In 1986, just a few years before he first tasted Hollywood success in Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas,” the first in a string of numerous films and TV shows for which he’s become known, Michael Imperioli was a 20-year-old artist trying to make his name in the New York music scene.

Imperioli played in bands all the way through the early ‘90s, including a no-wave band called Black Angus—”when I really didn’t know how to play guitar”—and singing in a band that would become Wild Carnation, which The Feelies’ Brenda Sauter would later join and is still active today.

But back in 1986, while living in Greenwich Village, he wrote a song called “Roll It Off Your Skin,” about living through the height of the AIDS crisis in New York’s ground zero.

“I don’t think I’ve even really told anybody this, but the song is about that and seeing and knowing people who were dying, and the indifference that the government and the powers that were running the country had towards the people who were suffering and dying from this disease,” he said in a video call last week from New York, which is home again following about a decade in Santa Barbara. “I’m sure if you lived in the Castro at that time, that was a similar experience. Up until that time, there was nothing like that, as far as what I had seen as a person, and the shocking indifference and even beyond indifference, like hatred and people saying that, ‘People deserve to get it.’ … That’ll make an impact on a wide-eyed young person.”

The rough and rumbling “Roll It Off Your Skin” concludes La Dolce Vita, an album Michael Imperioli recorded with his trio ZOPA, with whom he’d been playing off and on since 2005. He and bandmates Elijah Amitin and Olmo Tighe finished writing the song and eventually recorded the album to tape in 2012. There, it patiently sat on a shelf for nearly a decade before its 2020 release to Bandcamp.

The song and the time that inspired it are still significant to Imperioli, who is known for hits like “The Sopranos” (for which he won an Outstanding Supporting Emmy), Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever,” “The Basketball Diaries” and “The Lovely Bones.”

“Being an adult in early adulthood, formulating your ideas of the world, being in a big city like New York, where there was a lot of different types of people in different ways of being and thought … It’s just the forge where I became who I am, the ingredients of my life at the time that have led to where I am today and who I am as a person,” he said. “That period of time is very important to me, as are the artists that inspired me in that period of time.

Imperioli was heavily influenced by the late ‘70s and early ‘80s New York music scene, with the likes of the New York Dolls, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground and Patti Smith, as well as U.K. contemporaries The Smiths, and indie rock and shoegaze innovators like Galaxie 500, My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr. All of these acts were influential to ZOPA, collectively.

Imperioli went years without playing in a band after he started having success as an actor. But he never stopped writing music or practicing the guitar in his free time. In 2005, as “The Sopranos” was about to enter its final season, he decided to start a trio, and looked to Galaxie 500 (also a trio) as inspiration.

“One of the reasons is it’s easier to get three people to practice consistently than four,” he said, laughing.

First, he turned to drummer Olmo Tighe. The two, along with Tighe’s older brother, Michael, had acted in a film called “Postcards from America” in 1991. Imperioli was 25 at the time—and Olmo Tighe was 8. Michael Tighe, 18 at the time, went on to become a guitarist with Jeff Buckley, playing on 1994’s Grace. Imperioli ran into the elder Tighe, who let him know that his brother was a drummer.

“I hadn’t seen the kid since he was 8 years old, but there was some kind of instinctual thing that drew me to look him up, and we started practicing together,” he said.

Olmo Tighe invited his high school friend, bassist Elijah Amitin, to the second practice, and he joined the band. The three connected musically right away, but it still took a lot of effort to write and perform songs they were happy with.

Imperioli and his bandmates weren’t interested in any celebrity shortcuts. Instead, they started at the bottom like most everyone else in the early aughts. He credits their songs and energy, but is readily willing to acknowledge the band wasn’t very good.

“There’s no other way to really get better, but by doing it, so there was some rough shows early on,” he said. “We did a lot of shows from 2006 until 2013, like a shitload. We played every place we could, some really cool venues and cool bills and some really dive-y shitholes. Sometimes they were fun. Sometimes they were Godawful, but we did a lot, a lot of shows, which … really helped us develop.”

Imperioli said that he felt reaffirmed that ZOPA was doing the right thing when his “Sopranos” castmate Steven Van Zandt—better known as Little Steven of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band—came to one of their early shows and told him to keep playing.

“It’s a fine line when you’re known in another discipline,” he said. “Obviously, I’m known as an actor, and you start playing music; people just think you’re trying something new because you’re famous and you can, or something like that.”

When ZOPA was getting started, social media was still in its infancy. The band had a hard time drawing music fans because it had no outlet to communicate their goals or prior experience. While it would have been relatively easy to get gigs because of his celebrity status, that was the last thing he wanted. One music manager in L.A. told him that if he changed the band’s name to “Michael Imperioli Group,” he could get a slot opening for what Imperioli called a cheesy ‘80s band (which Imperioli didn’t name).

