Bitter coffee and a made-up rocket: writing routine in two words

«Despierto solo. Miradas vacías.» Wake alone. Empty stares.

That's how it starts. Two words, full stop. Two words, full stop. If you've ever filled in an office timesheet, the kind where you write "meeting", "email", "meeting", "email" in half-hour boxes, you already know the rhythm. The first half of «Elon Musk ha anunciado», Elon Musk has announced, is that: a timesheet of sadness.

I've been asked several times why a song with such an outrageous title starts so flat. Today I'll explain it from the inside, from the desk where it gets written, cold coffee at my elbow.

A timesheet of sadness

When I started on this lyric, the first thing I had was the chorus, the announcement one. The second, and the hardest, was what comes before. Because an announcement is only funny if it arrives to rescue you from something. And that something had to be written so the listener felt it in their body before the rocket appeared.

I tried long sentences first. I got things like "I get up every morning and everything seems the same as yesterday". Correct, sad, boring. And boring the wrong way, because you could feel the effort of describing boredom. It was a school essay on tedium.

So I cut. I cut and cut until only two words per line were left.

«Trabajo insípido / Café amargo / Todo es tan rígido / Maldito letargo» ("Tasteless work / Bitter coffee / Everything so rigid / Damned lethargy")

When I read it like that, I realised I was no longer describing routine. I was imitating it. Short phrases, almost verbless, unadorned, are routine. They make you breathe in the same places. They line you up.

It was one of those times when the form does the work and all you have to do is get out of the way.

No verbs, no oomph

Notice something, if you have the full lyrics to hand. Those verses have hardly any verbs. «Despierto» and «olvido», I wake and I forget, and that's the end of the action. The rest are nouns with an adjective stuck on: empty stares, cold routine, nameless street, unhurried steps, faceless people, distant laughter, sleeping dreams.

A verb is an action. A verbless phrase is someone doing nothing, or doing things without being there. That's how I feel on some Mondays: like a list of objects. The coffee, the metro, the computer, the supermarket queue. I choose none of them; they all happen to me.

There's another detail I love, though I found it rereading rather than writing. Many of those pairs use «sin», without: «sin nombre», «sin prisa», «sin rostro», «sin risa». Nameless, unhurried, faceless, laughless. Routine defined by what it lacks. It isn't that the street is ugly; it has no name. It isn't that people are bad; they have no faces.

And then there's «emociones mutantes», mutant emotions, which sneaked in among all the grey and amuses me because it's the only thing in the first part that sounds like a B-movie. As if the chorus's science fiction were already poking its nose in early, under the door.

The yawn test

I have a habit when I write lyrics like this, made of tiny phrases: I read them aloud with a civil servant's face. No intonation, no charm, like someone reading the agenda at a residents' association meeting. If I yawn reading them like that, I'm on the right track. If I laugh, I'm also on the right track, but a different one.

With this first part both happened. I yawned at «pasos sin prisa», unhurried steps, and laughed at «maldito letargo», damned lethargy, because that word, lethargy, is straight out of a nineteenth-century novel, a young lady with a migraine lying on a chaise longue, and stuck there between the coffee and the work it's ridiculous in the best way. It's the only moment in the verse when boredom turns melodramatic. I kept it.

No workshop teaches the yawn test. I made it up, like most of what I do. But it tells me whether a grey verse is properly grey or just badly written. Which isn't the same thing.

Routine, routine, routine

After the verses comes a block that works like an alarm clock that won't stop. The word «rutina», routine, alone on a line. Then a phrase. Routine again. Another phrase. Everything repeats. Nothing surprises me. Always the same.

It's a fairly obvious joke, I know: to talk about repetition, I repeat. But it works. You can't hear that block without feeling the loop a little. Like when your phone alarm goes at seven, you snooze it, it goes again, you snooze it, it goes again. Routine. Routine. Routine.

And at the end of the loop, the only exclamation in that part: «¡me ofende!» It offends me. Exclamation marks and all.

I love that phrase there. Because the normal thing would be "it bores me", "it tires me", "it depresses me". And I say it offends me. As if routine were a rude person who'd said something nasty to you in the Mercadona queue. As if boredom were a personal insult and you had every right to feel aggrieved.

It's the most me thing in the whole first part, I think. The jump from sadness to a neighbour's indignation. It offends me. The nerve of it.

It offends me

Let me explain a bit more, because that verb is a small hinge.

For half the song, the protagonist drifts with the grey current. He's passive, does nothing, chooses nothing. And suddenly he says it offends me, and he's no longer passive. He's angry. He has an opinion. Deep down, he's ready to leave.

It happens a lot in real life. You put up, put up, put up with a situation you don't like, a job, a relationship, a city, and you do nothing while it only makes you sad. The day it offends you, though, you get up. Sadness sits you on the sofa. Offence puts your shoes on.

