How to build a queer Spanish-language playlist that doesn't sound like the usual one

There's a queer Spanish-language playlist we all know. The one that's played at every birthday, every pre-drinks and every gay bar for years. It has its evergreen anthems, its two or three summer hits and a ballad to close. It works, nobody's arguing. But listen to it three times in a month and you start to notice it's turned into furniture.

Making playlists is a bit of a vice. And as someone who also produces songs meant to end up on other people's playlists, I've been jotting down some ideas on how to build one that has something to say. They're not rules. They're habits that work for me.

Start with a question, not a genre

The most common mistake is starting from a label: "gay music", "LGBT pop", "Pride". Those labels are so big the list ends up a junk drawer. I'd rather start with a concrete question. Who is it for. For what moment. What do you want that person to feel when it ends.

A playlist for cooking with your boyfriend on a Sunday looks nothing like one for the drive to the beach. A playlist for the day after a break-up isn't the same as one for the day you finally stop missing him. The smaller the question, the better the playlist.

It also helps to name it before you add the first song. A good name holds you to something. Call it "To get over Javi" and you already know a happy love song doesn't belong there, however much you love it.

Mix eras without apologising

Queer pop in Spanish didn't start yesterday. There's copla, the old Spanish torch song; there's the light pop of the sixties and seventies; there's eighties and nineties pop the community adopted even though nobody wrote it with us in mind. And there's everything being made now, much of it far from the big radio stations.

A good queer Spanish-language playlist, to me, leaps across all of that without any hang-ups. A dramatic copla followed by something electronic from this year. A village-fiesta number after an alternative track almost nobody knows. The contrast makes you hear both better. And it tells a story too: how we spent decades claiming songs until we started having our own.

Not everything you include has to be by LGBT people. Part of the queer tradition is precisely reading between the lines of songs that weren't meant for us. But I'd suggest that at least half the playlist comes from people speaking from the inside.

Cross the Atlantic

If you only include songs from Spain, or from just one country in the Americas, the playlist limps. Queer Spanish is spoken in many accents, and every place has its own way of laughing, crying and flirting. Mixing accents gives a playlist a texture you can't get any other way.

A trick I use: alternate. One from here, one from over there. Not as a rigid rule, because sometimes two songs from the same country call to each other, but as a habit. In the end the playlist sounds like a bar where people from all over have ended up together, which is the closest thing I know to a community.

Order is almost everything

People underestimate order. A playlist of the best songs in the world on random is worse than a decent one in a good order. Think of the first song as a front door: it has to invite you in without shouting. The second can lift things. Somewhere in the middle, something unexpected. And the ending, with care, because that's what people remember.

Watch the transitions too. Two songs in very different keys back to back can grate. Two songs with the same energy for twenty minutes bore. You have to go up and down, like a long conversation.

And don't overdo it. A four-hundred-song playlist is a warehouse. Between twenty and forty is, for me, where a playlist still has a personality.

Now, since it would be odd to write all this without mentioning my own work, here's where I'd put a few PLANETA GAYFOLK songs. With the warning that it's my playlist, not yours.

«La dieta del cucurucho» (The ice-cream-cone diet) I'd put on a summer playlist, if only for the title, which already smells of ice cream and terraces. «No quiero otro novio cojín» (I don't want another cushion boyfriend) and «La vecina cotilla» (The nosy neighbour) work on a playlist for laughing with friends before going out, that moment when everyone's getting ready and nobody can find their keys. «Mi novio de Albacete» (My boyfriend from Albacete) and «Mitad Venezuela, mitad Pakistán» (Half Venezuela, half Pakistan) have names that play with where people come from, and I'd love to see them on a playlist about loves from far away. «La primera drag» (The first drag queen) I picture on a Pride playlist, next to songs about stepping onto a stage. And «Tan Cateto» (Such a bumpkin), the song a lot of people found me through on TikTok, I'd put wherever a bit of cheek is needed.

If you want something longer, the GAYFOLK trilogy works as a ready-made, ready-ordered playlist. The three albums, «Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado GAYFOLK», «Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK» and «El día de la liberación», tell one story in three acts. There I set the order, and I'd ask you not to shuffle it.

One last habit. Share the playlist. A queer playlist kept just for yourself is fine, but one you send to someone going through a rough patch, or to a friend who's just come out, becomes something else. A small gift that says "you're not alone" without having to say it.

My songs are on Spotify, Deezer and YouTube, and all the lyrics are at mikesaintlouis.com.