Michael Imperioli never viewed himself as a solo artist. It’s always been a collaborative interest with his bandmates. He was willing to play hundreds of shows at dive bars rather than getting a leg up.

“And that was the advice Steven gave me. He said, ‘Be like a bar band. If you want to play covers, play covers. If you want to play original stuff…’” Imperioli said. “It was good advice. … He wasn’t like, ‘You should get this agent and have him book you at this 1,000-seat theater and just promote it at one of ‘The Sopranos’ premieres,” you know what I mean? You can use a lot of angles as a celebrity. It wasn’t really the point for me. The point wasn’t to be famous as a musician and sell out arenas; the point was to play music, record music, write music.”

In 2012, ZOPA recorded its album, and then Imperioli, his wife, and children moved cross-country to Santa Barbara. The band played a few more shows in L.A., but it soon became impractical, which led to a length hiatus starting in 2013.

Five years later, in 2018, Imperioli got a sublet in New York and started spending time in the city again. He was doing live readings of his late-‘70s-set novel (which features Lou Reed as a character!), and one of his two bandmates would join him for a performance.

When he moved back permanently in 2020, the band picked back up—this time with the help of social media.

After being asked by the makers of a TV show he was doing at the time, Imperioli started an Instagram account in 2019—his first and only social media account of any kind—and connected with fans over more than just a love of his acting, but also his tastes in music. Then he shared that he’s also played in bands and was currently in one.

The interest in his own music is what led ZOPA to release its 2012 album in the summer of 2020. He called Instagram a game-changer. The band grew some organic buzz that year, and the album even made one Rolling Stones best-of list. It made Imperioli feel like others understood what he and his band were aiming to do.

“That’s been really fun, especially in New York, being part of the indie rock community in a very different way than it was before,” he said. “It’s easier to seek and find people of like mind through social media. It’s been wonderful connecting that way, both to other musicians and to fans. …  Because of all the work we did in the past, we kind of feel like we’ve earned it.”

“Zopa” means “patience” in Tibetan. Imperioli is a practicing Buddhist, and in Tibetan tradition, your teacher gives you a second name. Zopa is his Buddhist middle name. In fact, when he won a “Chopped” celebrity tournament in 2014 (cooking is apparently another of his skills), he donated the $50,000 grand prize to a charity that builds and maintains schools in Tibet.

During the pandemic, he also started giving free virtual meditation and Buddhist teaching classes; something that’s continued on a weekly basis. Those teachings and themes are also present in ZOPA’s music.

Imperioli’s teacher said, in 2010, when he got his name, that patience would be a key to his practice. He recently heard another Buddhist teacher speak about how patience isn’t just the tolerance of inconvenience, but an obligation of compassion. That struck a nerve for the artist. Over time, the meaning of his name and his Buddhist practice began to resonate with him.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say we’re doing Buddhist rock, like Christian rock, but it’s definitely flavored with that at times,” he said.

Imperioli said the music that ZOPA is writing now is quite different from the 10 jangly, swirly and bass-driven songs on La Dolce Vita. The band finally sounds like itself, he said, citing a Miles Davis quote. Their newer songs are less punk or post-punk, and more in the vein of alternative rock and shoegaze. The newer material is both about love and keeping an independent mind in the face difficulty, power and evil: “Innocence, innocence lost, things like that.”

“The stuff that I write, lyrically, have similar themes to any of this stuff I’ve written as a screenwriter, especially the more personal things like the novel that I wrote and the one film that I wrote and directed,” he said.

On Feb. 16, ZOPA will release its first new song since the album, “Red Sky,” produced by John Agnello (Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, Kurt Vile; Imperioli is a fan). The single will debut on one of his favorite New York radio stations, while a video that will drop the same day was directed by his wife, Victoria (herself an artist) and cinematographer Lisa Rinzler, who worked on Steve Buscemi’s “Trees Lounge,” several Albert and Allen Hughes films and some Wim Wenders films.

The band has also been playing a couple of other new songs at shows. Imperioli, Amitin and Tighe have enough songs for their next album but haven’t recorded them yet.

Even if he can’t easily toggle between songwriting and acting, writing, directing and screenwriting (he wrote five episodes of “The Sopranos” and co-wrote the screenplay for the film “Summer of Sam” with Spike Lee) three decades into a successful artistic career, Imperioli said that he pulls inspiration for music from the same place as his better-known skills.

Songwriting is a much more personal and independent process, he said, but performance is similar whether it’s a concert, film or theater. The goal is to transport people to another level both emotionally and physically.

“It doesn’t flow seamlessly, but it flows from the same place, at its best,” he said.

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.