What they say lives on the moon: «Canguros» and the promises we choose to believe

A bearded guy in sunglasses and a tracksuit jacket in loud eighties colours is flying flat out over a city full of palm trees, fist first, like a superhero from a video-rental shop. Kangaroos are flying all around him. Four or five of them, also in sunglasses, one with the face of someone having the time of his life. Behind them sits an enormous sun sliced into stripes, a pink sky, candyfloss clouds, and the title in yellow and fuchsia neon, with that glow a VHS tape gets after one too many trips through the player.

That’s the cover of «Canguros», Spanish for kangaroos. If you look at it before hearing the song, you expect a village-fiesta banger, something to jump around to with a drink in your hand. Then you press play and get something else entirely. A goodbye song. One of the tenderest I have, with a lighthouse, a wooden boat, mermaids, and someone who has no idea how to let go of the other person’s hand.

It’s on «Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK», the second album of the trilogy, and the song’s own page on the blog already explains what it’s about and gives you the full lyrics. I don’t want to repeat any of that here. I want to look at two little words that come back so often you almost stop seeing them: dicen que. They say that. Because «Canguros» is built as a list of rumours, and the interesting part is which ones the person speaking believes, and which ones they don’t.

They say, they say, they say

Count them. The lyrics open with three lines in a row that start the same way. They say the world has an edge. They say there’s a lighthouse in the bay. They say if you follow a certain star you’ll end up on a wooden boat. Nobody says who’s saying it. No source, no witness, no grandmother with a name and a surname. Just that faceless plural Spanish uses for everything we can’t prove.

I love that way of talking because it’s how people really talk. On the estate, in the queue at the butcher’s, in the family WhatsApp group. They say the rent’s going up. They say the woman on the fourth floor has split up with her husband. They say the bar downstairs is closing in January. «Dicen que» is the grammar of gossip, and it’s also the grammar of legend. The two are first cousins: stories passed from mouth to mouth that nobody bothers to check, because the fun is in telling them.

In «Canguros» that gossip grammar is put to work on something huge. The rumours aren’t about the neighbour, they’re about the whole world. Where it ends, which light guides you, where a star will take you. It’s as if someone took the tone of the hairdresser’s and used it to do cosmology.

The lighthouse, the star and the wooden boat

Those first three images have something in common: they’re all for finding your way. The edge of the world tells you how far you can go. The lighthouse tells you where the coast is. The star tells you which way to head. And the reward for following it is ending up on a wooden boat, which is the oldest picture there is of someone leaving.

There’s nothing modern about that opening. No screens, no apps, no airports. It’s an old harbour, the kind you find in the stories someone read to you as a child. And that clashes wildly with the cover, which is all neon, synths and Miami palm trees. I adore that clash. The cover promises a party in outer space, and the lyrics sit you down on a wooden jetty to stare at the horizon.

I think both are telling the same story from different places. The man flying fist first is running off somewhere, just like the boat. The difference is that the boat is slow and the superhero is fast. But both of them are leaving. And in both pictures there’s someone left on dry land, watching the other one shrink to a dot.

I have to go

The chorus is where the list of rumours breaks and the first person steps in. The call of the sea comes back, that background music that makes you leave, and then comes the bluntest line in the whole song: «Me tengo que ir». I have to go. Four words in Spanish. No explanation. It doesn’t say why, or where, or for how long.

And straight after it comes the knot, the reason the song exists at all. Seeing you here, «No me puedo despedir». I can’t say goodbye. The person speaking knows they’re leaving, has accepted it, says it plainly, but the moment the other one is standing there, they freeze. They can leave. What they can’t do is say goodbye.

That happens to everyone and hardly anyone talks about it. Real goodbyes don’t happen on a platform with a white handkerchief. They happen on the landing, with the suitcase already in the lift, when someone says «right then» for the fifth time and nobody moves. They happen in the car with the engine running, when you’ve already said goodbye and you wind the window down again to say something silly. That jammed goodbye, the one that drags on because neither of you wants to be the first to let go, is the one in the chorus.

Mermaids and mermen

Then comes my favourite word in the whole lyric. «Dicen que hay sirenas y sirenos». They say there are mermaids and mermen. Except «sirenos» isn’t really a word in Spanish. The mermaid is a «sirena», always feminine, and the lyric simply invents her masculine twin, as if it were nothing. In the old fairy tales the mermaid is always a girl, and the sailor who loses his head over her is always a boy. Here the mythology comes with both options as standard.

To me that is so very this planet. GAYFOLK is full of little corrections like that, quiet ones that change everything. You don’t need a speech. You just add a word the fairy-tale dictionary forgot. If there are mermaids, there are mermen too, and if a sailor falls for a merman, then he falls for a merman and that’s that. The sea doesn’t ask questions.

The word is funny, too. Sirenos. It has a playground feel, like when you’d invent the masculine of anything just to make your cousins laugh. And the published lyrics repeat it again and again in the closing stretch, almost on its own, like an echo left floating once the rest of the song has faded out.

