It opens with a deranged cartoon voice asking if this is the real life. It is not. It’s fiber optics. Then the drop hits like a firestarter with a crush: breakbeat aggression, buzzsaw synths, and a frontman growling about zoning variances with the unhinged joy of a man who has never once been down with the sickness, only up with it. This is rage music for people who are having a great time. Every scream is a scream of love.

The story, as testimony: a Suburban pulls up on a Tuesday. A woman says “hyperscale campus.” Our hero says “yes ma’am” and never recovers. He wears his only tie to a seven-hour zoning meeting and testifies against his own cousins. His pastor preaches against him. The paper runs his name. The water table drops. The creek is on hospice. He regrets nothing, because she’s on site Monday through Thursday, and love makes cooling towers look like Notre Dame.

The facility will create eleven permanent jobs. He only wants one. Grandpa is still buried by the creek. For now.

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He knows. He’s coming.

Tweezer Man is a three-minute garage-surf ode to the small violent mercy of precision extraction. Splinters, ticks, chin hairs, cactus spines, that one eyebrow situation you think nobody notices. Everybody notices. He noticed first.

He does not take appointments. He does not take Venmo. He takes one sharp breath and whatever’s next.

Recorded at full volume with the reverb tank half full of ocean water. Nothing embedded stays embedded.

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He came home to torn foil and a fork still in the pan.

“Bitch Ate My Meatloaf” is a crushing metal ballad about refrigerated betrayal, day-two flavor science, and the specific rage of a man who knows the freezer loaf is not, and will never be, the fridge loaf. Everybody knows day-two meatloaf is the keeper. The flavors settle overnight. You eat it cold, standing in the kitchen light, with ketchup and white bread soft as forgiveness.

She didn’t even use a plate.

Featuring whispered verses, a four-minute grief solo, and the genre-mandated “OH WAH AH AH AH,” this is Popster Monster & the Payday Fajitas at their most wounded. Turn it up. Guard your leftovers.

She didn’t even eat the end piece first. Savage.

Buy me a gin & tonic

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Recorded at Blue Dog Farm between hydration breaks. The band would like to clarify that we respect the boots, we respect the aesthetic, we simply cannot respect the moisture agreement happening at the ankle level. Tony Lama was not consulted and would not have approved.

For fans of: Rough dance, Disturbed, open-toed footwear, ventilation.

No podiatrists were harmed in the making of this track. Several were consulted. All of them quit.

#funk #disco #numetal #countrycrossover #boothygiene #squishah

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This is a song about that. It is the Emperor’s new clothes, except the Emperor charges retail and the whole court claps anyway. It is also a song about a small child who pointed out the obvious and was escorted from the building. We last saw him reflected, very small and very alone, in the Reflecting Pool. We have chosen not to ask.

We mastered it at full volume to compensate for the color. It is loud, it is fast, and it is dressed in a putty-toned t-shirt that goes with everything and pairs with nothing.

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“Looksmaxxing Max” is a glam-punk stomp about the looksmaxxing pipeline, the bone-density influencers, and the very profitable business of convincing teenage boys that they are ugly and it’s fixable for nine ninety-nine a month. It chants. It claps. In the bridge, it stops and tells the truth, which is that the kid was fine, and then it gets loud again because that is easier.

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Recorded loud, mixed louder, somewhere between a tent revival and a bar fight. Tithing optional. Bail money sold separately.

For fans of slide guitar, who should know better, and a bridge that turns the gun around on the congregation.

This is not a sad song. This is a mosh pit at a memorial service. This is your drunk uncle giving the best eulogy anyone’s ever heard and then knocking over the flower arrangement on his way back to the pew. The verses come at you like a guy reading obituaries at an auctioneer’s pace, the choruses are shouted by what sounds like an army that pre-gamed, and there’s a trumpet in there that nobody invited but everybody’s glad showed up.

It ends with a single sad trombone note, because somebody had to acknowledge the occasion.

Rest in pigment, legends. The Crayola box of the afterlife keeps getting fuller, and we keep getting louder about it.

