«Me muero», I'm dying: the exaggeration of everyday Spanish speech and my lyrics

Listen to two people talking on a café terrace in Madrid for five minutes. You'll hear that somebody died laughing, that someone else hasn't seen their cousin in a thousand years, that the waiter took an eternity and that Sunday's paella was scandalous. Nobody died. Nobody is a thousand years old. The paella, in all likelihood, was perfectly ordinary.

The Spanish spoken in Spain exaggerates enormously. And hardly anyone notices, because it's just the natural way of talking. I noticed when I paid attention to how my lyrics sounded read aloud, and saw that much of what worked for me came from there. From the street, not from poetry.

A language that can't say "a bit"

There are very specific traits. Intensifiers, to start with. We say «súper», «mega», «tope», «superbién», «fatal» with a glee that surprises speakers of other languages. We say something is «buenísimo», really, really good, that someone is «majísimo», lovely beyond words, that a flat is «carísimo», eye-wateringly expensive, and that «-ísimo» does an enormous amount of work without anyone noticing.

Then there are the augmentatives, the endings that pump things up. A «cochazo», a whopper of a car, a «pastón», a fortune, an «exitazo», a smash hit, a «bodorrio», a wedding of epic proportions. Add a few letters at the end and the thing grows. And the reverse: a well-placed diminutive, like «un ratito», "just a little while", that lasts three hours, is exaggeration too, only dressed up as modesty.

And there's death, which turns up in everyday Spanish all the time without any real drama. Me muero de hambre, I'm dying of hunger; me muero de vergüenza, I could die of shame; me muero de ganas, I'm dying to; me muero contigo, you're killing me. Death as the unit of measurement for any emotion.

What would be excess in a formal speech is gold in a pop song. Because a pop song lives on big emotions said in few words. And Spanish speech comes with the big emotions built in.

The «tan» in «Tan Cateto»

A lot of people found me through «Tan Cateto» (Such a bumpkin) on TikTok, and the title is a good example of what I mean. «Cateto» is already a strong word. Putting «tan», "such" or "so", in front is what anyone does in a kitchen conversation: it isn't enough to say something is, you have to say it's extremely so. That «tan» sounds overheard, not read in a book.

It happens with other titles. «La dieta del cucurucho» (The ice-cream-cone diet) has that comic-exaggeration logic: a diet that, by its very name, sounds like a failure foretold, that very Spanish habit of declaring an enormous resolution on Monday and surrendering to an ice cream. I won't tell you the song, only what the title suggests to me. And what it suggests is a line anyone might have come out with at a bar.

Same with «No quiero otro novio cojín» (I don't want another cushion boyfriend). Nobody has a cushion for a boyfriend. But we all get the picture, because it's the kind of exaggeration we make without thinking: comparing a person to an object so that what bothers us about them shows more clearly.

Exaggerating to be exact

There's a paradox I love. Exaggeration is often more precise than a literal description. If I say "I was a bit tired", I convey nothing. If I say "I was dead", I convey exactly how I felt, even if it's technically a lie.

Everyday exaggeration describes the feeling, not the fact. And a song has to tell the feeling. So when a lyric comes out too correct, too measured, I usually turn it up. I run it through the filter of how someone would say it telling a friend on the phone, at full volume, walking down the street.

When exaggeration is too much

Now the contradiction. The same device that makes a lyric sound alive can make it noisy. If everything is "the most", nothing is. If everybody dies in every line, death stops meaning anything. I've had to learn to ration it.

My way is to look for contrast. In the middle of a hugely exaggerated lyric, slip in one flat, almost dry line. That ordinary line, surrounded by exaggeration, sounds louder than any superlative. It's like a silence in the middle of a party: everyone turns to look. It doesn't always come off, but when it does, it's my favourite thing in the song.

I'm careful about something else too. Spanish exaggeration has a very marked accent, and my audience is spread between Europe and Latin America. In Mexico or Colombia people exaggerate as well, of course, but with other words. There something can be «bien bonito» or «demasiado bueno», and here that would sound odd. So when I use a very Spain-only intensifier, I ask myself whether it'll be understood across the Atlantic. Sometimes I decide yes, because the tone explains everything. Sometimes I change it.

The GAYFOLK trilogy, with its three albums, «Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado GAYFOLK», «Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK» and «El día de la liberación», has some of this in the titles too. «Ojalá», "if only", the word that opens the title of the second one, is something we say daily with tremendous intensity. Ojalá it rains, ojalá he calls, ojalá it were possible. An enormous wish packed into three syllables.

What I'm after, in the end, is for my lyrics to sound like the way people talk, not the way they write. The Spanish spoken in Spain is exaggerated, theatrical and hugely entertaining. I don't see why a song should be blander than a conversation on the bus.

The full lyrics, every exaggeration included, are at mikesaintlouis.com.