September is season-premier month in TV-land, but the obsessive fans of ABC’s supernatural survival show Lost will have to wait until 2009 before more secrets of the Island are revealed. Fortunately, even during the doldrums of the show’s current hiatus, there’s plenty of information to seek and conspiracies to follow online, at sites like DarkUFO and DocArzt (my personal favorites). But while some viewers appreciate the nuances - and even humor - of the show, others have gone off the deep end with their devotion.

Fans with a healthy level of interest include those who weave an online web of episode recaps. You’ll find plenty of written summaries and podcast synopses, but as far as I know, there’s only one group doing musical recaps of Lost.

Jeff Curtin and Adam Schatz make up the band Previously On Lost. Each week during the season, they release a song to their MySpace page that riffs on themes from the episode. Past songs include “The Island Won’t Let You Die” and “Be My Constant.”

Curtin and Schatz sing high above their speaking range, and sunny keyboards and organs back up the duo. Schatz sees the band in a similar vein to Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.

The music of Previously On Lost is strange to be sure, but that’s part of its appeal. The lyrics Curtin and Schatz write together are hilarious, and they also highlight the silliest elements of the show.

“There is no denying parts of the show are meant to be funny,” Schatz said in a phone interview with me. “Parts of the show are utterly ridiculous. Lost fans aren’t like people who obsess over Star Trek - everybody has a sense of humor.”

That sense of humor leads the band’s fans to appreciate lyrics in the song “Ballad of Sayid Jarrah,” which describe Sayid, a main character and hitman, carrying out a kill on the golf course:

He’s armed to the teeth, with a gun and effective hair spray
You may have picked the right club, But you still strolled into murder
on the fairway

Curtin and Schatz watch the episodes independently, taking detailed notes about possible topics to include for the upcoming week’s song.

“We ask, ‘Is this funny?’” Schatz said. “We try and take a theme from the episode and warp it.”

Previously On Lost is hoping to expand the band’s reach by touring in advance of the show’s fourth season’s DVD release in December. But even these two Lost recappers have a limit to their fandom.

“We are by no means super Lost fans,” Schatz said. “While we do love the show and love talking about the show, we don’t listen to the Lost official podcast. People [from other fansites] are contacting us now, and asking us to do stuff with them. We don’t know who all these people are.”

The fact that two guys who write their own Lost homage songs don’t even count themselves among the uber-faithful highlights the depth of fandom associated with the show. And not all of these die-hards know when to stop. There’s a difference between riffing off the show or exploring its influences and using Lost as an excuse to procrastinate on something only tangentially related to the show.

Between each season of Lost, ABC sponsors an interactive online game built on the fringes of the Lost universe. In this year’s game, which recently began, players can become new recruits for the Dharma Initiative, the slightly sinister, possible mastermind behind the crash survivors’ current fate. Pass eight tests and you may be invited to become a member.

These games help die-hards maintain their Lost buzz, but they serve no greater purpose. They aren’t canon, so secrets the games reveal won’t help players understand the mysteries of the show.

For this year’s class of online Dharma recruits, playing along is lots of work with very little payoff. But ABC wouldn’t keep supporting these games if some fans didn’t ask for them, which suggests that there are fans who are enthusiastic about consuming anything even tangentially related to the show. These are the same die-hards who rush out to buy the Portuguese version of Catch-22 when it appears in an episode to hunt for extra clues.

True, Lost is epic, full of mystery and the best show on network TV. But it’s also ridiculous – time-traveling polar bears, anyone? I suggest these die-hards laugh a little and listen to the music of Previously On Lost, which perfectly captures the show’s absurdity. Bonus: they’re guaranteed to get all the jokes.