Live from Clark with Thousand Horsepower Cigarette

Will Ripke and Nick Delugos of Thousand Horsepower Cigarette were bundled up in February when I interviewed them. At the time, they were two mutual friends of mine who had been writing music in the comfort of their Clark University dorm. After they crossed paths with FRONTRUNNER, they were on track to finally play their first live show – the catharsis that, as artists, they had been hoping for. Their laidback friendship echoes through their music – soft vocals, soothing yet complicated riffs, sequences that bounce off of each other like a game of ping pong.

On stage, their symbiotic energy is ever present. Though to the audience it appears that they’re just nodding to beats or catching each other’s eye, their quick communication allows them to coast through their music in a way that appears natural but still intentional. Just as how they described to me, watching them play feels like watching a great song be written in front of your eyes – like a jam session that’s vulnerable enough to feel genuine, but too complicated to be chalked up to timing or luck.

I first want to hear a little bit about each of your individual journeys with music. When did you first start songwriting, or playing an instrument?

Will: I’m not sure about the very first time I played an instrument, but my parents had this tiny keyboard. Actually, it was my sister’s. She made my parents buy it for her for Christmas, but she never touched it. When I was 10 or 11, I started messing around with it and teaching myself how to play. I got a full size keyboard soon after. In 9th grade, I took a guitar 1 class; you needed a guitar to be in the class but I didn’t have one. It was the same thing: my sister bought a guitar for herself so she could learn to play and impress a guy she liked. She never did, and then it became mine.

Nick: I come from a musical family. My uncle Robbie was in a punk band and he played bass, my uncle Nick is a jazz guitarist. My dad played a bit of guitar in college – we still have his fender acoustic and I tried to teach myself on it but when it was too complex, I decided to play bass. I’ve been playing bass since 7th or 8th grade. It wasn’t really until my first semester at Clark that I started playing guitar. My parents bought it for me, but I didn’t use it for a while. Once I started, though, I quickly fell in love with it.

When you first got the keyboard, were you reading sheet music? Were you like “I’m gonna try and write a song”?

Will: I can’t read sheet music actually. I started learning songs that I liked. I was just doing stuff for fun, and then I’d go show off to my dad what I’d learned. In sophomore year of high school, I was in a band, but we didn’t write any of our own original songs. We’d just do covers; it was just good practice, really. I didn’t start writing my own songs until freshman year of college. Before then, I wasn’t good enough with the instrument to know what things sounded perfect together. But then I started to get a sense of what I could create. I started to feel like, “Oh, okay, I can start writing music and it won’t sound like a kid writing a song.”

Nick, I heard that you were in a band in high school?

Nick: I was. We were called the Manhunters: it was my brother, this guy Danny, and me. We released an EP and played a bunch of shows over the summer. It was kind of just like a joke. There was this guy Paul who would come and spitball the craziest things. They still make music even though I left to go to college.

I was curious about where each of you grew up and how your hometowns influenced your music taste. How have these influences shaped your own sound?

Will: We actually grew up like 25 minutes from each other in New Jersey.

Nick: I took my SAT at his high school.

But you guys didn’t know each other?

Both: No.

Will: Our high school played against his in baseball, football and stuff but we never met. Northwestern New Jersey – it’s a kind of lonely area. People think of New Jersey as the armpit, the shit, but you’re out in the woods and you’re far enough from New York City where it stops having an influence.

Nick: I’d say we live right on the edge of the New York metropolitan area. To the east there’s light pollution and then to the west, it’s all farmland. You can see the Delaware water line from both of our houses.

Will: There was a big punk scene. Eastern Pennsylvania and western New Jersey had a lot of smaller indie punk bands.

Nick: It’s like a mecca of northwest Jersey and eastern PA; there used to be a massive hardcore scene that kind of dissolved after people went their separate ways.

Will: My sister and her boyfriend were involved in the hardcore scene in the early 2000’s. 

How would you describe your genre?

Nick: We’ve got some stuff that gets loud. In my other band, we’d play our own songs and then we’d play Title Fight songs, Modern Baseball, or Joyce Manor. We’d have mosh pits in the crowd and go crowd surfing.

Will: We have a little bit of folk; it’s what I grew up with. There’s some country influence where I’m from, too. All of our material is on acoustic right now, but that’s subject to change as we evolve.

Nick: Yeah. Punk is an attitude, not a genre.

Do you aim to be different or similar to stuff that you listened to back home? Are there specific artists you look up to?

Will: We have a lot of sounds in our band that have been inspired by other people, but we do have a pretty unique sound.

Nick: We have a shared playlist on Spotify where we sift through indie bands from Boston and collect bits and pieces from everywhere. What we’re doing, I can say, is different from what I’ve done in the past.

What kind of audience are you hoping to cultivate with your music? When you picture doing a live show, what do you hope the crowd is going to be like? Who do you think is drawn to your music?

Will: I can’t picture exactly one type of person – there’s mosh pit potential, but we have sadder songs too. It appeals more towards younger audiences.

