The elements that comprise The Secret Handshake's new album, My Name Up In Lights, aren't complicated or out of the ordinary. Instead Dallas musician Luis Dubuc has built a collection of songs that embraces an unabashed pop sensibility, drawing on the '90s to inspire the disc's feel-good energy and playful mood. The record follows the success of The Secret Handshake's previous album‚ 2007's One Full Year‚ with more streamlined intent and clarity of vision. "My first record was 14 songs and it was all over the place," Dubuc says. "It was like looking in my brain. It was full of ideas and all the songs sounded different. This record is really narrowed down. It's really influenced by Family Matters and Step By Step and the Ninja Turtles and Len and Spacehog and awesome '90s radio music. I just narrowed all those influences down and put them into a record."
Dubuc, who started The Secret Handshake in 2004, began writing songs and compiling demos for a new album as soon as he finished One Full Year, eventually ending up with nearly 60 songs to weed through. Once he had selected the 10 strongest tracks, Dubuc sat down in his home studio to record in December of 2008. Instead of enlisting a producer, like on the last record, Dubuc played, programmed and recorded the entire album himself to ensure that his vision achieved reality. "I wanted to do this record and have it be 100 percent me," he explains. "I didn't want anyone else to have input. I wanted to just do it. No one could stop me from doing anything." | 