So the «me ofende» isn't a stray joke. It's the moment the character is ready to hear the news.

The fakest news in the world

And the news arrives. Thank goodness that today Elon Musk has announced the first crewed flight to a newly discovered planet called GayFolk.

He's announced nothing of the sort, of course. I made it up. The planet isn't in any NASA catalogue and Mr Musk has never, as far as I know, said a single word about GAYFOLK. That's exactly why I use him: he's the perfect character for fake news. He's spent years promising rockets, colonies on Mars, self-driving cars and tunnels under cities, with such confidence that you no longer know which announcement is real and which is a meme. If anyone in the world could announce a flight to a queer planet without it sounding completely impossible, it was him.

And there's another layer, which tickles me. I put to work for my planet the man least likely to sign up. I needn't explain why. It's a small fictional revenge: the rocket man suddenly serving the cause of the queens. In the song he doesn't know it, but he works for us.

In the post on why the first album has a news-headline title I explained that I like writing in headline form. This song is that same habit taken to the extreme: the nine o'clock news announcing a utopia.

Why a headline

I could have written "I'd go to another planet". Or "if only there were a better place". The whole song is, deep down, that idea. But said like that, plainly, it's a soft wish. It just hangs in the air.

A headline is something else. A headline has a date, a protagonist, a concrete action. It's today, it's Elon Musk, he has announced. It turns a wish into a fact, even an invented one. It puts you in front of a door and says: it's open now, you decide.

And it has the charm of news-speak, that "newly discovered" nobody uses in real life. Nobody says down the pub "I recently met a boy". That's said on the news, in press releases, in official statements. Putting it into a queer song about routine and escape is like putting a tie on a dog. It doesn't suit it at all, which is why it works.

That mix is what I enjoy most about the craft. Taking a serious register, the news, and carrying it somewhere it doesn't belong.

Thank goodness that today

There's a detail in the chorus people overlook that for me is the key: «menos mal», thank goodness.

It doesn't just say that today he announced it. It says and thank goodness that today. That «menos mal» is a mother's relief, someone who's spent days without sleep waiting for the doctor to ring. Thank goodness. At last. About time.

It's the expression of someone at the end of their tether. Who couldn't take one more Monday of bitter coffee. And who receives the news like test results that have come back fine.

That's the heart of the song, if you push me. The rocket is the joke. The «menos mal» is the truth. Some people live waiting for someone, anyone, to announce a way out. A job offer in another city, a grant, a boyfriend who'll get you out of the village, a lottery win. And when it comes, if it comes, the first thing people say is that. Thank goodness.

Are you coming with me?

After so much repeated announcing, the song switches person. Until then it was an "I" and a grey world. Suddenly a "you" appears.

«Yo ya me he apuntado ¿Te vienes conmigo?» ("I've already signed up. Are you coming with me?")

I love that the protagonist has already signed up before asking. He doesn't wait to see if the other wants to. He's got his ticket. The question isn't "shall we go?", it's "I'm going, are you coming or staying?". It has something of a fond ultimatum about it, and something of courage too.

There are many ways to read that "you". A partner, a friend, a stranger on the metro. Whoever's listening. When I wrote it, I was thinking a bit of all of them. Play it on your phone in a packed carriage at quarter past eight in the morning and the question is for everyone travelling with you wearing the same Monday face. Are you coming?

I said it on the song's page: if someone next to you smiles, ask them. You needn't explain anything. The face is enough.

Being twenty again

At the end, the song goes epic. Let's do something crazy, let's be twenty again, let's go to GayFolk.

I wrote that with a crooked smile, because I'm perfectly aware of the trap. Being twenty again is the fantasy of everyone past forty. And it's a rather dodgy fantasy, because at twenty we weren't all that happy either. We had less money, more fear and worse taste in men. But in memory, twenty is the time before routine. When anything could happen.

I'm not talking about the age on your ID card; I'm talking about the feeling. When any Friday could change your life. That's what the song means, I think. Getting back the mood of when you didn't yet know what was going to happen to you.

In «Against nostalgia» I wrote that retro interests me as a way of looking forward. This line is the same thing. It isn't going back, it's starting again. And the way to start again, according to the song, is to board a made-up rocket.

A mere mortal

There's another line near the end that makes me laugh and also makes me a bit serious.

«Quiero dejar de ser un simple mortal» ("I want to stop being a mere mortal")

From anyone else it would sound pretentious. It sounds like a superhero-film villain, the kind who wants immortality and ends up melted in a vat of acid. But here it's said by someone who two minutes ago was describing his bitter coffee and tasteless work. He doesn't want to be a god. He wants to stop being a box on a timesheet.

For me, ceasing to be a mere mortal means ceasing to be interchangeable. Let the street have a name. Let people have faces. Let Monday be different from Tuesday. It's asking for very little, really. But said in science-fiction capitals, it looks like a lot.

