From the Vault
No One Wins on a Tuesday
The original, unreleased demo playlist — before it became re: Cubicle 13.
This was the first pass: 16 songs written and generated on Riffusion's free tier, chronicling the same cursed workday that later became the album. The free tier's output can't legally be sold or commercially distributed — so rather than let it disappear, it's rewritten from scratch (new lyrics, new arrangements, new production) as re: Cubicle 13, and the original is shared here instead, free, as a curiosity for anyone who wants to hear where it started.
Eight tracks kept their title straight through to the final album — the rest were completely reworked into different songs. Read the full story on the making of it: Turning Mundane Mayhem into Music and Time is a Flat Liar.
Free to listen. Not for sale, not for commercial use.
Liner Notes
Want to see exactly how each song changed, line by line? There's now a full side-by-side diff of every track — original demo on the left, final album lyric on the right, with every cut and addition highlighted.
Every track here can stand on its own, but the original demo was already a full single day, start to finish — that narrative structure was there from the beginning, not something added later. What the rework actually did was tighten the ties between songs, something I got better at as I learned more about what a "concept album" can even mean. There's a real range out there — some are just a themed collection of songs, others are a genuine story. Mine leans hard toward the latter, closer in spirit to something like Pink Floyd's The Wall — less an album, more a movie told in songs. A lot of the final tracks even have intros and outros built specifically to hand off to the song next to them, rather than standing alone the way the demo versions mostly do. And the day is built to loop: it ends at 11:59 PM with him too wired to sleep, and starts again at 7:10 AM the next morning in exactly the same place — as if he eventually dozes off only to wake up and repeat the same cursed Tuesday all over again. That loop idea goes all the way back to this original demo's very first outro line: "(But please wake me up again tomorrow too.)" — reworked on the album into a drier "Same time tomorrow? Thanks," but the same wish either way.
Not every reworked track just got better production — some got entirely new ideas. "The Salad Shamed Me Publicly" below was never going to work as a salad song, so on the album it became "The Cottage Cheese Conspiracy" — the forgotten cup of cottage cheese belongs to Karen, a coworker who disappeared years ago when the lights went out and never did get her W2. Karen first appears earlier in the day, vanishing in "Sent to Print. Never Seen Again." — one of a few real recurring characters stitched through the album. The Latin chanted in that earlier track ("Impressus malum, clausus in tenebris" — printed evil, shut away in darkness) is quietly hinting at something stranger than a disappearance: Karen didn't vanish, she became the cup of cottage cheese. Which means the protagonist spends "The Cottage Cheese Conspiracy" unknowingly eating a transformed coworker — dairy horror, on top of my own real dairy intolerance baked into the joke.
A cracked phone recurs across several songs on the final album — a small thread tying the day together on purpose. The later tracks also segue into each other to keep the day moving forward, rather than standing alone like the earlier ones do. Writing-wise, the earlier songs in the album stayed closest to these original demo styles; by the back half, things get more tonally muddled as the day (and the songwriting) unravels right along with the character.
A lot of the rewriting on the final album was pure craft grind — chasing syllable counts and rhymes that actually landed instead of forcing it, genre by genre. Several songs also picked up more of the idea that the appliances themselves are plotting against their owner, which wasn't as present in these original takes. And underneath all of it: a lot of real, lived experience got folded into these lyrics — things actually seen, actually felt, actually happened, just filtered through a cursed office-appliance lens.
A couple of these original takes have a feeling that never got fully recaptured on the album version — worth a listen for that alone. See the notes on tracks 14 and 16 below.
"I Just Wanted Soup" started as my own experience of decision paralysis in a grocery aisle, cranked up into full panic for the song. On the real album that same grocery trip ties three tracks together: the frozen Dino Mac & Cheese he buys in a panic is the exact lunch that goes catastrophically wrong in "Choose a Temperature, You Coward!", and the toothpaste he forgets to grab shows up twice more — judging him from the counter the next morning in "Time Is a Flat Liar", and finally running out entirely in "Spit in Grief". One bad grocery trip, three songs later.
