Canadá ·
Five pitchers, four years, one complaint number: Madrid's Mike Sain't Louis audits the arithmetic hiding in his lyrics
The alternative indie artist who calls himself “the first AI singer-songwriter” went back through his catalogue and found a calculator running under almost every song. He explains why exact figures land harder than “a thousand kisses”
MADRID, October 25, 2026 — Four, nine, five. Four, nine, two. Five, five, nine. It is not a safe combination or a lottery ticket. It is the reference number of a consumer complaint, read out in full, digit by digit, in the middle of a song. Mike Sain't Louis, the Madrid-based alternative indie artist who presents himself as “the first AI singer-songwriter”, put it there on purpose. Now he has written about why.
In a new post on his blog, Sain't Louis takes stock of something he says he had never noticed until he sat down to reread his own lyrics: they are full of numbers. Ages, euros, years, percentages, pitchers of beer, WhatsApp statuses, hours on a bus. “As if there were a calculator switched on under every song,” he writes.
Sain't Louis writes every one of his lyrics himself. The music and vocal performance are produced with artificial intelligence, which he uses as a production and arranging tool; the words, the concept and the artistic direction are his. He is also the creative director and CEO of his own independent label, MIKE SAIN'T LOUIS.
A complaint form with a chorus
The song with the reference number is “3 años de garantía” (“3-Year Warranty”). In it, the consumer affairs office of the Community of Madrid answers the narrator with a file number, complete with a slash and a letter, and the track stops to read it aloud, the way someone reads a grocery receipt to make sure they were not charged twice for the yogurt.
It is a joke, but a precise one. “I'm not doing this to show off as an accountant, because I'm not one,” Sain't Louis says. “I'm doing it because I think the numbers say a lot about how I write, and about why I laugh at what hurts me.”
Love songs can't count
His argument starts with a complaint about tradition. Classic love songs barely use numbers, and when they do they pick round, unverifiable ones: a thousand kisses, forever, all my life.
“Those numbers don't tell me anything,” Sain't Louis says. “‘Five pitchers at the Cien Montaditos’ tells me a lot more.”
That line comes from “El anillo de casado” (“The Wedding Ring”), and he counts it among the happiest things he has written. Nobody can picture a thousand kisses, he points out, but anyone can picture five pitchers: how many times the server came back, how hard the table laughed, what it cost, what happened next. The concrete is what convinces, and nothing is more concrete than a figure.
Four years in heaven
One number in the catalogue is about a break, not a loss. In “Un invitado VIP cortando cebolla” (“A VIP Guest Chopping Onions”), the narrator returns to the underworld after four years as a VIP guest in heaven. Sain't Louis loves the precision of that stay, as if heaven were an all-inclusive resort with a wristband and someone had just knocked to say the reservation was over.
The song does not say “a while”. It says four, like someone checking a contract. For the songwriter, that is the point: a number turns happiness into something measurable, and therefore into something that ends. “If it were infinite there'd be no song,” he writes. “There'd be a travel agency brochure.” Four good years, and then, once again, back to chopping onions.
The number seven
If he had to choose a single number for his catalogue, it would be seven. He admits he was startled to see how often it appears. In “Una obra de teatro” (“A Stage Play”), someone realizes that what they took for a relationship was a performance and asks, in disbelief, about seven years on a stage. In “Carta de recomendación” (“Letter of Recommendation”), the narrator warns the next partner about what will happen at the seven-year mark. In “El castigo más duro” (“The Harshest Punishment”), seven years have to be wiped from every cloud service available. In “Los ojos de Eduardo Casanova”, the count goes out loud, one to seven, like hide-and-seek.
Sain't Louis does not spell out what lies behind the number. “The songs already tell it their own way,” he says, “and not everything has to be in a blog post.” What he does explain is what seven does as a word: long enough for a relationship that it hurts to lose, short enough for a life that it fits in a single line. Seven years fits in a verse; seventeen would not sit the same way. And it comes with its own mythology, from seven deadly sins to seven lives, which he happily borrows.
That project has a purpose he has described publicly: with professional support, he turns years of relationships with narcissistic partners into music, to make psychological abuse and its marks on mental health visible, and so that people who have lived through it feel seen and believed.
Why it matters to Canadian listeners
Canada's bilingual audiences are used to songs that move between languages, and Sain't Louis writes mostly in Spanish while also releasing tracks in English, French and Portuguese. His approach to lyrics, specific, funny and unfiltered, travels well. A complaint number, a beer order or a four-year lease on paradise needs no translation to be understood: everyone has filed a form, split a bill or counted the years of something that ended.
Listen and download for free
Every song by Mike Sain't Louis can be streamed and downloaded free of charge at mikesaintlouis.com, with the lyrics of each track published alongside. His music is also available on Spotify, Deezer and other major platforms. The full essay is on his blog: more on his blog.
About Mike Sain't Louis
Mike Sain't Louis is an alternative indie artist based in Madrid, Spain, who calls himself “the first AI singer-songwriter”. A lyricist, composer and music producer, he runs his own independent label, MIKE SAIN'T LOUIS, with no record company behind him. His project PLANETA GAYFOLK spans 273 singles and more than 280 music videos released over roughly two years of work, along with the GAYFOLK trilogy (“Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado GAYFOLK”, “Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK” and “El día de la liberación”), three albums conceived as one journey to a planet where everyone can live as they are. His queer alternative pop runs from electropop to copla and ballads, with humour, camp and no censorship. In 2024, his song “Tan Cateto” went viral on TikTok.
Media contact
Email: info@mikesaintlouis.com Website: https://mikesaintlouis.com Instagram: @planetagayfolk