Look me in the eye, I don’t believe you

But watch out, because here comes the twist. Right after the mermaids and mermen, the person speaking says look me in the eye, and lets slip a flat «no te creo». I don’t believe you. Believe what, exactly? The legends, sure. Mermen, come off it. But it could also be the other person. Whatever they’re saying right then, in the doorway, before the departure.

And suddenly the list of rumours turns into a test. Up to now everything was things people say. Now there’s someone standing right there saying something, and the answer is suspicion. Look me in the eye. Which is exactly what we tell someone when we suspect they’re selling us a story.

I find it a very honest line. Because when someone leaves, or when you’re the one leaving, there’s a moment when everything anyone says sounds like a fairy tale. I’ll call you. This changes nothing. See you soon. They’re lighthouse lines, star lines, lines meant to keep you on course, and that’s exactly why they’re so hard to believe. Nobody really knows if they’ll call.

The only rumour that matters

And right in the middle of that list there’s a line with nothing fantastical about it. They say the most beautiful thing in the world is when someone tells you they love you. No lighthouses, no boats, no mermen. Just that.

It’s the only legend in the song you can actually check. The rest you can’t. Nobody has gone to the edge of the world to have a look. Nobody has spotted a merman in the bay. But someone telling you they love you, that you have lived, or wanted so badly it feels as if you had. And the song slips it in among the rumours like someone hiding one real card in a deck of trick ones.

I like to think the whole song is built to get to that line. That all the legends around it are the wrapping, the bright paper on the present. You talk about mermaids and stars because you’re too shy to talk straight about the other thing. And when you finally dare, you still put a «they say» in front of it, just in case, so it doesn’t look like you’re the one saying it.

There are kangaroos on the moon

And then comes the title. «Y dicen que en la luna hay canguros». And they say there are kangaroos on the moon. It’s the most absurd rumour on the list and, at the same time, the one that comes back the most. Kangaroos bouncing between galaxies, all over the world. It makes no sense whatsoever, which is exactly why it works.

When someone goes far away, the distance gets so big it turns abstract. It stops being kilometres and becomes another galaxy. And to bear that, sometimes you need a daft picture, something that makes you smile while it hurts. Kangaroos on the moon. Which is a way of telling the other one: I don’t know where you’ll be, but I like to imagine there’s something bouncing around up there that’s going to make you laugh.

Besides, the kangaroo is an animal that moves in huge leaps, never in a straight line, always looking about to shoot off. It’s a there-and-back animal. It jumps, it lands, it jumps again. Maybe that’s why it feels like the perfect creature for a goodbye song that, deep down, doesn’t want to be a final goodbye.

Come back, you promised, I’ll wait

There’s a stretch of the lyric that feels like some of the most naked writing I’ve done. After the kangaroos, the person speaking says they’ve been told they’ll find the other one again. And then, one word to a line: come back, you promised, I’ll wait.

Three loose words in Spanish, each on its own line, like three steps. First the plea. Then the reproach, which is more of a reminder than a complaint: you promised. And finally the decision: I’m staying right here, waiting. Three lines hold a whole love story, crisis and open ending included.

The curious thing is that this stretch changes the point of view. In the chorus, the one who has to leave seems to be the one speaking. Here, though, the speaker is the one who waits. It could be the same person at two different moments, or it could be the two people in the story taking turns. The lyric doesn’t say, and I don’t want to say either. I like that everyone gets to stand on whichever side of the jetty is theirs.

A harbour lullaby under neon

If I had to explain «Canguros» to someone who’s never heard it, I’d say it’s a sailor’s lullaby played in an eighties nightclub. It has the sweetness of a cradle song, that chorus that keeps coming back and rocks you, and at the same time the cover and the title push it towards something far more pop and far more unhinged.

There are other songs in my catalogue that play at being lullabies, like «Nana para adultos», a lullaby for grown-ups, but this one has a touch of harbour copla the others don’t. The sea, the lighthouse, the boat, the one who leaves and the one who stays. Those are the ingredients of half the Spanish coplas ever written. Only here, instead of a sailor in a cap, you get kangaroos in sunglasses.

And that, to me, is GAYFOLK at its purest. Take a tradition that’s deeply ours, as old as the hills, and drop something into it that doesn’t belong, so it breathes differently. I do that in much wilder songs, but here I do it gently, almost without you noticing.

Between «Aquí escupo» and «No Contact»

In the list of singles, «Canguros» sits right between «Aquí escupo» and «No Contact». And the neighbourhood is telling.

«Aquí escupo», here I spit, is pure rage: broken heels, a stained skirt, a list of things spat onto the floor so you can keep on living. «No Contact» is the song of someone who’s already cut the cord: shutting doors, not looking back, heading to the dancefloor to shine without the other one. And in between sits «Canguros», which is the opposite of both. No rage and no cutting off. Just someone who has to leave and doesn’t know how, and someone who stays and decides to wait.

