The photo that isn’t the end: a sunlit cover and a lyric in the dark in «El día más ideal»

First, something more important than this post.

If you’re thinking about ending your life, or about hurting yourself, don’t go through it alone. In Spain, the 024 line is free and open around the clock for anyone thinking of harming themselves, and for anyone worried about someone else. If there’s immediate danger, call 112. If you live elsewhere, your local emergency number or crisis line can help. Talking to someone, even a stranger on the other end of a phone, changes more than it seems to in that moment.

Now, the post.

A holiday cover

If you look at the cover of «El día más ideal» (“The Most Ideal Day”) without having heard the song, you’ll think it’s a summer single.

A young man walks towards the camera, his linen shirt open in the breeze. Behind him, parked by the sea, a pink Cadillac convertible with a number plate that reads SAINT. Palm trees, little white houses, a sun going down slowly. The colours are strawberry ice cream and sand at dusk. It’s an image of calm, almost like an old-fashioned cologne advert.

Then you open the lyric and it’s written entirely in capitals, like a shout or a note scribbled in a hurry, and what it says is the opposite of a holiday. The speaker believes he has reached his end. He apologises for not choosing a better day. He makes a list of everything he’s leaving undone.

This post is about that distance between the photo and the lyric. And about why I think it matters that it exists.

Writing without jokes

Anyone who knows me a little knows that almost everything I write has a joke in it. I laugh at my exes, at narcissists, at myself, at haters, at AI and at people who get angry about AI. It’s how I tell things. I’ve said it many times and I stand by it: humour tells the truth too.

But there are subjects where the joke has no place. This song is one of them.

In «El día más ideal» there’s no mockery at all. No celebrity, no brand dropped in for a laugh, no inventive insult. There are simple sentences, repeated, the kind people say when they don’t have the strength to shape them. It’s written like that, plainly, and I believe it had to be, because any ornament would have turned it into something else. Into spectacle. And this isn’t spectacle.

I won’t explain in this post where the song comes from. The lyrics say what they say, and I’m not going to lay a biography on top. What I do want to share is how I think about it, and what I want it to do for the people who hear it.

The photo of my end

The line the lyric repeats most is a sentence about a photograph. The speaker says it seems this is the photo of his end.

That word, photo, fascinates me. Because a photo is an instant. A frozen moment that looks definitive afterwards but was, at the time, just one second among many. Photos lie that way. They show you a sad face and not the burst of laughter five minutes later.

When someone is down a very deep well, they see their life as that photo. Everything seems still, fixed, with no way out. Their mind tells them this image is the last one and there won’t be any more. It’s one of the cruellest lies a suffering mind can tell, because it arrives wearing the face of certainty.

The song captures that certainty as the speaker feels it. But the title and the cover contradict it. The cover is another photo: a sunset, a car, someone walking forward. Two images from the same record. One says the end. The other says the sun also sets in order to rise again.

I wanted both to be there. For anyone who looked at the artwork and then read the lyric to feel the collision. And to hold on to the second.

An impossible title

The title is a phrase from the lyric itself: the speaker apologises for not having picked the most ideal day.

That “most ideal” is grammatically odd. “Ideal” is already a superlative; it doesn’t need the “most”. But that’s how people talk when they’re anxious, when they don’t think the sentence through, when everything comes out in a rush. I left it that way because it’s true. And because the clumsiness of the phrase says a great deal about the speaker’s state.

There’s something else in the title that I think is essential. There is no ideal day for that. There isn’t. The very idea that someone has to choose a day, that one would be better and another worse, is part of the trap of thinking the song describes. The speaker apologises for something that has no excuse and no right date, and that apology shows how far his mind is deceiving him.

Any day someone feels like this is a day to ask for help. That’s the only ideal day I know.

Apologising to people who aren’t there

There’s one feature of the lyric that breaks me every time I reread it: the speaker can’t stop apologising.

He apologises for the day. He apologises for not having made himself presentable. He wishes everyone luck, says he doesn’t want to see them cry. Here is someone who, at the worst moment of his life, is still trying not to be a bother.

That happens to many people who suffer in silence. They believe they’re a burden. They think that if they disappear, everyone else will be better off. It isn’t true. It’s depression speaking in your own voice. The people who love you don’t prefer your absence. They’d rather you rang them at four in the morning, even if they don’t know what to say.

I think it’s important to say this plainly, because a song can leave things hanging and a post shouldn’t. The speaker in «El día más ideal» is wrong about the thing that matters most. He is not surplus.

Mum on the phone

There’s a scene in the lyric that isn’t a thought but a forecast. The speaker imagines what will happen the next day: someone from work will ring his mother, and she’ll answer that her son hasn’t read her messages either, that he hasn’t even opened WhatsApp.

