portugal. We really started playing in September 2006 in New York, and we've played once a month or so ever since."

What was that first show in Lisbon like?

"It was really exciting and very nerve-wracking. It was probably a little bit premature, but we really just wanted to get onstage, and we had an opportunity to go there, so we took it. We're actually going back in two weeks."

The reception was good?

"It was great. There were like 450 people there--it was sold out--and they were very enthusiastic. And considering we were a very new band that hadn't been playing together long--and never played live before--they were very warm and receptive."

Had you floated any songs out online prior to that?

"No, we don't have anything out yet. We didn't record at all--we just started the last couple months working on a three-song EP."

You always hear a lot of actors say they love doing theater over movies or television because of that instant feedback from the audience--is it something like that?

"It's exciting, yeah--that connection and that energy that's different every night. It's also scary because there's no second take. You're gonna fuck up, and you have to recover in the moment and work through it."

Do you go up there with the band feeling like you have something to prove? Or do you just go up and do your thing?

"It was a little scarier in the beginning. Because I hadn't really had a lot of experience I really had to work myself up to ... maybe I had something to prove. But now after doing it for a while, these couple years, it's not this gigantic thing to prove. It's just you're gonna perform these songs with these other two guys and you've worked at it, and now it becomes a matter of executing it. It's really a lot of fun, and our atmosphere is very collaborative. We're all equal voices in the band."

In terms of writing?

"In terms of everything. A lot of the initial songs, some of them were like 20 years old, stuff that I wrote. I was writing my own stuff back then, but never really recorded or performed some of them."

How come?

"The first band kinda broke up, and then the second band I was mostly singing and writing lyrics, and it was right when I started working in film. I was almost thinking of concentrating on music. There was a point where I wasn't really sure, and then I got a job that kinda took me away, and then I got another job. But I kept playing on my own, and I was always saying, 'Oh, I'll come back to being in a band.' A lot of time went by and I said, 'Well, if you're gonna do it, why don't you just do it?' And then I found these two guys. If I didn't find these two guys, I don't think it would've happened."

Did you feel like you had to have some distance from The Sopranos before you really pursued the band all-out?