Nick: I want everyone at the shows. The average Clark student, young people, people who just wanna connect with something. It would be cool to see all walks of life.

Any dream venues?

Will: We’re certainly not big scale, but it would be cool to play The Stone Pony. It’s near where I grew up. It’s a famous venue on Jersey shore and I’ve seen like, 15 shows there. It’s the venue I’ve been to the most.

Nick: Yeah, hop the fence.

Will: Yeah, that’s what I used to do. It’s famous for having poor security, and I’d hop the fence and get into any show I wanted. I saw T-Pain for free by hopping the fence even though I never listened to him.

Nick: It’d be fun to play a show!

Will: You know, I’d love to do a church basement show. For some reason the church basement show I played [in highschool] was a ton of fun. The small shows I’ve been to in that environment always had a ton of energy.

How’d you come up with your band name?

Nick: I think it was my friend Noah from home. It appeared in my notes app one day – I write down a lot of phrases that get stuck in my head so I can use them for ideas later – and Thousand Horsepower Cigarette was just in there.

Will: It was Noah, you said that he hit a vape, coughed and said, “This shit is like a thousand horsepower cigarette.” You were like “that’s a great band name!” and wrote it down.

Why do you write music? Is it cathartic, is it fun?

Nick: Without a creative outlet, I get really depressed. I do photography, poetry; I taught myself how to use charcoal and paint. Music is part of my life and I don’t think I could live without it. Being part of a scene and doing a show is an indescribable feeling – it’s incredible.

Will: I started doing it for fun and then it evolved into, “if I’m sitting in my room not doing anything, why don’t I play some keyboard? Play some guitar?” I’d try to see what I’d be able to come up with spontaneously.

Tell me about the songs you’ve recorded so far. Any songs that stick out to you that were particularly memorable for you to write?

Nick: “Ed”, my boy!

Will: I don’t even know if we had said we were a band when I wrote that song. I remember I was on my front porch in the summer, and I came up with a riff that I thought would be great for a song. I named it “Ed” after my neighbor that happened to be walking by. You can hear him in the background of the original voice memo.

Nick: It’s like a transformation. The first time we played it, we were kind of just jamming, but as it came together, everyone watching just stopped. Time stood still.

So you think that “Ed” brings people into your world?

Nick: It brings them into another world.

Will: It gives people a taste of how we sound as a unit.

How’d you first decide that you’d be good at making music together?

Nick: We’ve been playing guitar since freshman year. We would jam together every so often in our dorm. We’ve been living together or very close to each other for years and one day we were like, “we’ve been doing this so long, why not?” I had this experience of being in a band over the summer, recording songs in the studio, playing shows, and [once that was over] it was just like I needed something to do while I was at school. And I was like, “Will, we gotta get something going!”

Will: Out of the people we played guitar with and jammed with… I think we were the most serious. We vibed the most with each other. We had the most similar taste in music, we riffed off each other most easily.

Nick: If it was going to happen with anyone else, it would’ve, but it didn’t.

What is it like to work together? Do you see making music as work?

Will: A lot of our best songs and most creative material came about spontaneously. What seems to happen a lot is that I’ll come home and either one of us is playing guitar and so the other jumps in. Every couple of jams we realize, “hey, that sounds really good.”

Nick: For me, music is never work. I’m never thinking “fuck, I have to play the guitar.” I’ll be sitting at work and just waiting to get home so I can play. Every day I’ll be playing and if something good happens, I’ll go bang on Will’s door.

Do you think that Clark University has impacted your music? Is it important to your story?

Nick: Oh my god, yeah. I have met so many people where I’ll share music with them, or play with them, or discuss music with them… the community of “music enjoyers,” not just musicians… it feeds into the music I make. 

Will: Clark has a good music scene. My friends send me random shit all the time that I listen to, things that are underground. As a liberal arts college, I feel like there’s a lot of interesting flavors of music here that there might not be at other schools.

Nick: It definitely has a good music culture.

Is this something that you see for yourselves long term? Not necessarily THC, but even just being musicians?

Will: Yeah, I’d love to be a musician for the rest of my life. It would be great if that was my main thing. But if nothing else, I’ll always keep it as a side project. I don’t know if I’ll be in a band for the rest of my life. I’d love to, but I have no idea.

Nick: At this point, it’s like a requirement. I get too much out of it to not do it.

Do you have any advice for people who are starting to get into music?

Nick: I have trouble learning how to play other peoples’ songs – it might be because I didn’t learn how to play the guitar formally – but if you want it, and you stick with it, you can do it. It’s a skill that pretty much anybody can pick up with enough time, devotion and care.

Will: My only advice is to stick with it. It’ll come in handy – it’s a good hobby to have, it’s good for your brain. It brings people together. I have a lot of friends that I’ve made through playing guitar. If you’re passionate about music, just keep playing.

Nick: Once it clicks, it clicks. There’s no better feeling than being in the zone with even one other person. To be in the moment of creation feels amazing.