A stopped clock that screams: the objects of «Ruido en mi mente»

A stopped clock shouldn't make a sound. That's the whole point of it being stopped.

In «Ruido en mi mente», Noise in my mind, it screams. «Un reloj parado grita su tic»: a stopped clock screams its tick. It's the first big image in the lyric, and it's a lie, of course, because a stopped clock doesn't tick. But anyone who has spent a night without sleep knows it's true. At four in the morning, objects make noises they don't make. The fridge talks. The blind creaks. The phone buzzes when nobody's written. And the clock, stopped or not, keeps up its tick.

This song is an inventory. A room at night, with its things, and every thing doing something it shouldn't. The song's page has the summary. Here I walk into the room and pick up the objects one by one, like someone moving out of a flat where they've had a dreadful time.

The first verse: echoes colliding

«Hay ecos que chocan dentro de mí / Ruidos que nunca quieren salir.» There are echoes colliding inside me / Noises that never want to leave.

It starts on the inside. Before the room, before the objects, there's the head. And in the head there are echoes. An echo is a noise that has already happened and comes back. It isn't a new noise: it's an old one bouncing around. That's roughly what small-hours anxiety is. It isn't that anything new happens to you at four in the morning. It's that everything from before comes back, bouncing.

«Ruidos que nunca quieren salir.» There's an idea here that mattered to me. Usually noise is something that comes in: the neighbour upstairs, the roadworks outside, the bin lorry at six. In this lyric the noise is inside and won't go out. It's the opposite problem. You can't shut the window, because the noise isn't coming from the window.

And then comes the clock.

The stopped clock

«Un reloj parado grita su tic.»

I love broken objects that keep doing their job in some absurd way. A stopped clock is a clock that no longer measures time, yet in the lyric it keeps on demanding it. It's time that doesn't pass and still manages to be a nuisance.

I think of Dalí and his soft watches in «The Persistence of Memory», melting over a branch. Those watches don't work either, but they don't scream. They melt with great surrealist elegance, in a Cadaqués landscape. My clock has no landscape. It's on a bedside table, next to a glass of water, and it screams.

Come to think of it, it's the most exact image of insomnia I've ever come up with. At night, time stops and at the same time won't stop sounding. You check your phone: 3:12. You close your eyes for an eternity. You look again: 3:14. Time isn't moving, but it makes an unbearable racket.

Tick. And again, tick. And you counting, as if counting ever helped.

The grey brick

«Y el aire pesa como un ladrillo gris.» And the air weighs like a grey brick.

Air doesn't weigh anything. Well, it does, they taught us about atmospheric pressure at school, but you don't feel it. In the lyric the air weighs like a brick, and a grey brick at that.

The "grey" is there to rhyme with "tick", I won't lie. In Spanish gris and tic sit well together on the ear even though they don't fully rhyme, and the whole lyric plays with those near-rhymes. But once it was in, the grey did something more. A red brick belongs to a building site, a village house, a barbecue. A grey one belongs to a tower block, an industrial unit, a cemetery wall. The grey drained every bit of warmth from the brick.

Anyone who has had an anxiety attack knows the chest tightens. That breathing is hard work. That the air, which normally comes in by itself, suddenly has to be shoved in. That's the brick. It isn't a poetic metaphor. It's almost a medical description with a bit of building material thrown in.

The broken hours

«En mi sombra bailan las horas rotas.» In my shadow the broken hours dance.

Another broken object. First a clock; now the hours themselves. Broken, and dancing too. In the shadow of someone who can't sleep.

Here camp sneaks in, if only by the back door. The broken hours don't lie still like corpses: they dance. It's an image from a sinister verbena, the open-air village fiesta, the kind that by five in the morning is no longer a party but something else, with the band playing for three drunks and a woman in a dressing gown. The hours dance because they don't know what else to do. And you watch them from the bed.

The idiot moon

«La luna se burla con su carcajada idiota.» The moon mocks me with its idiot cackle.

