Dear Joe Friday and Everyone Else

As you requested in your Secretin of the Week survey, Mickie has agreed to try and do a song of the week. When Danny gets back from Europe, I'm sure he'll do it too (esp considering he kind of already did with the Love of My Life video. Look forward to seeing this feature soon, hopefully starting next week.

I thought it would be cool if Secretins wrote in and told me stories about what certain songs remind them of. I'll start with an example.

Boner reminds me of when I used to try and get my mom to listen to the Secretions while we were driving around doing errands in the car. It's always been important to me to try and involve my mom in what I'm doing and give her a chance to experience the things I like so she doesn't feel like I'm trying to exclude her from my life or whatever. To this day I still invite her to most Secretions shows and parties that I go to.

Anyway, I was about sixteen at the time and my mom knew I had a crush on Mickie. At this point the only interaction I'd had with Mickie was squeaking at him and throwing money at him to buy Til Death at an Old Ironsides all ages show about a year before. I didn't talk to him, barely ever looked at him, and mostly just crept around and shows trying not to be noticed.

I really didn't want my mom to hear the Boner song because I knew she'd be like, "ew, those guys are total perverts! You're never going to another show again!" So, every time Boner was about to start, I'd dive forward and skip to the next song and make up some excuse like, "Oh, that's a really slow crappy song, I'm not in the mood to hear it right now."

One day I forgot and the song played all the way through and sure enough my mom was like "WTF?!" But then we got into this huge debate about how songs are SONGS and shouldn't be taken literally most of the time. I brought up a bunch of the bands she likes (mostly 80s and 90s hair metal) and eventually she grudgingly agreed with me.

The next couple times the CD played, I made no effort to skip Boner. One day, we were in the store and I caught her humming it. Now she loves the Secretions. See? Things work out ok sometimes.

Write to me at crystalsecretin@gmail.com and tell me about your experiences with certain songs.

Secretinly yours,
Crystal