How to read a lyric while you listen to it

There are people who read song lyrics and people who don't. I've always been one of the first kind, and since I write every lyric on PLANETA GAYFOLK, I have a certain interest in you being one too. But I don't want to talk you into it. I want to tell you how I do it, in case it helps.

Because reading a lyric while the song plays isn't the same as reading a poem. It's an odd activity, with its own rules, and almost nobody explains them to you.

The text runs behind or runs ahead

The first thing you notice when you read and listen at the same time is that you're never at the same pace. Either the eye races ahead or it lags behind. Reading is faster than listening. If you don't rein yourself in, you finish the verse before the music does and you're left staring at the bottom of the page, waiting for the song to catch up.

My trick is to put a finger, or the cursor, on the line that's playing. It looks like a child learning to read. It is. It works all the same.

The other option, which I use when I already know the song, is to always read one line ahead. That way the text warns you of what's coming and the music confirms it. It's a way of listening with anticipation. There's a whiff of cheating about it, but the good kind.

What the music does to the words

This is where it gets interesting. A lyric on the page and a lyric inside the track don't say exactly the same thing.

On paper, all the words weigh roughly the same. In the song, they don't. Some words stretch, some repeat, some are left alone in a bar of their own. Some syllables get swallowed. Some lines looked calm on paper and, set to music, turn into a complaint. When you read and listen at once, you watch those differences live. You see where the music underlines and where it tiptoes past.

For me, as the writer, this is the most revealing part. I write the lyric and then produce the music with artificial intelligence tools, which I direct: I try, I discard and I choose until the result sounds like what I had in my head. Very often I throw out a version because it stresses the wrong word. On paper the line is fine. With the vocals putting the weight in the wrong place, it loses all its meaning. If you read while you listen, you'll notice that in the versions I release that's been taken care of. Or I try.

One thing that surprises a lot of people when they read a lyric is how repetitive it looks. A chorus that comes back three or four times, written out on the page, can look like laziness. Heard, it doesn't.

Repetition in a song isn't redundancy. It's how memory works. The first time you hear a chorus, you understand it. The second time, you recognise it. The third time, you're waiting for it, and that's where the pleasure is. When you read the whole lyric, it's worth skimming past the repeats and watching whether anything changes. Sometimes a single word changes in the last chorus, and that word is the whole song.

I'm not saying it always happens in my songs. I'm saying it's something to look for.

Humour reads differently

My lyrics have a lot of humour, with camp and a whiff of copla, the old Spanish torch song. And written humour has a problem: it has no timing. A joke needs a pause before the punchline. On paper that pause doesn't exist, or the reader puts it in their own way.

When you read and listen at once, the music sets the pause for you. You see the whole line on the page, but the punchline reaches you when the song decides. It's a curious effect: you know what's coming and it still makes you laugh. Like when a friend tells you a joke you already know but tells it well.

It works the other way round too. Some lines look merely funny on paper and, with the music, hang on a second too long and start to hurt. I love that. It's what I love most about copla, in fact: that exaggeration, held a little longer, stops being a joke.

Where to read them

On the practical side: at mikesaintlouis.com every song has its own page with the music video, the full lyrics and the Spotify link. You can have the video on one half of the screen and the lyrics on the other. Or the song on your phone and the lyrics on your laptop. Whatever's comfortable. There's also a lyrics section sorted from A to Z, which is handy if you remember a title but not where you heard it.

The website is in Spanish and English. If someone passes you one of my songs and doesn't speak Spanish, the English page helps them follow it. It isn't the same as understanding it in the original language, but it beats being left outside.

Reading and listening at the same time is tiring. Don't do it with everything. I do it with one song, sometimes two, and then I let the rest play without looking. If you turn every listen into a close reading, you end up treating music like homework, and music isn't homework.

Pick a song that intrigues you. Read it while it plays. Then listen again without looking at the lyrics. That second listen, the one that comes after reading, is my favourite. You know what it says and at last you can let yourself go.

The full lyrics are at mikesaintlouis.com.