This line makes me laugh every time I read it, and I'm glad, because a song about anxiety without a little laughter would be unbearable.

The moon in songs is usually romantic. It's the moon of boleros, of poets, of «Luna de miel», of Mecano and their «Hijo de la luna». My catalogue already has a moon or two: in «El castigo más duro», The harshest punishment, there's a vampire weeping in the moonlight. But this moon is different. This moon laughs. And not charmingly: it has an "idiot cackle".

Idiot. I called the moon a name. It strikes me as the most me thing in the whole lyric. When I'm in a bad way, I hurl insults. I do it to exes, to narcissists, to haters. Here there was nobody to insult, because anxiety has no face. So I insulted the moon, which was what happened to be in the window.

If anyone wonders whether you can insult a satellite, the answer is yes. And it feels marvellous.

The past on the edge of the bed

«El pasado se sienta al filo de mi cama / Recordándome que soy su esclava.» The past sits on the edge of my bed / Reminding me I'm its slave.

This is the most unsettling image in the lyric. And the most concrete.

The past isn't in the head, or in memories. It's sitting. On the edge of the bed. Like those hospital visitors who perch on the mattress because there are no chairs. Like the ghost in Japanese horror films, who's sitting at the foot of the bed when you wake.

What I like most is the posture. It isn't standing, menacing. It isn't lying down. It's sitting, comfortable, in no hurry. It's a past with all the time in the world. That has come to stay a good long while. And that talks to you.

«Recordándome que soy su esclava.»

In the feminine. Esclava, not esclavo.

Why «esclava»

I've been asked several times. Why the feminine, if a man wrote it?

First, because it rhymes with cama, bed. That's the workshop truth, and I'm not ashamed to say it. Rhymes call a lot of the shots, and anyone who writes lyrics knows it.

But then, once the rhyme was in place, the feminine felt right for another reason. In good old queer Spanish we use the feminine quite naturally. «Estoy muerta», I'm dead (feminine). «Qué cansada estoy, hija», I'm so tired, girl. «Soy tonta», I'm silly. In «Al fuego», Into the fire, another song of mine, the speaker says «como soy tan tonta, he sido una gilipollas», silly me, I've been such a fool, all in the feminine. It's a feminine that isn't about grammatical gender but about tone. About trust. About being among your own.

And here the feminine does something more. «Su esclava» has the ring of a penny dreadful, a kiosk novel, a four-o'clock telenovela. A heroine in thrall to the past, as in a Venezuelan soap. It gives the line a touch of camp drama that saves it from being merely sad. It's sad, but sad with fringing.

The chorus: noise, noise, noise

«Ruido ruido ruido en mi mente otra vez / Cierro los ojos pero no se va esta vez.» Noise noise noise in my mind again / I close my eyes but it won't go this time.

The chorus is the simplest part, and it had to be. "Noise" three times, like someone covering their ears and repeating the word so as not to hear anything else.

"Again" and "this time", in two consecutive lines. They seem the same and aren't. "Again" says it's happened before. "This time" says that, unlike other times, it won't go now. Some nights closing your eyes works. Not this one.

«Corro en círculos en un sueño sin red.» I run in circles in a dream with no net. A dream with no net is a trapeze artist's dream with no mattress beneath. If you fall, you fall. And running in circles is what the head does when it can't sleep: round and round the same thing, the same conversation, the same sentence someone said to you three years ago.

«Ahogo mi grito pero no hay quien lo ve.» I stifle my scream but there's no one who sees it. Look at the verb. It doesn't say "hears", it says "sees". A scream you can see. I left it that way because a stifled scream can't be heard, but it can be seen: in the face, in the fists, in the clenched jaw. And nobody sees it either. Because at four in the morning there's nobody watching.

The laughing labyrinth

Second verse: «Quiero escaparme de este laberinto / Pero la salida se ríe distinto». I want to escape this labyrinth / But the exit laughs different.