I like that mismatch. Asking for small things in enormous words. It's one of my ways of exaggerating, and you know I exaggerate quite a bit.

The gravitational orbit

And the finale. The lyric admits the risk: we're betting our lives, we might get caught in another gravitational orbit, we might never be able to come back.

It's the only technical moment in the whole song. Gravitational orbit. I put it in with total cheek, like someone using a word they heard on a La 2 documentary at four in the afternoon, half asleep on the sofa. I know nothing about orbits. I know it sounds like serious danger, like an astronaut film with violins. And that's exactly why: the danger is stated in physics-textbook words, and the conclusion is a hen-night queen's. Let's do something crazy.

What interests me is the attitude. The song knows it could go wrong. That we might not come back. And it doesn't care. Because staying in the routine, after saying it offends me, is no longer an option.

There, by the way, the joke stops for a moment and something quite clean is left: sometimes leaving is frightening and staying is more so.

What I won't do

I won't retell the history of real space flight here or compare my rocket with the ones on the news. There are people who know far more than I do about that, and on the planet's sister site someone has already started reading the small print on the ticket. I'm the one who wrote the song, and what I can tell you is the inside: why those words, why that order, why that verb.

Nor will I tell you this song is about running away from your problems. I don't like that agony-aunt kind of reading. It's about what it's about: that routine sometimes offends. And that imagining a way out, however ridiculous, is what lets you hold on until Friday.

A Monday song

If you ask me when to listen, I'll say what I said on the song's page, in more detail.

A Monday. Eight-something in the morning. On the Madrid metro, on the line you hate most, squashed between a rucksack and a man watching his phone without headphones. Or in the car, in the traffic jam into the city, the wipers doing their own routine. Or at the office, if you have one where you can play music quietly without the boss glaring.

There, at the exact moment you realise everything repeats, put it on. The first verses will feel like a mirror. And when the announcement comes, you'll laugh. Even if only inside.

It's a song made for that second of laughter in the middle of the grey. It won't fix your Monday. It'll make it a bit shorter.

Before, a massacre; after, a mouth

I find it funny where it ended up in the site's discography. Just before it is «Como en la matanza de Texas», like in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, one of the darkest things I've written, all chainsaws and hope turned to salt. Just after it, «La boca», the mouth. And in between, this rose-pink rocket that basically says: right, enough suffering, shall we go?

I didn't plan it that way, but I like it. As if the song were the emergency exit between two very different rooms. A green light above a door, with a little running man.

The second album and longing

It's on the trilogy's second album, «Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK», if only you could travel to GAYFOLK, and it couldn't be on any other. That whole album is that: longing. Longing to leave, longing to arrive, longing for a place where you needn't explain yourself. I went into it more calmly in the grammar of longing, where I talk about how an «ojalá», an if-only, changes a whole sentence.

This song is the moment longing turns into a ticket. The album title's if-only comes true, even if only in invented news. Today they announced the flight. It's no longer an if-only. It's a thank goodness.

Written by me, made with machines

The usual, which I have to say because I'm asked in every interview: I wrote the lyrics myself, without artificial intelligence. The two words per line, the «me ofende», the «menos mal», the mere mortal, all of that is mine and came out of my Mondays. The music and vocals are made with AI tools, Suno among them. I'm the lyricist, composer and producer. I'm not the one on vocals.

There's an irony there, I admit: a song criticising mechanical routine, made with the help of machines. But the machine has no Mondays. It doesn't know what bitter coffee at seven is. What I ask of it is to put sound to something I've already lived, and for that it works very well. I went into this further in AI doesn't save me work, it moves it somewhere else, if you're interested.

And if anyone tells me my songs are made by a button, I'll ask him to write routine in two words without it sounding like a school essay. Let him try. What a laugh that'll be.

I've already signed up

The last thing I'll tell you is what the song says, because I can't think of anything better.

I've already signed up. I've been signed up since I wrote the first lyric of the first album. The planet has no coordinates, you won't find it in any telescope, and Mr Musk will never call me. Doesn't matter. That's what songs are for: announcing flights that don't exist and boarding them anyway.

Are you coming with me?

If you are, the rest of the luggage is in Lyrics.

Frequently asked questions

What is «Elon Musk ha anunciado» about? Routine and the urge to escape it. The first part describes a grey day in two-word phrases, and the chorus announces, in invented news, the first crewed flight to the planet GayFolk.

Has Elon Musk really announced a flight to GayFolk? No. It's the song's fiction. Mike Sain't Louis uses the figure because of his reputation for announcing rockets and space projects, and turns it on its head for humour.

Which album is the song on? «Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK», the second album of the Planeta Gayfolk trilogy.

Who provides the vocals? The vocals and music are made with artificial intelligence tools such as Suno. Mike writes the lyrics without AI and is the composer and producer.

Where can I read the lyrics? In full, at gayfolkplanet.com/letras/elon-musk-ha-anunciado.