Dear the Fembots,

Your music is helping me understand Charles Manson.

This realisation comes as a shock to me. I've loved music for most of my life; I've memorized entire albums and learned the intricate histories of any band that could hold my interest. When I find a band or an album or a song I enjoy, I get single-minded and obsessive. Every important moment in my life is somehow inextricably linked in my memory to the music that was playing at the time or the song that represents the events' effects on me.

When I was five my family moved from Wadena, Saskatchewan to Barrie, Ontario with only Blue Sky Mining by Midnight oil and Billy Joel's Greatest Hits, Volume I and II in the tape deck of our fake-wood-paneled station wagon. No matter what "Piano Man" may mean to Billy or the rest of the world, It still represents the cold, bleak close of the 1980s. I quit my first job over Sloan's Navy Blues.

I have a habit of making long speeches about songs and bands. I commandeer social situations to teach classes on the finer points of 90s East Coast rock, or the events that led me to associate Ric Ocasek and Weezer's debut album with reclining car seats and vomiting in a friend-of-a-friend's flower garden. I just get nervous in "ordinary" conversation because I feel I have nothing to contribute but complaints about obscure technical issues and a few tales that are wearing thin, so I resort to the "Ongoing History of New Music" talking points.

I had to unlearn my habit of proselytizing about "music's significance to me right now." Turns out girls don't like it when you stop halfway through making out to note that this is your favourite Eels song and did you know Peter Buck plays on their albums?

Girls are weird.

I'm pretty susceptible to suggestion from musical sources, but I never understood how a person could latch onto a song like "Helter Skelter" and attach such murderous meaning to it. It's a freaky little Beatles tune with vague lyrics about a generic drug delivered in a half-talk over manic, hyperactive guitars. Sure. Maybe it reminds you of drinking and driving, or taking mushrooms and cowering in an elementary-school playground at 3am. But as an omen of impending race war and a signal that it's time to murder wealthy Caucasians in LA, it's flimsy at best.

I used to think that was a pretty rational way to look at the effect of even the most intense musical barrage on the psyche. But then you guys showed up -- in my stereo and in my brain. I remember being unimpressed by your performance at Hillside this past July. I guess I dismissed you as uninteresting, as Dave Alexander music. Cowboy hats, guitars, synthesizers, cowbell, etc. Yawn. But Amy bought your CD and I heard it in the car. One line stood out: "Let them break their bats on our heads...."

Methought, That goes down smooth. Your website (curse its Flash interface!) yielded another fateful tune: "Small Town Muder Scene."

What kind of cruel bastards would write a song they knew would become the soundtrack for my every thought and deed for two straight months and give it such gruesome lyrics? It's sadistic! I walk around at work singing "the bottom basement stair / is caked in blood and matted hair." I live in a dark, creepy basement. I'm starting to get impressions -- fleeting thoughts, really -- that I should perhaps bring about the situations described in your songs simply to exorcise the lyrics' grip on my consciousness. But then I suppose you already knew this.

I'm just another cog in your diabolical scheme. You'll be pulling the strings when the new class war arises from the student ghettos of our nation. And when the land has been levelled and the blood of the innocent floods the soil and all the wealth has been redistributed in accordance with your plan, you'll take up the cowboy crown and cowbell sceptre and rule over a new nation of ignorant twentysomethings, enslaved and strung along by their co-opted ideals and their hunger for liquor and inexpensive ethnic foods and the unstoppable music in their heads.

The future is much bleaker than December '89 on the prairies.

So basically what I wanted to ask is, when the time comes and the shit starts flying, can I just rat people out for you? I don't want to have to kill anyone.

Your unwilling servant,

Regan