Videos by American Songwriter
ARTIST: Apofakul – My name is Jeffrey Marcus Oshins. I write, record, and produce all my own music and books. I came up with name Apokaful in my novel 12: A Novel About the End of the Mayan Calendar as the name of a band in which the heroine is the singer. I defined “apokaful” as excessive thoughts about the end of the world.”
SONG: “Cut to Sand”
HOMETOWN: Santa Barbara, California
CURRENT LOCATION: Mountains above Santa Barbara
AMBITIONS: To not limit myself with thoughts of “you can’t do that” or “you have to stick to one thing.” I write books, record music, and am thinking about running for Congress in 2016 after I get back from New Years in Cuba.
TURN-OFFS: Cut and dry thinking i.e. the conservative mindset that thinks there can only be one answer
TURN-ONS: Finding the right note or word in my music and writing. Sometimes you just have to sit back and listen to the vibe. Other times you have to just play or write and see what comes out.
DREAM GIG: Playing with a great band. I mean playing with the E-Street band would be like being on the bridge of the Enterprise and hitting warp speed.
FAVORITE LYRIC: “Cut mountain back to sand. Run to ocean once again…”
SONG I WISH I WROTE: “In My Life”
5 PEOPLE I’D MOST LIKE TO HAVE DINNER WITH: John Lennon, the mouses Danger and Dead (is that 1 or 2?), Bill Clinton, Andrea Merkel, and Atahualpa the Inca to ask him why he let 168 conquistadores capture him and slaughter his court in one afternoon without the lost of a single Spanish life.
MY FAVORITE CONCERT EXPERIENCE: Grateful Dead when they took you on a musical trip.
I WROTE THIS SONG BECAUSE…I was writing music in a cabin (you can see the place in the Apokaful video to You Know You’re Home) in Castle Valley, Utah beside the Colorado River and was blown away by the power of water in the river and shaping of the rocks. There’s a water theme in a lot of my work maybe because my name is Oshins. In my novel 12: A Novel About the End of the Mayan Calendar it starts to rain or snow everywhere on the earth.
