Two years of releasing singles and music videos: what I learnt about consistency

Today I want to tell you about something I've been chewing over for a while. I recently sat down to look at everything I've released in these two years of work on PLANETA GAYFOLK, and I came up with two figures I'm still struggling to take in: 273 singles and more than 280 music videos. Plus hundreds of short videos I no longer even try to count.

Written down like that, it reads like a company's annual report. Living it was something else, and a lot less tidy.

The pace

There was no master plan. Or there was, but it changed so many times that calling it a plan would be a lie. What there was, though, was a habit: putting things out. One song, then another. One music video, then the next. There were busy stretches and quieter ones, and I didn't always get to choose which was which.

The odd thing about consistency is that you can't see it from the inside. One day looks like nothing. So does one week. It's when you look back, with two years behind you, that you see the mountain and wonder how you got to the top when all you remember is taking small steps.

The discipline

People imagine that with artificial intelligence the songs just appear. That's not how it works with me. I write all the lyrics. I produce the music with AI tools, but I'm the one who decides what stays and what goes, and a lot goes. Then comes everything that isn't the song: the cover, the final title, the moment to release it, and above all the music videos, which I direct. The fact that there are more videos than singles already tells you something about where my time has gone.

My discipline has never been the 5 a.m. photo with a coffee and a leather planner. It's been something duller. Finishing what I start before opening something new. Not leaving a video half done until tomorrow, because tomorrow there'll be another song waiting and yesterday's job turns into a debt. When you work alone, small debts pile up very fast.

And I learnt something else that took me a while to accept. Consistency doesn't depend on enthusiasm. Some days you run on desire and some days on sheer habit. Both work. For a long time I thought that if I didn't feel like it, whatever came out would be worse. Not always. Some of my favourite lyrics were written on grey days, with no inspiration whatsoever, just because it was time to sit down.

The doubts

I had plenty, and some are still there.

The first is the obvious one: whether I'm releasing too much. With so many songs coming out, each one has less room for someone to listen to it calmly before the next one arrives. There are songs from these two years that I think are really good and that slipped by almost on tiptoe, buried by the ones around them. That makes me genuinely sad, the kind of sad a blog post can't fix.

The second doubt is more personal. I wondered whether I was repeating myself. Whether I was writing the same song with a different title. Rereading the lyrics now, the honest answer is: sometimes yes, mostly no. The themes are the same because they're my themes: gay love, ex-boyfriends, pride, self-esteem, everyday life. But the stories change. Between «La primera drag» ("The first drag queen") and «Mitad Venezuela, mitad Pakistán» ("Half Venezuela, half Pakistan"), for instance, the titles alone are worlds apart. That reassures me quite a lot.

And then there's the tiredness. I'm not going to make an epic of it. It's tiring. There are moments when consistency looks an awful lot like stubbornness, and I can't always tell them apart.

What I'd do differently

There are things I don't regret. Releasing so much forced me to let go of perfectionism, which in my case was an elegant way of never finishing anything. And it has left me with a big catalogue I can now draw on, put in order and tell in other ways.

But I'd change the spacing. I'd leave more air between songs, so that each single had a few days of life of its own before the next one came out. I'd rather someone listened closely to ten of my songs than skimmed through fifty without remembering any.

I'd also have thought much earlier about how people would find them. For almost all of this time, the website that exists now didn't. Since October, every song has its own page on mikesaintlouis.com, with its music video, its complete lyrics and its Spotify link, and there's a search box and an A-to-Z lyrics section. I wish I'd built it at the start. It would have helped nobody get lost among so many titles, starting with me, since I've occasionally had to hunt for one of my own lyrics like anyone else.

The GAYFOLK trilogy is partly an answer to all this. Taking material from these two years and telling it as a single story in three acts, with a beginning and an end, instead of leaving it loose in an endless list. All three albums can be downloaded for free, no sign-up, and to me they're the friendliest way into everything else.

I don't know what the next two years will look like. Slower, I suspect. What I do know is that without this slightly pig-headed consistency I'd have nothing to put in order, and no piece like this one to write to you.

The whole catalogue, with its lyrics, is at mikesaintlouis.com.