A few tracks slip into Latin at key moments — that's deliberate. Latin is the language horror movies hand to cults right before something terrible turns out to be fake, and I liked playing with that: everything the Latin is "warning" you about on this album is completely harmless. It's also just genuinely on my mind — I spend a lot of time reading old 1800s newspapers and documents while researching local history, and Latin shows up constantly in old laws and records. I can't actually read or speak it, but finding it in those old pages always sticks with me. The payoffs are real, though: the chant in "Sent to Print. Never Seen Again." ("Impressus malum, clausus in tenebris" — printed evil, shut away in darkness) is the first hint of Karen's fate. In "Data Wrangled Me First," two more lines quietly tie back to earlier in the day: "Claves in sinum relictae sunt" (the keys were left in the pocket, the whole time — see "Locked Out, Keys Laughing") and "Tepor haereditarius: caffa liberorum" (roughly, inherited warmth — the coffee of the next generation, tying to the family caffeine curse in "The Cursed Brewer's Soliloquy"). That same track also hides two chanted ASCII-hex strings that spell out, if you decode them, "KAREN" and "CURDS."
7:10 AMTime Is a Flat Liartitle kept in re: Cubicle 13
Went through heavy line-by-line rewriting. The setting shifted from "cookie-cutter homes" (too literal, didn't read as a home) to the more oblique "boxed shape of decline in design" — still not crystal clear, but more lyrically satisfying. The clock became a deceiver instead of a traitor, the staring sock staged a mutiny instead, the calendar now casts judgment rather than sighing, and the birdsong line got reworked to land harder on how unhelpful an alarm of birds actually is. This is the only track that got a full music video, so it's also the only song where the whole thing plays out visually. The demo's original outro ended with "(But please wake me up again tomorrow too.)" — the seed of the whole day-loop idea — reworked on the album into a drier, more resigned "Same time tomorrow? Thanks."
7:24 AMThe Cursed Brewer’s Soliloquytitle kept in re: Cubicle 13
Meant to explain why the whole day goes wrong: he can't get going without caffeine, and — oddly, deliberately — it's framed as a curse passed down through his family, generation to generation. The album version leans even harder into the coffee maker itself as the villain of the piece.
8:11 AMButtoned Up, Butt Taken Hostagetitle kept in re: Cubicle 13
A fun one, but there was real uncertainty over whether it fit the mood of the day — moving from getting out of bed straight into a fight with clothes that won't cooperate. Small additions made the struggle more pronounced on the album version, which is still fast and upbeat overall, just toned down a little from here.
9:03 AMKeys in Exile
Reworked into "Locked Out, Keys Laughing" — the original idea (keys laughing at him from inside) gave them too much agency to not make sense, so the album version removed the view inside entirely: he just faces a blank door while a neighbor laughs at him instead. The character spirals into increasingly ludicrous memory tricks so he won't forget again, before the twist — the keys were in his pocket the whole time. The album version also leans more into frustration with the door itself than with the keys.
10:29 AMJam Eternal (Ctrl+P for Pain)
Loved this intro. Reworked into "Sent to Print. Never Seen Again." — went through a few versions of what the cursed printer actually spits out (one draft had it printing everyone's passwords for the whole office to see) before landing on the final mix: a coworker named Karen vanishing the day the lights went out, plus chanted hex-code strings, plus a chant that sounds vaguely like Latin for "printer jam of the soul." Karen herself resurfaces later in "The Cottage Cheese Conspiracy."
11:33 AMChoose a Temperature, You Coward!title kept in re: Cubicle 13
Kept the title, swapped the food: this demo's burrito became a frozen kids'-lunch tray of Dino Mac & Cheese on the album, on purpose — a burrito's just a burrito, but "dinosaur" plus "hot/cold temperature" plus "bringing a kids' TV-dinner to the office" opened up an ice-age pun and a genuinely sillier lunch to sing about.
11:57 AMThe Salad Shamed Me Publicly
Cut entirely — the music was too comedic right after the microwave screaming session (track 6), and a salad never made sense for this character anyway, too leafy and complex a dish for him to be caught with. Reworked instead around stolen office-fridge food (a universal workplace sin) and a cup of (peach) cottage cheese, which doubled as an angle for my own dairy intolerance.
