Writing to be danced to and writing to be read

There are two imaginary readers who perch on my shoulder whenever I write a lyric. One is on a dance floor, drink in hand, and wants the line to land right on the beat so they can throw their arms in the air. The other is on the sofa, phone in hand, reading the full lyric on my website while the song plays, and noticing whether a rhyme is weak or a line says something worth saying. They're both right. And they almost never want the same thing.

For quite a while I thought I had to pick one. Now I think my job is to negotiate with both, knowing that in every song one of them is going to lose out a little.

What the body wants

The person dancing doesn't read. They catch fragments. They hang on to a word that repeats, a syllable that hits hard, a name they can shout at the same moment as their friends. They couldn't care less if the second line of the verse is terribly clever when it can't be made out between the kick drum and the noise of the bar. What they need is air, space, words they can chant along to even if they don't know the rest.

Writing for them forces me to cut. Shorter sentences. Open vowels at the end of a line, because they stretch better. Fewer subordinate clauses. A chorus you can understand first time round even with your back to the speaker. When a lyric of mine works in that territory, it's usually because I've had the nerve to leave it a bit silly. And I say that fondly: silly done well is fiendishly hard.

A title like «La dieta del cucurucho» ("The ice-cream-cone diet") is already working for that listener before the music starts. It has its own rhythm, it sounds like a game, it repeats without effort. It needs no explanation. It works on the dance floor because it's a pleasure to say.

What the eye wants

The other reader is demanding in a different way. Since the new website gave every lyric its own complete page, with its music video and an A-to-Z index, I know there are people who read what I write the way you read a text. They pause. They go back. They spot the repetitions that work in the song and that, on screen and without music, look like padding.

That gaze has changed the way I edit. I used to check lyrics by listening to them. Now I also read them in silence, as if someone else had written them, and ask myself whether they stand up without the production underneath. Some lines sound wonderful and look very thin on paper. Others barely register in the song and, once read, have a wit or a sadness I didn't expect.

Readers care about things dancers don't care about in the slightest. That one image doesn't contradict another. That the character in the first verse is the same one in the last. That the humour has something underneath it. That there aren't three lines in a row saying the same thing in different words just to fill out the bars.

Where they fight

The conflict almost always flares up in the same place: repetition. A dance track lives on repetition. A lyric meant to be read suffers when it repeats. If I write a chorus that says the same line four times, on the dance floor it's a gift and on the page it looks as if I've nodded off.

I don't have a neat solution. What I do is try to make the repetition change its meaning even when the words don't change. So that the same line, coming after a sad verse, lands differently from the same line coming after a funny one. When I pull it off, the dancer doesn't notice and the reader does. When I don't, I'd rather the dancer won. It's a decision, and I make it knowing what I'm giving up.

Another flashpoint is vocabulary. For someone to dance to you, the words have to be everyday ones, the kind people say in the kitchen or in a group chat. For someone to enjoy reading you, it helps to have the odd unexpected word, a curiosity that sticks. My way of mixing the two usually goes through humour and that copla flavour: copla has a habit of slipping an old-fashioned, dramatic word into the middle of an ordinary situation. That gets a laugh on the dance floor and leaves something for the slow reader.

Since the lyrics come entirely from me and I produce the musical side with artificial intelligence, directing and discarding versions until I settle on one, I have a leeway others don't: I can try the same lyric with very different arrangements and see which of the two readers wins out. Sometimes a lyric I thought was a sofa lyric finds a production that pushes it onto the dance floor. And the other way round: a song I wrote with dancing in mind ends up asking for something slower, something for close listening.

That flexibility has rid me of a prejudice or two. I no longer think danceable songs are lesser, or that the ones made for reading are more serious. PLANETA GAYFOLK is queer alternative pop and pretty camp, and camp has always known that frivolity can carry a wound inside it. What I try to do is make sure nobody feels short-changed. That the dancer gets their chorus and the reader gets their line.

There are songs where I don't manage it. Some are pure movement and, read on the page, are a list of exclamations. I'm fine with them existing. Others are so much for reading that they get in the way at a party. I'm fine with that too. With 273 singles in two years, the catalogue has room for every kind of reader to find their own songs, and for me to get it wrong in both directions.

The last thing I do before signing off on a lyric is read it under my breath and then imagine it at full blast somewhere packed with people. If both tests have at least one moment I like, I let it go. If it only passes one, I think it over. If it passes neither, into the bin it goes, however fond I am of the title.

I don't know if that's a method. It's a habit. But it has helped me write with specific people in mind, even invented ones, rather than some vague idea of an audience.

The lyrics are all at mikesaintlouis.com/letras, in case you fancy playing the sofa reader.