Play the three back to back and they sound like three stages of the same break-up, shuffled. First the fury, then the tenderness, finally the slammed door. And I love that the tenderness ends up in the middle, squeezed between the other two, as if it were the part we hardly ever dare to show.

Whoever stays on shore

There are plenty of songs about people who leave. Far fewer about the ones who stay. And I think «Canguros» is, above all, a song for whoever stays on dry land. The one watching the lighthouse, the one hearing talk of stars and boats, the one who ends up saying I’ll wait.

We all know that figure. The friend who stays in Madrid when you move to Berlin on a grant. The boyfriend who can’t move with you. The mother waving you off at Barajas. The boy you met on the beach one summer who lives a thousand kilometres away. And in the queer world, so many people have gone far away precisely so they could be who they are, leaving behind someone who loved them but couldn’t come along.

I don’t want to give the song one particular face. The lyric doesn’t have one and it’s right that it doesn’t. But when I think about it, I picture all those people on a jetty, staring at the horizon and telling themselves that maybe, just maybe, there are kangaroos on the moon.

For a departure gate

«Canguros» is for listening to in the places where people say goodbye. A coach station at seven in the morning. The gate for a cheap flight, eyes still puffy. The last coffee at the usual bar before a move. The landing, with the suitcase already in the lift.

It works the other way round too, for whoever stays. For the first night in a half-empty flat. For when you notice the other one is online at strange hours because they live in another time zone. For when you look at the moon from the window and catch yourself thinking they might be looking at it too, even if it’s a different moon, even if it’s a different hour.

And if you push me, it’s also for listening to with someone beside you whom you still haven’t told you love them. In case it gives you the nudge.

A song with no villain

Go through my catalogue and you’ll see that a lot of songs have a bad guy. The narcissist, the lying ex, the bargain-bin coordinator, the hater of the week. I like pointing the finger and naming whoever does the damage, because I believe keeping quiet is another way of protecting them.

«Canguros» has no bad guy. Nobody cheats on anybody, nobody manipulates, nobody laughs at the other. There are two people who love each other and a circumstance that pulls them apart. We don’t even know what that circumstance is. It could be a job, a family, a country that won’t let you live in peace, or simply life pulling in different directions. The lyric isn’t looking for anyone to blame.

And on a planet as scrappy as GAYFOLK, that’s almost a rarity. When I write from rage I have a thousand words at hand: creative insults, horror-film comparisons, lists of grievances. When I write from tenderness I’m left with very little. Lighthouse, boat, star, I’ll wait. But maybe that’s why this song feels so important on the album. It proves this planet also has room for stories where nobody is to blame and it still hurts.

There is some mistrust, mind. The «I don’t believe you» is right there. But it isn’t the mistrust of someone who’s caught the other in a lie. It’s the mistrust of someone who’s scared. Scared the promise will turn into just another rumour, that the «I love you» will end up as one more legend of the bay. And faced with that fear, the song doesn’t answer by slamming the door. It answers by waiting.

The rumour I choose to believe

In the end, what «Canguros» leaves me with is a very simple idea. We all go through life surrounded by things people say. That love lasts three years, that exes always come back, that the world ends somewhere. And each of us chooses which rumours to believe.

The person in the song doesn’t trust the mermen, the promises, the words spoken in doorways. But they believe two things. That the most beautiful thing in the world is someone telling you they love you. And that there are kangaroos on the moon. One is the most serious truth there is, and the other is the silliest nonsense. And both do the same job: they get you through the wait.

If anyone asks what makes me «the first AI songwriter», I’d say this: writing a lyric where a piece of nonsense and a truth hold hands. The music and the vocals are made by machines working with me. But the decision to put kangaroos on the moon in a goodbye song is mine, and it’s one I’m proudest of.

If you fancy staying on this softer side of the catalogue, there’s a piece on the blog about why we need gay love songs that end well, and a guide to listening to the GAYFOLK trilogy from start to finish. And if your body is asking for the more cosmic side of the planet, there’s «Soy marica sideral», which is also about floating through space, though with a lot more attitude.

Frequently asked questions

Which album is «Canguros» on? It’s on «Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK», the second album of Mike Sain't Louis’s GAYFOLK trilogy.

What is «Canguros» about? A goodbye. Someone has to leave and, with the other person standing right there, can’t bring themselves to say goodbye. The lyric mixes sea legends, like mermaids, mermen and a lighthouse, with the most absurd rumour of all: that there are kangaroos on the moon.

Why is it called «Canguros»? Because of the final chorus, which says there are kangaroos on the moon, bouncing between galaxies. It’s the wildest image in the lyric, and it makes the distance bearable.

What’s on the cover? A bearded man in sunglasses flying over a city with palm trees, surrounded by kangaroos in sunglasses, under a pink sky and a striped eighties-style sun.

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