1:00 PMBuffering My Soul
All about video-call misery — frozen screens, dropped audio, the general indignity of it. Reworked into "Mandatory Misery" by giving the meeting a specific reason to be dreadful: a mandatory HR call. One detail is lifted straight from real life — a teleconference meeting where most of us were together in the office, with a few remote people up on a TV screen, and one of the people on that screen had fallen asleep while the CEO yelled at him to wake up and everyone else quietly lost it. That became the manager, the supposed role model, caught dozing on camera while everyone else stays painfully awake.
2:27 PMThe Spreadsheet Knows I’m Weak
Nerdcore hip-hop was the right genre for this one — it makes room to spit off genuinely insane things seen in real spreadsheets. The original here is honestly a bit raw and unpolished; most of the work on "Data Wrangled Me First" (the album version) went into syllable/rhyme polish and the Latin/hex detail covered in the Liner Notes above. Anyone who's actually suffered through a real spreadsheet will get a lot more out of the final version.
4:16 PMThe Machine Who Hated Chips
Reworked into "All for One, Nuts for Me" — the vending machine denies a craving for 3 Musketeers (honor! justice! swordplay!) and hands over a Snickers instead, which doubles as the machine snickering at you. "All for one" is literally the Musketeers' own motto, repurposed as the title of the song about being denied one.
5:30 PMGPS Gaslighting My Sanity
Grounded in a real feeling: the drain of a full workday, driving home in the rain while a GPS insists on wrong turns and places that don't exist, then blames you for it. Reworked into "Road to Somewhere, Maybe", slowed way down into a rambling, half-psychotic monotone. It also plants a "Simple Soup" radio jingle mid-song, which becomes the whole focus of the next track — and echoes once more, faint and half-remembered, in the very last song.
6:01 PMI Just Wanted Souptitle kept in re: Cubicle 13
Rooted in my own real experience of decision paralysis in a grocery aisle, amplified into full panic for the song. That same grocery trip ties three tracks together on the album — see the Liner Notes above for the full thread through "Choose a Temperature, You Coward!", "Time Is a Flat Liar", and "Spit in Grief." The whole aisle meltdown is also set off by a specific brand, "Simple Soup," first planted as a radio jingle in "Road to Somewhere, Maybe" — he's hunting for a can that isn't actually on the shelf.
7:12 PMToast Was Always Plan Btitle kept in re: Cubicle 13
Rooted in real exhaustion — a day of work (and a house full of chores there's no energy left for) that ends in bread for dinner, no toaster involved. Not a win by any normal standard, but a real one for him that day.
8:48 PMThe Couch Sucks Me Intitle kept in re: Cubicle 13
The intro and overall feeling of this one never quite got recaptured on the album version — still one of the favorites. This is also one of the most faithful carry-overs on the whole album: the concept, structure, and most of the lines survive almost unchanged. The one real addition on the album version is a quiet callback — a line about his keys slipping away and getting lost somewhere in the couch cushions, a small nod back to the keys-in-exile thread from earlier in the day.
9:46 PMBrushed My Teeth with Spite
Reworked into "Spit in Grief" — another faithful carry-over; the baroque, mock-operatic toothpaste duel survives almost word-for-word, just with the title flipped from the demo's "spit with spite" framing to the album's "spit in grief," plus the cracked phone added into the chorus (see the Liner Notes above). This is also the toothpaste from the grocery-trip thread above, now finally empty.
11:59 PMToo Tired to Sleep, Somehowtitle kept in re: Cubicle 13
This one comes from a real problem I have — if I go to bed, I just lie there for hours with my own thoughts, so instead I work at the computer until I'm exhausted enough to actually fall asleep. The album version changed some things, but I really wish I could've kept the whispering and the low ambient hum from this original. The point was to contrast normal people who can just sleep against someone who can't — and also that the fan itself is judgmental about it ("Fan spins judgment slow... Sleep is for the functioning, for those who don't hear the fan whisper").