Welcome
back to Clockwork Conversations!
Today, I
am happy to have as my guest author, poet, songwriter, and social media marketer Dane
Cobain.
Thanks for
joining me today, Dane! Please, introduce yourself.
DC: My name’s Dane Cobain, and I do
a bit of everything – author, performance poet, musician, social media
marketer, you name it. I’ve been writing for over ten years in multiple
different formats, and I studied creative writing at Roehampton University in
southwest London. After that, I moved into social media marketing, using a
hybrid of my writing skills for content creation and the marketing skills that
I developed over the years while I was promoting my work.
I’ve just signed with Booktrope to
publish No Rest for the Wicked, a
short supernatural thriller which follows the story of an elderly priest as he
tries to stop mysterious beings of light, nicknamed ‘Angels’, who are behind a
wave of mysterious deaths across the globe. That should be out this summer. I’m
also working on a full-length novel about a social networking start-up for the
dead, called Former.ly – I’m about
three quarters of the way through it at 70,000 words.
Q1: In addition to writing stories,
you also write music and what you call ‘experimental poetry’. Do you find
writing song lyrics to be much different than writing poetry?
DC: Great question! Yes, the two of
them are totally different, and I have to be in a different state of mind to do
them. With a song, I tend to focus more on the music and the melody and fill in
some words in a hurry, afterwards – in fact, I sing along and improve and
usually stick with whichever lines sound best. When Paul McCartney wrote
Yesterday, its working title was ‘Scrambled Eggs’ for the exact same reason –
he had no lyrics, so instead of ‘yesterday’ he used to sing ‘scrambled eggs’.
With poetry, it’s more of a stream
of consciousness thing, and it’s a lot freer than lyrics – I write free verse
poetry which doesn’t always rhyme, and so it’s all about the inherent poetry of
language rather than the defined structure of a traditional poem. That said,
it’s still written to be performed verbally like lyrics are, and so there are
some subtle similarities in terms of timings, rhythm, pitch and the like.
Q2: If you had to choose, which
would you say is your favorite creative outlet? I know it’s like asking a
parent to pick a favorite child… but just try. Why is it your favorite?
DC: This is so hard!
Performance-wise, it’s easily poetry, but I guess my favourite is probably
fiction… once I get into the swing of things.
Q3: What style of music would you
classify yours as...does it fit a genre?
DC: I’d probably describe it as a
lo-fi folk rock, if I had to define it. But really, it depends upon the song –
the genre tends to vary from track to track because I have such diverse
influences!
Q4: Let’s say that you can have dinner with three artists (be they musicians or writers or actors or any other form of artist) from any time period, living or dead. Who would you like to spend an evening with?
DC: I’d go drinking with Charles
Bukowski and Ernest Hemingway, and I’d take Allie Burke (one of our fellow
Booktrope writers) with me. Partly because she’s a cracking writer, and partly
because she’d probably never speak to me again if I went for dinner with
Bukowski and Hemingway and didn’t take her.
Q5: *bonus question for everyone* Do
you collect anything? If so, why?
DC: I’m a book blogger and a writer, so
I collect books – for obvious reasons, I think! I’ve attached a photo for you
to take a look at – I think I have around 1,000 books, and I’m slowly working
on reviewing them all for my book blog, SocialBookshelves.com.
Wow, that’s a lot of books! Very cool indeed.
Thank you so much for stopping by to
chat today, I'm wishing you the best of luck as you embark on your adventure with
Booktrope!
To find out more about Dane and his
books, you can visit his website at www.danecobain.com
See you all next time!
