Putting my lyrics in order from A to Z: archiving what you wrote yourself

There's a job that never shows up in any photo and has eaten more hours than I expected: making clean copies of all my lyrics and sorting them alphabetically. All 273 songs I've released have lyrics, and I wrote every one. Now they're on my website, mikesaintlouis.com, in an A to Z section. Getting there was a lot less simple than the word "sorting" suggests.

I want to share what I learnt doing it. Archiving your own work forces you into decisions you'd never even considered.

Which is the real version?

The first thing I ran into was that many lyrics had several versions. The one I wrote in the notebook, the one I typed up, the one I tweaked once the song was already produced, the one somebody transcribed in a comment with their own typos. Laid side by side, they didn't always match. A word changed here, a line that fell off there, a repeat of the chorus that was on paper and not in the song.

I had to decide which one was official. My rule was simple, if painful to apply: the lyric that counts is the one you hear. If the finished song says one thing, that's what goes on the website, even if the notebook said another. I liked some of those notebook versions better, I admit. But an archive isn't the place to correct the past. It's the place to record how things turned out.

Song lyrics tend to be written with very relaxed punctuation. Plenty of missing commas, sentences that stop without a full stop, a capital at the start of every line just because. When a lyric only exists to sit alongside a song, that's fine. When you want it to be read as a text, it isn't.

I spent days deciding things like whether every line starts with a capital, whether a verse ends with a full stop, how to mark a line spoken by another character. They sound like a proofreader's obsessions, and they are. But those decisions are what make the difference between someone reading a lyric and understanding it, and someone tripping every other line.

I didn't arrive at a perfect rule. I arrived at a reasonable one and applied it to all of them equally. That matters more to me than getting each case right: that the archive is consistent with itself.

The alphabet has no favourites

Sorting alphabetically has something very democratic about it. No featured songs, no hits at the top. «Tan Cateto» (Such a bumpkin), the one a lot of people found me through on TikTok, sits under T, among whatever happens to be there, no special treatment. A song hardly anyone has heard can be right above it.

I like that. On the platforms, the most-played songs hide the rest, and the body of work looks smaller than it is, because you only see five titles. In an alphabetical index every song takes up one line, the same as all the others. No more, no less.

It has its comic side too. L is packed. «La vecina cotilla» (The nosy neighbour), «La dieta del cucurucho» (The ice-cream-cone diet), «La primera drag» (The first drag queen). Apparently I have a weakness for titles that start with an article, and the alphabet has thrown it back in my face. M is well stocked too: «Mi novio de Albacete», «Mitad Venezuela, mitad Pakistán». And some letters of the alphabet are nearly empty. I've wondered whether I should write something beginning with K just to even things out, and decided not to.

Alphabetical or chronological

I went back and forth between the two orders. Chronological tells a story: how I started, how I changed, which subjects turned up in each period. It's the author's order. Alphabetical tells you nothing, but it serves best the person looking for one particular song. It's the reader's order.

I chose the reader's order for that section. It cost me, because part of me wanted the evolution to show, and I still think one day I'll do something with the chronological order, even if only for myself. The website also has a search box for people who only remember a fragment, and every song has its own page. But the A to Z section is built so that someone can walk in, go to the letter they need and find what they're after without detours.

Archiving forces you to reread. All of it. And rereading 273 of your own lyrics in one go is an experience I wouldn't recommend to anyone with low self-esteem, though in the end, oddly, it did me good.

There are lyrics I'm a little ashamed of, and I've left them in anyway. There are others I'd forgotten that made me laugh as if someone else had written them. And there are patterns I hadn't seen: subjects that keep coming back, lines that answer each other across songs months apart. Self-esteem, pride, gay love, exes. Reading it all in one sitting, you can tell there's a single hand behind it, obsessions and all, and that reassured me more than I expected.

Why go to the trouble

Someone might ask why I'd spend so much time on something few people will look at closely. The short answer is that if I don't do it, nobody will. I'm the CEO of my own label, MIKE SAIN'T LOUIS, and a one-person label has no archivist.

The long answer has to do with respect. I wrote these lyrics with care, and leaving them scattered, full of typos and in contradictory versions, felt like neglecting my own work. Archiving is a way of taking yourself seriously. Without solemnity, but seriously.

The lyrics, from A to Z, are at mikesaintlouis.com.