I wrote that scene knowing it was the hardest in the song. Because it’s the only one where another real person appears, with her own worry, at the other end of a line. A mother staring at her phone, waiting for the blue ticks. Anyone who has had a loved one go quiet knows that wait.

That scene is also, for me, the key to the song. Because it proves the speaker isn’t alone, even if he feels he is. Someone is writing to him. Someone notices his silence. There’s a thread.

The threads are there even when your mind says they aren’t. A mother, a friend, a colleague who calls when you don’t turn up. The animals waiting to be fed. If you’re reading this from a dark place, think of just one of those threads and pull on it. Send a message. Answer the one you’ve been sent. Call 024.

The capitals

I said the official lyric is set in capitals. I want to explain how I read that.

Capitals, in a message, read as shouting. But there’s no shouting in this lyric. There are short, tired, repeated sentences. Here the capitals work differently: like the handwriting of someone dashing off a note without caring about the form. Like a sign. Like something meant to be seen.

To me they’re the part of the song that asks to be read. That asks someone to notice. Whoever writes in capitals wants to be heard, even while saying goodbye.

This happens a lot in real life. Many people who are thinking of harming themselves say so in some way beforehand: an odd remark, a goodbye that comes out of nowhere, an out-of-place “I wish you all the best”, an unexpected gift of their belongings. Not always, but often. If someone around you says things like that, don’t let it slide. Ask them directly how they are and whether they’re thinking about hurting themselves. Asking doesn’t put the idea into anyone’s head. Quite the opposite: it gives them permission to talk.

What the song can’t know

There’s one thing the song can’t know, because it’s written from inside the well: what comes after the photo.

The lyric ends the way it begins, with repeated goodbyes, with the line about the photo, with the apology for the day. It’s circular, the way a trapped mind is circular. It doesn’t move forward. It has no way-out line.

But people aren’t songs. People have tomorrows the song doesn’t tell. They have therapy that works after several attempts, medication that takes weeks to kick in and then does, friends who turn up, dogs who demand their walk, Sunday afternoons that suddenly become bearable again. None of that fits in a lyric written at the worst moment. That’s why it matters so much to remember that the lyric isn’t the end of the story, just a photo of one moment.

There’s one thing I do know, because I write songs: songs are written in a moment, but life carries on after the last line. There’s always an afterwards the song can’t see.

Why make a song like this

It’s fair to ask whether it’s right to make songs about this. It’s a fair question and I want to answer it.

I believe talking about pain is better than keeping quiet about it. For years, suicide was something nobody talked about at home, at school or on television, and that silence protected no one. Quite the reverse. Many people who are suffering feel that what’s happening to them is so strange and so shameful it can’t be spoken.

A song can do one small but real thing: tell someone they’re not the only one who has felt this. That other people have had these thoughts, have written them down, and are still here. Sometimes that opens a door.

But a song carries responsibility too. It can’t present the end as a beautiful way out, or as revenge, or as something romantic. That’s why this lyric has nothing glamorous in it: no heroics, no scenery, no grand gesture. There are pyjamas, uncombed hair, unbrushed teeth, an unchecked phone. The saddest thing in the world is the most ordinary thing in the world. And the song doesn’t prettify it.

The glamour is on the cover, deliberately, and outside the lyric. As a reminder that the world out there still has sunsets.

Where it sits on the album

«El día más ideal» is part of «Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado GAYFOLK», the first album of the trilogy. It’s an album full of party songs, of heartbreak with a wink, of larger-than-life characters. And in the middle of all that, there’s this.

It matters to me that it sits in the middle and not off to one side. Because that’s how life is for many people: celebration and sadness live side by side, sometimes on the same day. Some people leave a night of laughter and get home alone with a thought they don’t tell anyone.

If you’d like to hear the whole album, the Planeta Gayfolk project page explains how it’s organised, and the discography has every song with its own page. This song’s page, with the description of the cover, is here on the blog.

Neighbouring songs

Other songs of mine talk about mental health from different angles, and if this one has touched you, it might help to listen to them too.

«La música me está salvando» (“Music Is Saving Me”) is almost the opposite of «El día más ideal»: someone who finds in music something that holds them up, and shouts it with fury and joy. A word of caution: music keeps you company, but it doesn’t replace a professional; that song is a celebration, not a prescription. «Llorar» (“To Cry”) is about crying without apologising, letting the tears come. And «No me aparece una ilusión» describes that grey state where nothing appeals, which so many people know and so few name.

They’re not therapy. They’re songs. But songs can sometimes keep you company while you find real help. All my lyrics are in the lyrics section if you’d like to read them slowly.

How it was made

A note on production, so it’s clear how I work.