RIYL: The Ramones at a wake, Dead Kennedys with a horn budget, yelling “WE REMEMBER!” at a funeral and meaning it.

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The rabbits were not interested in any of that.

This song is a document of what happened next. It is accurate in every detail except the string quartet, which I added for emotional scale because the situation warranted it.

“Goddamn Baby Rabbits Are Eating My Strawberries” is the latest track from Popster Monster & the Payday Fajitas, a band that exists primarily as a response to circumstances beyond our control. We play it straight. The music never acknowledges the joke because we do not consider it a joke.

If you have also lost something you loved to something small and soft and completely indifferent to your feelings, this song is for you.

The rabbits have not been caught. The patch has been replanted. We remain cautiously optimistic in the way that people who have learned nothing remain cautiously optimistic.

Recorded somewhere. Mixed with feeling. Mastered with whatever was left.

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This song was written for Trout Bowman — ex-FBI, synesthete, and a man whose relationship with actual facts is, at best, complicated. Also for Brandy, the efficiency consultant who measures human suffering in deliverables. For Timothy Splashinski, who mops the floors where the real decisions get made and knows more than anyone gives him credit for. And for Olive and Otis, two government-enhanced otters who are, frankly, handling all of this better than the humans are.

Truth Tastes Like Pennies is the novel. It’s also the feeling. It’s also this song.

The book is being serialized — chapter by chapter, conspiracy by conspiracy — over at brianlewandowski.substack.com. Come for the otters. Stay because you’ve started to wonder if your efficiency consultant knows something she’s not supposed to.

Three chords. One uncomfortable truth. No refunds.

🎸 brianlewandowski.substack.com

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What follows is three minutes and twenty-two seconds of escalating airport lounge chaos: power chords over cheese cube towers, a guitar solo performed on top of a leather club chair, and a bridge breakdown where the entire band performs in front of seventeen simultaneously running CNN screens. A man in a fleece vest remains on a phone call throughout, completely unmoved by any of it.

The video culminates in a triumphant final chorus where the frontman raises a plastic cup of Scotch to the camera like he just won something — because he did — before being cheerfully informed that his gate is now boarding. He takes one more drink. He is not rushing.

Filmed at 160 bpm. No first-class ticket was purchased in the making of this video.

© 2026 Popster Monster & the Payday Fajitas

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I was in Marrakech in late April. This is not the setup to a joke. I was actually there, in the actual medina, in the actual narrow alleys where the walls are close enough to read and the sensory information arrives faster than the brain can sort it. Cumin. Exhaust. Leather. Something burning that no one is acknowledging. A cat on a carpet regarding you with the specific contempt that Marrakech cats reserve for tourists who have made navigational errors.

I did not have a motorcycle. I want to be clear about that. But I did have the distinct sensation of being a vehicle that could not turn around, moving through a system that was not designed for me, watched by people who had seen this before and had opinions about it.

The Song Wrote Itself, Which Is the Best Kind of Song

Popster Monster & the Payday Fajitas -- my punk project that exists somewhere between a real band and a creative fever dream -- needed a Marrakech song the way a road trip needs a blown tire. It was going to happen. The only question was how fast.

“Sidecar Medina” runs at 160 bpm, which is approximately the speed at which the human brain stops processing new information and just starts logging impressions for later. Spice merchant. Donkey. Boy on a wall. Door I have definitely passed before. The chorus is simple because the situation is simple: you cannot turn around, the souk has eaten your map, and the medina is not a place you navigate so much as a place that absorbs you, files you, and decides what to do with you later.

That is either terrifying or deeply comforting depending on what you brought with you when you arrived.

What Marrakech Actually Feels Like at Street Level

The medina does not care about your itinerary. This is not a complaint. It is closer to a relief. The alleys are narrow enough that two people walking toward each other have to make a decision about who they are as a person. A motorcycle with a sidecar would require a level of negotiation that I suspect has no diplomatic precedent.