More laughter. First the moon, now the exit. In this song everything laughs at the one who can't sleep. It's a night full of mockers.

«Se ríe distinto», laughs different, is an odd construction. Not quite correct, and I like it for that. You'd normally say "laughs in a different way". But "laughs different" sounds the way people really talk, fast, unpolished. And it leaves a doubt: different from what? From the moon? From how it used to laugh? I don't explain it. There are nights when everything laughs and every laugh is a little different, and you couldn't say how.

«Sigo cayendo en espejos partidos / Donde mi reflejo está malherido.» I keep falling into shattered mirrors / Where my reflection is badly wounded.

Broken mirrors. Another broken object, and that's quite a few now: the stopped clock, the broken hours, the shattered mirrors. Anyone listing the broken things in this song would end up with more than a junk shop in Lavapiés, Madrid's old bohemian quarter.

And the wounded reflection. Not the one looking, the reflection. As though the one looking were fine and the injured party were the image. It's a way of saying you don't recognise yourself. That what you see in the mirror at that hour isn't exactly you.

The questions

«¿Es verdad o un truco la realidad? / ¿O es el eco de lo que no puedo olvidar?» Is reality true or a trick? / Or is it the echo of what I can't forget?

They're the only two questions in the lyric, and they come near the end. They have no answer, like every four-in-the-morning question.

The first is the most philosophical I've ever written, and I know nothing whatsoever about philosophy. Is reality true or a trick? I take it with a pinch of humour: it's the question of any sixth-former after watching «The Matrix», or of anyone who's slept three hours in four days. Past a certain level of tiredness, reality starts to look like a papier-mâché set.

The second is more concrete and goes back to the beginning of the song. "The echo of what I can't forget." The echoes of the first verse. The circle closes: all that noise was just that, an echo. What can't be forgotten, bouncing around.

The wall

The last chorus has two new lines that change the ending:

«El silencio me juzga y se ríe sin fe / Construyo un muro para verme después / Pero siempre caigo aunque no lo desee.» Silence judges me and laughs without faith / I build a wall so I can see myself later / But I always fall though I don't want to.

Silence, which ought to be the opposite of noise, judges and laughs as well. Not even silence helps. It's the perfect trap: if there's noise, the noise tortures you; if there's silence, the silence judges you.

And then the wall. "I build a wall so I can see myself later." It's the strangest line in the lyric and the one I like best. I don't build the wall to protect myself, or to hide. I build it "so I can see myself later". Like leaving yourself a note. Like putting something up so you'll have something to lean on tomorrow.

But "I always fall though I don't want to". The wall doesn't hold. Or I don't. The song doesn't end well. It ends the way many nights end: unresolved.

In the middle of an album of longing

«Ruido en mi mente» is on «Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK», If only we could travel to GAYFOLK, the second album, the one about longing to reach a planet where you needn't explain yourself or pretend. And there's something fitting about an insomnia song sitting right there.

Because longing, when it isn't fulfilled, makes noise. A desire left half-done doesn't go quiet: it bounces. It's one more of the echoes colliding in the first verse. The whole album is written in "if only" mode, and this song is the night of that "if only". The part where desire won't let you sleep.

If planet GAYFOLK is the place without explanations, the room in this song is the place where everything demands explanations at once. The clock, the moon, the silence, the past sitting on the bed. They all ask, they all judge, they all laugh. It's the anti-planet. Earth at four in the morning.

It seemed important to me that an album of longing should have its bad night too. Otherwise desire looks easy, like in aftershave adverts: handsome lad, beach, convertible, not a dark circle in sight. And desire isn't like that. Desire is also tossing and turning in bed thinking about what you haven't got.

To read it in full, with its verses in order, it's on its lyrics page. I recommend reading it once without music, slowly, paying attention only to the objects. There are more than you'd think. And then, if you fancy, reading it with the song on, following this little guide to reading a lyric while it plays. With music, the objects move.