I wrote the lyric myself, without AI. The music and vocals are made with artificial intelligence tools, which I direct, choosing and discarding until the song sounds the way I need. I go into it more on my About page.

With a subject like this, the responsibility doesn’t end with the lyric. Every decision, from the cover to the description on the song’s page, has to think about who is going to come across the song and in what state. That’s why the song page talks about the cover, and why this post talks about 024 before anything else.

A message in time

The scene with the unopened WhatsApp has made me think a lot about a habit we should all have more of.

We live surrounded by messages. Family groups, work groups, memes, four-minute voice notes, stickers. Which is exactly why it’s easy not to notice when someone stops replying. One person’s silence gets lost in everyone else’s noise.

Here’s a very small suggestion. Think of someone you haven’t heard from in a while. Someone who used to write and doesn’t any more. Someone who has slowly faded out of the group chats. Message them. No speech needed: “hey, I was thinking of you, how are you?” is enough. If they say they’re fine, great, you’ve brightened a day. If they say something else, you’ve opened a door that perhaps nobody else was going to open.

In the song, the mother writes and nobody answers. In life, sometimes all it takes is for someone to write in time.

If someone worries you

Many people who read about songs like this aren’t down the well but at its edge, looking at someone they love who is inside. For them, a few simple things that professionals recommend and that I repeat because they seem like common sense.

• Ask directly. “Are you thinking about hurting yourself?” Calmly, without drama. Asking doesn’t give anyone ideas; it opens the door for them to tell you.
• Listen without correcting. You don’t need answers. You don’t need to talk them into anything in that conversation. Being there and not judging is enough.
• Don’t keep it secret if there’s risk. If they tell you they’re thinking of harming themselves, get help even if they ask you not to tell. You can call 024 together.
• If the danger is immediate, don’t leave them alone, and call 112.
• And look after yourself too. Supporting someone through this is exhausting. 024 is there for family and friends as well.

Small things. None of them requires being a psychologist. All of them can make a difference.

Listening with care

One last suggestion, this one for whoever listens to the song.

If you’re going through a rough patch, «El día más ideal» might not be the song you need today. That’s fine. You don’t need to hear it to understand it, or for this post to make sense. If you listen and notice it leaves you worse, that a line has stuck to you and isn’t doing you any good, stop. Put something else on. Go for a walk. Message someone. Songs are there to keep you company, not to pull you further down.

And if you listen and recognise yourself in it, take it as a signal, not a destiny. Recognising yourself in a lyric like this means something is hurting a lot, and what hurts needs to be seen by a doctor, a psychologist or someone at 024, just as you’d have a broken bone looked at. It isn’t weakness. It’s going to A&E for something nobody can see.

If the song is useful at all, it’s because it puts into words what is sometimes hard to name. Use those words to ask for help. Tell someone: “I feel like that song.” It’s a way to begin.

A palette that doesn’t lie

Back to the cover to finish, because in the end it’s what matters most to me about the whole thing.

In other songs of mine the cover is a joke or a wink. In this one, the reason is simpler: sadness isn’t the only thing that exists, even though it feels that way when you’re sad. The cover doesn’t deny the lyric. It keeps it company from the outside. It says: there’s a sunset, there’s a sea, there’s a ridiculous pink car with a number plate that says SAINT, there’s someone walking forward with his shirt open.

The young man on the cover doesn’t know what the lyric says. Or perhaps he does, and has decided to keep walking. I like to think so.

If it’s you

I want to finish by speaking to you directly, in case you’re the one in that photo right now.

You don’t need a plan to ask for help. You don’t need to be sure of anything. You don’t need to explain it well. It’s enough to say “I’m not OK” to someone. A friend, your mum, your GP, someone at 024. If you feel you’re in danger now, call 112 or go to A&E.

What you feel is real, but it isn’t final, even if it seems so. The photo isn’t the end. It’s just a photo.

And if you’re the one worried about somebody, don’t wait for the ideal day to ask. Ask today.

Frequently asked questions

What is «El día más ideal» about?

It’s a lyric written from inside the head of someone thinking about disappearing: he apologises, says goodbye and lists what he’s leaving undone. It has no jokes at all. It contrasts with a bright cover, a sunset with a pink Cadillac by the sea. The lyrics are at gayfolkplanet.com/letras/el-dia-mas-ideal.

What should I do if I recognise myself in the song?

Talk to someone today. In Spain you can call 024, the suicide-prevention line, free and at any hour. If there’s immediate danger, call 112. Elsewhere, contact your local emergency number or crisis line.

Which album is it on?

«Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado GAYFOLK», the first album of Mike Sain't Louis’s GAYFOLK trilogy.

Who made it?

The lyrics are by Mike Sain't Louis, lyricist, composer and music producer from Madrid. The music and vocals are made with artificial intelligence tools.