Liberation day, and the day after

The third album in the GAYFOLK trilogy is called «El día de la liberación», Liberation day. The other two titles are long phrases, almost full sentences. This one is short. Five words in Spanish, with a definite article in front that weighs more than it seems.

Because it isn't "a liberation". It's «el día», the day. A specific one. With a date, even if I don't say which.

Why a day and not an era

I thought about this a lot. Liberation, in real life, almost never happens in a day. It's a slow process, with steps backwards, with conversations that go badly and then get mended, or don't. Anyone who's been through something like it knows there's no single Tuesday when everything changes.

And yet we all remember days. The day you said something out loud for the first time. The day you went to your first Pride march. The day you realised you no longer cared what the man on the fifth floor thought. Those days work like marks on memory's calendar, even if what they mark took years to arrive.

The third act is one of those days. I gave it a definite article because that's how we remember them: as if they'd been unique, even when they weren't.

In the trilogy's story, the first album finds a place where you can be who you are. The second holds the longing to get there. The third is the arrival. All clear so far.

What I wasn't so clear about when I started was what you're freed from when you arrive. At first I thought of big things: laws, prejudice, fear. Then I realised that what weighs most is usually small. Lowering your voice when you mention your boyfriend in a restaurant. Switching a pronoun in an anecdote. Measuring how camp you let yourself be depending on who's around. Gestures so automatic you don't even notice them until the day you no longer have to make them.

For me, that's liberation. No more calculating. Talking at a normal volume.

Put like that it seems small, and in a way it is. Nobody's going to put up a statue to the day someone ordered two coffees out loud, one for him and one for his boyfriend, without glancing round. But anyone who's lived it knows that tiny gesture weighs more than many speeches. I wanted the third act to have the scale of those gestures, not of a parade. Though, of course, there's a parade too.

The easiest album to listen to and the hardest to make

It's the most festive of the three; anyone who's heard it knows that. But that joy carried a danger that worried me the whole way through: that it would sound like an advert. Like a sale-rack T-shirt with a rainbow printed on it. Queer celebration has been sold so much in recent years that sometimes it's hard to do it without looking like somebody's sponsor.

My way of avoiding that was not forgetting the two albums before. The party in the third act has a discovery and a wait behind it. It isn't factory-made joy. It's the joy of someone who knows what it cost. That changes the tone, even if you can dance to the songs.

The day after

Now an idea that isn't on the album, or not entirely, but came to me as I finished it.

Every liberation story has a problem: what happens the next day? Films end with people hugging in the street and the credits rolling. Nobody shows the morning after, hungover, the dishes unwashed, life still being life. The bills don't get liberated. The nosy neighbour is still nosy.

A fourth album about that would be tempting. I'm not convinced. First because trilogies have three parts, full stop. And second because I think my singles already tell the day after. Exes, self-esteem, pride, everyday life: that's what happens on the planet once you've arrived. The 273 singles I've released in two years are, in a way, everyday life on GAYFOLK. The trilogy tells you how to get there. The standalone songs tell you what people do there on any old Wednesday.

I like seeing it that way, though I didn't plan it from the start. I understood it afterwards, which is how I understand almost everything.

A doubt I can't settle

There's something about the title that makes me uneasy, and I don't want to hide it. «Liberación» is a very big word. It has history, political weight; in many places it has cost blood. Using it for a pop album full of humour with a touch of copla can look like a liberty, or downright frivolous.

I thought about it. And I kept it. Because I believe big words are also lived on a small scale, and the liberation of someone who finally talks about his boyfriend without dropping to a whisper is no less real for not making the history books. But I understand anyone who thinks I've overreached. Maybe I have. I'd rather that than give a small title to something that, for many people, isn't small at all.

Closing a trilogy, deep down, is less like a party and more like finally tidying a wardrobe: relief, a bit of tiredness, and a wish not to touch it for a while.

All three albums, in order, are free to download, no sign-up, at mikesaintlouis.com/descargas and at gayfolkplanet.com. If you've landed straight on this one, that's fine. But when it ends, go back to the beginning. The party makes more sense when you know where it came from.

The rest of my music is at mikesaintlouis.com.