What I kept thinking, walking those streets, was that the place had been doing this for a thousand years before I showed up and would be doing it for a thousand years after I left, and my presence was neither a disruption nor a welcome addition. I was simply weather. A brief and slightly confused American weather event, passing through.

The song tries to hold that feeling. The narrator never gets unlost. The medina keeps the body and the medina keeps the soul and the engine is still running somewhere in there, going in circles, and that is not a tragedy. That is just what happens when you show up somewhere ancient with a vehicle that cannot reverse.

Listen/watch and decide for yourself whether it sounds like glory or whether it ends in silt. Personally I think it sounds like both.

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I wrote a song about her.

This is, I should mention, a thing I did not see coming. The new record I am making under the band name Popster Monster & the Payday Fajitas was supposed to be three minutes of punk shouting per track, full volume, no apologies, nothing too clever. That was the plan. The plan held for exactly as long as it took to write a verse about a four-foot-eight roller derby queen called The Pocket Rocket and realize that I was not, in fact, writing a punk song. I was writing a eulogy that happened to have power chords.

The song is called “Aunt Trixie Was a Roller Derby Queen” and it is on the record anyway, because the alternative was admitting that I had something sincere to say and trying to hide it, which is a move I have already made too many times in too many forms to keep getting away with.

The historical Aunt Trixie was a hundred and twelve pounds of grease and gasoline who worked at a machine shop for thirty years, ran a roller derby league for twenty, drove a 1969 Ford F-100 short bed she named The Honorable Margaret until it had three hundred and twelve thousand miles on it, and once, when I was thirteen and called her fun-sized at Thanksgiving dinner, drove me to a roller rink at eleven PM and skated circles around me until I understood that I had been the punchline of the evening from the moment I opened my mouth. She did not raise her voice. She did not need to. She lapped me approximately fourteen times, paused, said “you should let go of the wall, Lewie,” and went back to lapping me. By the time we got back into the truck I had reorganized my entire understanding of how the world worked.

She told me, sometime during that long quiet drive home, that people were going to underestimate me my whole life and I had a choice about what to do with that. Prove them right, or prove them wrong. But first, she said, I needed to let go of the wall.

She died fifteen years later. They played Joan Jett at the service, the way she had requested. They buried her in her skates, the way she had also requested. The headstone reads: The Pocket Rocket: Nobody’s Punchline. She picked it out herself. She had it ready.

The song is three minutes long. The bridge repeats “let go of the wall” three times, because that is the sentence the entire thing hangs on, and because some pieces of advice need to be said three times before they take. The choruses shout. The verses tell the story. There is a punk-appropriate guitar crunch and a shout-along that I hope, eventually, someone yells back at me from a small dark room with a sticky floor.

I do not know if she would have liked it. I think she would have made a face that I would have been unable to read for at least ten seconds, and then she would have said something dry, and then she would have driven home in The Honorable Margaret and never mentioned it again, which in her dialect was a form of approval bordering on rapturous.

The photograph is still in the box. I have not framed it, which is a failure of follow-through I intend to correct. But I know where it is, which box, which layer. That counts for something.

She is not smiling in it. She is looking past the camera. She is already moving.

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This song started as a provocation and ended up as a manifesto, which is exactly what happens when you give a middle-aged humor writer access to AI music tools and a grudge against the discourse. “AI Writes Better Music Than Your Mom” is not an attack on your mother. Your mother is probably lovely. This is an attack on the breathless hand-wringing that says AI-assisted creativity is somehow less real than whatever you call it when a guy with a four-track recorder and a dream makes something in his garage.

This one runs hotter and colder than our usual stuff -- less torn leather jacket, more neon-lit warehouse at 2 a.m. The electronics do things guitars can’t. We let them. Punk is not a sound, it turns out. It’s a posture. And you can absolutely hold that posture while a synthesizer does something deeply weird underneath you.

Popster Monster & the Payday Fajitas exists because creative people past a certain age stop asking permission. This is that. It was made with AI tools, genuine human stubbornness, and the dawning realization that genre is just a box somebody else built.

Your mom could not have made this. But honestly? Good for her.

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