The search box on my website remembers what I'd already forgotten

Here's a confession that doesn't look great on an artist: I don't remember all my songs. The titles, yes, nearly all of them. But what each one says, line by line, no. I've released 273 singles and I wrote every lyric, and even so there are days when a phrase pops into my head and I can't tell whether it's new or whether I already used it a year ago in another song.

That's why, when I was putting together my website, mikesaintlouis.com, I insisted it had a search box. I was thinking of the audience, of course. But the search box's first user has been me.

Memory doesn't scale

With ten songs, you carry them in your head. With fifty, they start to blur. With more than two hundred, memory stops being reliable. It's not about age or being scatterbrained. A head just isn't built to store that much of your own writing with any precision.

I noticed it before I had the website. I'd write a lyric, fall for an image, and a little later get the nagging feeling that the image already lived in another song. Finding it was hell: opening files, trying to recall which period it might be from, listening to snippets. Often I gave up and let it slide. A repeat or two has probably slipped through, and if you find one, I beg your indulgence.

Now, with every lyric in full on the website, each on its song's page, I type a word into the search box and it shows me where I've used it. It's humiliating and useful in equal measure. Humiliating because it forces me to accept that my memory is worse than my archive. Useful because, before I sign off on a new line, I can check in a moment whether I've already worn it out somewhere else, and decide whether to repeat it on purpose or change it.

What I learn by searching myself

Running a search on your own work is a strange exercise. It shows you your tics. There are words that come back again and again, and I hadn't always noticed. Some I like; they're part of how I talk and I'm not getting rid of them. Others make me blush a little, because I lean on them as crutches when nothing better comes to mind.

It also shows me the opposite: subjects I thought I'd written loads about and, it turns out, not so much. I had the impression I never stopped going on about exes, and it's true I go on quite a bit, but the more I search, the more I see that everyday life takes up more room than I thought. The neighbours, the diets, the boyfriends with a hometown attached. «Mi novio de Albacete» (My boyfriend from Albacete), «La dieta del cucurucho» (The ice-cream-cone diet). I saw myself as a writer of heartbreak, and I'm also a writer of the ordinary.

That gap between what you think you do and what you actually do is a very healthy thing to see. Sometimes it stings.

For people arriving at the website from outside, the search box solves another problem. Lots of people hear a bit of a song in a short video and keep a line, not the title. Without a search box, that person has no way in. With one, they type what they remember and the song appears.

I like thinking about that moment. Someone with a line circling their head for days, no idea where it came from, and suddenly they find it. It's a small satisfaction I know well, because it's happened to me with other people's songs all my life.

I don't know exactly what people search for on my site. I'm curious and a little scared. I suspect there'll be searches with spelling mistakes, half-remembered titles, words I've never used. That says something too about how a song settles in a listener's memory: warped, in its own way, in their own version.

A big catalogue needs more than order

With a catalogue like mine, putting things in order isn't enough. The website has an A to Z lyrics section, the classic order, and that's fine for people who know what they want. The search box is for people who don't quite know. They're two different ways of remembering. One is the archive's way; the other is memory's, which works in leaps, by association, by a single stray word.

I think anyone who makes a lot, whether it's music, writing or anything else, ends up needing a tool like this. Not to show off the volume, but so as not to get lost inside what they've made. Your own body of work, once it grows, becomes a territory, and in a big territory you get lost without a map.

What the search box can't do

Now the less pretty part. A search box finds words, not intentions. If I search for a sad song, it won't find one. If I search for something that's said indirectly, it won't find that either. My lyrics come at things sideways, with humour hiding something else, and a search box doesn't catch that.

For that you still need to listen. Or read slowly. Or ask someone who knows the songs well, who sometimes knows more about them than I do. The search box leaves you at the song's door, but walking in is up to you.

And in my case it's also a reminder that, however much I write, I can't carry the memory of the work in my head alone. I need a place outside me to keep it. For a long time that place was a mess of files. Now it's a website.

The search box, and the 273 songs it finds, are at mikesaintlouis.com.