That’s deep.
Steve, before you know it, all of us here are going to be dead. Will we be hearing a completed Zapaxe tune
sometime between now and then?
I think it’d be much more worthwhile and instructive for us all to appreciate your music for what it is, rather than
always in the hypothetical.
In the words of the immortal Clara Peller, “WHERE’S THE BEEF??” 
Given that I once wrote a song about YOUR childhood, I guess that means I write from biographical stance. My own life is too boring
3 out of 4 for me.
B- on the rare occasion.
C- much more often.
D- is pretty typical for me. I write in terms of themes, so if it doesn’t have a fantasy / imaginative setting, then I’ll write a synopsis for a plot / story, and extract lyrics that represent situational elements. If you think of a sitcom, you’ll get various stories where the actors are the same, but there is a line connecting the dots. Same deal with me. The musicians are the same, but the music portrays different situations within a theme. (This is when I write a cd’s worth of material that is… it wouldn’t work of course for just one song, unless it’s like 30 minutes long and linear. 
LOL – it was supposed to evoke the effect of having “burnt one” which if I recall was one of your fond memories of youth
I cannot believe after all these years we are still waiting for a zapaxe tune!! I feel like I’ve stepped into a time warp!!
Mine are always inspired by my IDEOLOGIES, but the actual stories are mostly completely fictional.
Is there a difference?
Frank Zapaxe?
I write about life, in general, which is still a mystery, unless you have figured it out. It keeps changing for me. When I was a lot younger I saw things through a very narrow prism and hung on to every word spoken or sung by arists like Lennon and Neil Young. Lennon’s gone, and Neil got old, like me. I feel the need now to write a song about why you started this topic, and what you mean with that dig against abstract art. Is it no to Shakespeare and Stephen King, but Merriam Webster is right on. No to Picasso, and yes to architectural drawings of the Pentagon. Hmmm. I’m sure you, and the crap and artsy people who bother to listen, would find something obscure and clever, in any piece of well constructed and performed piece of music.
To answer your question, I’m an other: I write songs about other people’s fictional lives.
Michael
Ah…I think you mean “Nu-Plateau”. Here’s how I describe it on Soundclick:
“Concerns the post-evolutionary trait of simultaneous attraction / repulsions to people completely similar to ourselves - a near-future love triangle between a woman, her clone and their created biomechanical anti-clone,and ultimate combination”
SEE? An ideology and a fictional story. Touche! 
I would not call myself a songwriter, however the few things I have produced have been autobiographical in some way, perhaps loosely. I’ve done one poiitical thing, which I’ve never published, and never will be, it was to vent my anger over needless death in places like Afganistan, Africa, etc… felt good, like music therapy. Sadly, I could probably do a whole album on that topic.
I used to get into poetry writing, and for some reason, music and it have never merged for me. I don’t have the time to wax on poetry writing much anymore… perhaps I should move to a mountain top!
Good topic.
Mostly B but sometimes C.
When your life has been a complete trainwreck it’s easy to write category B songs, but I think I’ve written them all now so I can rest for a while…
I couldn’t agree with you more on almost everything you said, especially about music being a business. It’s the “abstract” thingy that I think you should take a broader look at before you throw it under the bus. This would put you on track for one of life’s learning experiences, i.e. “life is a learning experience”. Just in my short lifetime, marketable music has progressed, grown and evolved from Big Band to what it is now, and another topic might well be – “Just What is it Now?” – ‘cause I kind of fell off the train at Hip Hop. Every step of the way older generations have deplored the “new music” on the horizon. I think abstract may be a one finger attempt to tell the older generation to…well, I don’t use that kind of language. I am the older generation now.
Mose Allison, whose is 83 now, a tremendous jazz piano player, would play with his forehead on the keyboard, about middle C. I saw him perform at a jazz club in Palo Alto in the late 60’s. Very moving, and bit abstract.
I once read a Beethoven biography, a big thick volume of page after page of European history and Beethoven’s squalid lifestyle. At the time, composers competed for time with the queen and royalty. They composed and performed for the queen at tea. Composers were natty dressers, supported by the state. Commissioned, if you will. Mozart was a favorite. He and Beethoven lived and composed during the same era in the same area, but Mozart, more for his style than his music was the overwhelming choice of royalty. While Mozart tinkled the ivories in the queens tea parlor, Beethoven, a few blocks away, scruffy and unkempt, would lie on the floor and write symphonies. He preferred laying down to sitting on a stool and thus sawed off the legs of his piano. Did I say that Beethoven was deaf as a door nail. He was. Amazingly abstract.
sometimes its all of it together. real stories but told in either metaphor or a point we’re trying to get across described from a ficticious world.
our song called Blizzard did refer to snow but really it was about things that pile up around relationships and make them hard. funny most people thought it was a winter song strictly about a big snowfall, lol.
another one was World without Shadows. it was a dream about walking along a sidewalk and falling through a crack into a world of people with numbers and no colour. it was real in the way that so many people either refuse to see life outside their window or resign to be controlled by the powers that be and being slaves to that.