The whole lyric, at home: why I keep every song written down on my website

You can listen to a song a thousand times without knowing what it says. It happens with songs in English, it happens with songs playing in the background at a bar, and it happens, more than you'd think, with songs in your own language. You hear a word that isn't there, you invent a line, you sing something in the shower that the writer never wrote.

I write my lyrics. I produce the music with artificial intelligence, which is why I call myself the first AI singer-songwriter. But the lyrics come out of me word by word. And that's why, on mikesaintlouis.com, every song has its lyrics, complete, on its own page, and all of them together in the lyrics archive.

I've written elsewhere about how I sorted them and what I learned doing it. Today I want to talk about the deeper why. Not the how, but the reason. There are three, and they map onto three words: archive, memory and authorship.

What you hear isn't what you read

A song has two lives. One is heard: it lasts a few minutes, moves fast, blends the voice with the music and waits for no one. The other is read: it stays still, you can go back, you can stop at a comma.

Music platforms are built for the first life. That's fine; that's what they're for. In some apps the lyrics scroll line by line as the song plays, in others they don't appear at all, and you almost never see them whole, top to bottom, as a text. I said it in What Spotify doesn't tell you about an artist: a listening platform is built for listening, and reading is a different activity.

My lyrics depend a lot on that second life. They play with twists, with the stock phrase that turns at the end, with the joke you only get when you see the whole verse. If the lyrics just float past, half of it is lost. So I need somewhere they can stay still.

Reason one: the archive

An archive isn't a shop window. In a shop window you put what looks best. In an archive you keep everything, what shines and what doesn't.

The most-played songs end up hiding the rest. That's the law of any chart: what's at the top stays at the top. A lyrics archive works the other way. Every song has its place, and a lyric hardly anyone has read weighs the same as the best known.

Some of my lyrics make me laugh and some are hard to reread. "Entre cuatro paredes" ("Between four walls"), for example, is a lyric made of nos, barely pausing for breath, and it ends with a very small line: «No, pero algo en mí pide respirar», "No, but something in me is asking to breathe". Heard in passing, that line can slip by. Written down, it stays. And for me it's the heart of the song.

An archive also protects against typos. Lyrics that circulate online, transcribed by ear, sometimes have words swapped, lines missing or a chorus cut short. It's nothing terrible, but the lyric stops being mine. When there's an original published by its author, anyone can compare. That original is what I put on my website.

Reason two: memory

The second reason is more personal. Lyrics are a kind of diary.

I wrote each song at a particular moment, with a particular anger, a particular joke or a particular sadness. When I reread them, I find what was going round my head back then. Some things don't hurt any more. Others still do. And that's information about me too.

I don't remember all my lyrics line by line. I admitted as much in the piece about my website's search box. If the lyrics only existed in the audio, my own memory would depend on listening to every song one by one. With the lyrics written down, memory can be looked up.

Then there's other people's memory. A song that gets played a lot one summer is forgotten by the next. That's normal: music renews itself constantly. But a text published somewhere stable is still there when the song isn't playing anywhere. Someone can find it years later, looking for a phrase they heard once and can't place.

In "Nadie hablará de mí cuando haya muerto" ("Nobody will talk about me when I'm dead") I wrote, with black humour, about how quickly a person is forgotten: «Y en dos semanas eso es pasado», "And in two weeks that's the past". The song laughs at that forgetting. The archive, on the other hand, tries to make it a little harder.

Reason three: authorship

This is the reason that matters most to me, and the one most tied to how I work.

When people learn my music is made with AI, they sometimes assume all of it is. That the machine did everything on its own. It didn't. I write the lyrics. I correct them, cross them out, write them again. No tool gives me the ideas, the characters or the jokes. I explained this calmly in Artificial intelligence and authorship.

Publishing the full lyrics, signed, on my own website is the clearest way to say it without speeches. Here's the text. I wrote it. Read it.

It isn't just a matter of pride. Spanish law is fairly clear about this. The Intellectual Property Act opens by saying that the intellectual property of a work belongs to its author by the mere fact of creating it. Among the protected works it expressly lists musical compositions, with or without lyrics. And among the author's moral rights, which the law itself describes as unwaivable, are the right to be recognised as the author and the right to have the integrity of the work respected.

I'm not a lawyer and I won't read more into the law than it says. But I like reading those two ideas together: recognition and integrity. Lyrics published by their author, complete and unchanged, are exactly that. They say who wrote them and exactly what they say.

In "Discutiendo con la IA" ("Arguing with the AI") I made fun of people who think using these tools is just «dar a un botón», "pressing a button". The full lyrics of that song, posted on my website, answer better than any argument. No button writes that for me.

My house, my rules

There's something else I've learned over the years: anything that depends on someone else can disappear. An app changes its design and removes a feature. A lyrics site shuts down. A social network decides long texts don't interest it any more. I'm not complaining. That's how things that aren't yours work.

My website is mine. There I decide how a lyric looks, how it's ordered, whether it has a note or an explanation beside it. There I can fix a typo the same day I spot it. There the lyrics don't compete with an advert or with the next song the app wants you to hear.

That's why every song has its own page, with its lyrics, its music video and the links to listen wherever you prefer. Platforms are the street where people walk by. The website is the house. You need both, but they don't do the same thing.

Who all this is for

I think of several people when I post a lyric.

I think of people listening in another language. My audience is in Spain, Latin America and the rest of Europe, and not everyone catches a Madrid expression first time. With the lyrics in front of them, they can stop, look up a word, wonder what it means.

I think of people who have trouble hearing, or can't hear at all. For them, written lyrics aren't an extra: they are the song.

I think of people who write. Many of the people who read this blog also write lyrics, and reading other people's is the best school I know. Having them whole, with verses and chorus in their place, lets you see how a song is built from the inside.

And I think of myself a few years from now, looking up what I used to say about something that seems important today.

What's still missing

Not everything is finished. I'm adding lyrics to the archive little by little, and some songs are still waiting for theirs. Checking each lyric against the version you actually hear takes time, and I'd rather be slow than publish something that doesn't match.

Nor do I think a lyric is better for being written down. Lots of songs stand on their own without anyone reading a line. But mine lean heavily on words. Take the words away and less is left than you'd think.

An invitation

If you feel like it, try something. Pick a song of mine you've heard a few times and read its lyrics in the archive without the music. Notice what you hadn't heard. The word you thought was a different one. The line that, read on the page, changes tone.

That's why I keep every lyric on my website. So that a song, as well as being heard, can be read, reread and remembered. And so that whoever reads it knows who wrote it.