Music for people who don't see themselves in the official playlists

The big platform playlists have something of a shopping-centre window about them. They're well lit, everything is arranged with care, and almost none of it has anything to do with you. I listen to them now and then, the way you stroll round a part of town that isn't yours, and I come away feeling that the love in those songs always happens between the same people, in the same houses, with the same problems.

I'm not complaining that they exist. I'm more interested in the people who get left outside them without making a fuss, the ones who put on a hits playlist to clean the flat or go to the gym and, after a while, realise they've spent half an hour listening to stories that feel foreign to them. Not offensive. Foreign. Like a suit that isn't your size and that you wear because it's the only one there is.

The listener who translates

A lot of queer people learn to translate songs very early on. You swap the pronoun in your head, you picture someone else in the boyfriend's or girlfriend's place, you adjust the scene so it fits your life. You do it so fast you don't even notice. It works, more or less. But it's tiring, even if you don't know it, the way it's tiring to speak all day in a language you've mastered but that isn't yours.

One of the things I wanted from PLANETA GAYFOLK was to spare someone that work. For a song about an ex-boyfriend to be about a gay man's ex-boyfriend, no translation required. For the humour to come from situations anyone who's lived through similar things will recognise. For pride, self-esteem and everyday life to be told from the inside.

I'm not saying I'm the only one doing it. Far from it. I'm saying that when I started writing these lyrics, I could feel a specific gap in Spanish: gay love songs with humour, with a dash of camp and a touch of copla, that were neither laments nor protest banners. I wanted to fill that gap, even if in my own way, which is fairly peculiar.

What doesn't fit on a hits playlist

Some traits make it hard for a song to get onto the official playlists, and I've got the full set. I write in Spanish with expressions from Spain, but I'm thinking of an audience spread across Europe and Latin America. I make alternative pop, which is already a label that tends to mean "doesn't quite fit anywhere". I use long, odd titles. I write about nosy neighbours, boyfriends from Albacete, absurd diets. And I produce the music with artificial intelligence, which plenty of people still view with suspicion.

With a CV like that, turning up on a hits playlist would be strange. I accept it pretty calmly. What I don't accept is the idea that because you're not there, your audience doesn't exist.

That audience exists, and it isn't all one thing. There are young people who found me through «Tan Cateto» on TikTok. I like to think there are people in small towns who hear «Mi novio de Albacete» ("My boyfriend from Albacete") as an affectionate joke about their own corner of the map. There are people looking for something to put on before going out and people looking for something to listen to alone, in the small hours. None of them fits any of the categories the platforms use to sort the world.

Building another shop window

If the big playlists don't represent you, the alternative is usually to search by hand. Friends' recommendations, playlists made by other people, small profiles, comments under a video. It's slower and more fun. It makes you listen with curiosity instead of letting a machine decide your afternoon mood.

My way of helping that searching listener has been to put my own house in order. On mikesaintlouis.com every song has its own page, with its music video and its complete lyrics, and there's a search box for finding things by a single word. The lyrics are indexed from A to Z. The 273 singles can be downloaded for free, one by one, with no sign-up, and the GAYFOLK trilogy comes as three files, one per album. I set it up like that because I wanted visitors not to depend on an algorithm to show them the next song. You can wander round it like a neighbourhood record shop, with no sales assistant steering you to the till.

The trilogy, in fact, is designed as an antidote to listening in bits and pieces. The three albums, from «Descubierto un nuevo planeta» ("New planet discovered") to «Ojalá se pudiera viajar» ("If only we could travel") and from there to «El día de la liberación» ("Liberation day"), follow on from one another like chapters: finding a place where you finally fit as you are, being desperate to get there and, at the end, arriving. It's the opposite of an official playlist, which mixes songs from a thousand places so you don't think too hard. Here I'm asking you to think a little. With humour, mind you.

I have a contradiction with all this. On the one hand, I like the idea of making music for people who don't see themselves in the usual stuff. On the other, I don't want my songs to be a ghetto, a corner only people who know the password can get into. I'd love someone who isn't gay or queer to put on «La vecina cotilla» ("The nosy neighbour") and laugh because they've got one on their landing too.

I think the two can live side by side. A song written from a very specific place usually travels further than one written for everybody, because the details show. But I don't know that for sure. Sometimes I suspect I'm just agreeing with myself so I don't have to change anything.

What I do know is that I don't want to write to fit a playlist. I want to write for someone who, on hearing a song, stops translating for three minutes. If that happens for one person, I'm well paid. If it happens for lots of people, even better, obviously. I'm not going to pretend to be that modest.

My songs, in order and with no middlemen, are at mikesaintlouis.com.