Ilya Popenko, the Songwriter and Lead Singer of the New York-based Band Mad Meg, is Releasing His Solo Single and Music Video Titled “The Horse is Not Mine”

News

3 Mar

We can never truly see things through other people’s eyes. Our own head is the limit of our perception of the world. The horse is not yours. That is a short summery of Ilya Popenko’s new song “The Horse is not Mine.”.

The video and the single is to be released on March 1st. In the video Ilya performs the song dressed in horse costumes amidst surrealist animation that interacts with live action footage. The lyrics of the chorus may seem like nonsense, but in fact, it is a verbatim translation of a Russian saying that goes, “I’m not me, and the horse is not mine,” which is used to say, “I have nothing to do with that.” Ilya likes to incorporate direct translations of Russian proverbs in his songs. Lost in translation and taken out of context they lose their original meaning and become just an abstract and beautiful combination of words. The music video is directed by Nikolai Metin and incorporates animation by Katya Mezentseva.

Ilya Popenko is a multi-disciplinary artist who was born in the Soviet Union and immigrated to the US at the age of 16. He is an award-winning filmmaker and photographer as well as a songwriter and a performer. In 2011, he formed a band called Mad Meg who play in an eclectic style they themselves haphazardly identify as “Punk-Chanson-Noir”. Based out of New York, Mad Meg has toured extensively in Russia and the former Soviet Bloc, including tours that covered close to 30 cities throughout the vast, frozen expanse of Eastern Europe, and in the course of which they shared the stage with such luminaries as Nogu Svelo!, Rasputina, and Emir Kusturica and recorded a live album in a female prison in Lithuania. While Mad Meg is on hiatus, Ilya works on his solo songs, one of which he’s proud to present today.