A song that gives no advice

There isn't a single self-help line in «Ruido en mi mente». Nobody says "breathe deeply", "this too shall pass" or "get help". And that's not because those phrases are wrong. Asking for help is a very good thing, and if anyone reads this on a night like that, please do: call someone, see a doctor, don't stay alone with the stopped clock. If you're outside Spain, call your local emergency number.

But the song isn't a leaflet from the health centre. It's the night described from the inside. And from inside the night nobody thinks in leaflet phrases. They think about the clock, the brick and the idiot moon.

I think there's more company in a song that describes well what's happening to you than in one that tells you what to do. That's why there are songs people put on at four in the morning, and I wrote about that small, everyday use of music in songs for doing the washing-up. This one isn't for the washing-up. But it's for a very domestic moment too: being unable to sleep in your own bed.

Sister to «El abismo en mi cabeza»

This song has a sister on the third album: «El abismo en mi cabeza», The abyss in my head. Both talk about the head as a place you can't get out of. Both use the word "labyrinth". Both have something that laughs at the one suffering: in one it's the exit, in the other it's the abyss itself, which «se ríe de mi torpeza», laughs at my clumsiness.

They're two different nights. «Ruido en mi mente», on the second album, is noisy: echoes, screams, ticks, cackles. «El abismo en mi cabeza», on the third, is quieter, more of a fall. Listen to them back to back and you'll hear how the same night changes when a few months have gone by. Not that it gets better, necessarily. It just sounds different.

Writing at night what happens at night

There's a craft question I often ask myself: is a song about the night better written at night?

I don't know. I've written lyrics at all hours, and in writing fast and writing slow I explained that some come out in one go and others take weeks. What I do know is that a lyric about insomnia can't sound well rested. If the lines are too rounded, too clean, if every image is perfectly polished, the song is lying. A sleepless night isn't rounded.

That's why «Ruido en mi mente» has rhymes that almost rhyme, constructions that aren't quite correct, like "laughs different", and a scream that's seen rather than heard. They're small deliberate imperfections. Like dark circles under the eyes.

The laughing part

And one more thing, which I don't want to get lost.

In such a dark song there's an idiot moon, some dancing hours and an exit that laughs. Images almost out of a cartoon. That mix is what makes me laugh when I write, as I said in what makes me laugh when I write: the serious and the ridiculous in the same sentence.

It's not that I make light of anxiety. It's that if I don't give the moon an idiot cackle, the moon wins. Insulting it is my way of getting the last word.

The moon's an idiot. For the record. And if any astronomer takes offence, they can write to me, and I'll reply with another song.

Why I carry on

People ask me why I release songs like this, which aren't party songs, which have no chorus to bellow from a Pride float. My answer is in why I carry on: because a song kept in a drawer is no use to anyone. And a song like this one, in particular, is of use to someone at four in the morning. That's good enough for me.

All the lyrics are arranged in the lyrics index, in case you want to look for other nights.

Frequently asked questions

What is «Ruido en mi mente» about? A night of insomnia and anxiety told through the objects in a room: a stopped clock that screams, air that weighs like a grey brick, a mocking moon and a past sitting on the edge of the bed.

Which album is «Ruido en mi mente» on? «Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK», the second album of Planeta Gayfolk's GAYFOLK trilogy.

Why does the lyric say «esclava», in the feminine? For the rhyme with «cama», and because the feminine of queer Spanish slang gives the line a tone of intimacy and melodrama. Mike Sain't Louis uses it in other lyrics too, such as «Al fuego».

Is it related to «El abismo en mi cabeza»? Yes. Both talk about the head as a labyrinth with no way out. «El abismo en mi cabeza» is on the third album, «El día de la liberación».

Who wrote «Ruido en mi mente»? Mike Sain't Louis, lyricist, composer and producer from Madrid: the first AI songwriter. The music and vocals are produced with artificial intelligence as a tool; the lyric is his.