I spent a grey British week looking up at someone else's skies: notes on the moonlit and rainbowless heavens of Mike Sain't Louis

Madrid, 25 October 2026.

It has been the kind of week where the sky sits on the rooftops like a lid. Low, flat, the colour of a dishcloth. So it felt slightly absurd, and then rather lovely, to spend it reading an essay about skies written in Madrid, where by most accounts the sky behaves a good deal better.

The essay is by Mike Sain't Louis, an alt-indie artist based in Madrid who calls himself “the first AI singer-songwriter”. He writes every one of his lyrics; the music and the vocal performance are made with artificial intelligence, which he uses as a production and arrangement tool. The ideas, words and artistic direction are his. Over roughly two years he has built a project called PLANETA GAYFOLK: 273 singles and more than 280 music videos, laid out across a trilogy that imagines a journey to a planet where everyone can live as they are. A planet, it turns out, needs weather.

What we draw first and understand last

He opens with a thought I recognised immediately. As children, the sky was the first thing we drew and the last thing we understood: a blue stripe at the top of the page, a sun with spokes, a cotton-wool cloud. Later we learn that it changes colour by the hour, that at night it fills with points of light that no longer exist, that some days it presses down and others it seems to open forever. And we learn, he writes, that the sky we see depends a great deal on how we are inside.

“In Planeta Gayfolk every song has its own sky,” he writes. Some are named in the lyrics, moon and stars included. Others you only sense, through a quality of light or an absence of colour.

The gentlest sky: «Dreams Drift Afar»

He starts with the calmest one, and so did I. «Dreams Drift Afar» is one of his shortest and softest songs, almost entirely humming and wordless syllables, the long murmur and “nananana” we have all heard at some point used to settle someone to sleep. Mike calls it a lullaby, and it is. Between the hums come a handful of English phrases, and every one of them looks upwards: whispers that call, night shadows falling, dreams drifting away, stars that blink and sigh. And at the very end:

under the moonlit sky

What he loves about this sky, he says, is that it isn't frightening. The shadows fall like a blanket. The stars don't glare; they blink and sigh as if they were sleepy too. The moon doesn't keep watch. It simply gives light. There are lullabies written for children and lullabies written for exhausted adults, he suggests, and this one works as the second kind: for putting yourself to sleep after a day that went on too long.

I tested the theory on Wednesday night, after a day that went on too long. It works. I didn't hear the last minute.

A sky without words

There is a quiet idea in the essay that I keep returning to. The most serene sky on his planet sits in a song with almost no words, and he thinks that is no accident. Lullabies don't need to explain. The meaning is in rhythm, repetition and tone. When someone soothes you, what matters isn't what they say but how they say it, just as the names of constellations don't matter when you are simply lying there looking at the stars. The humming, he writes, becomes a sky of its own: open, without edges, and the few English lines are loose stars scattered across a lot of dark blue.

A video of salt flats and borrowed clouds

The video for «Dreams Drift Afar» runs 3:14 and was released on 12 November 2025. It is, above all, a video about skies. The protagonist, in a flat cap with a red rose on his lapel, walks and runs through open landscapes in evening light. The salt flats are the showstopper: still sheets of water so reflective that the ground disappears and he seems to be walking on clouds. There are lavender fields running to the horizon, green cliffs above the sea, a castle by the shore, a coastal road, and a gallery of slender white arches. It ends on a terrace, watching the sun set behind hills. Mike notes that the clip never quite reaches the moon of the lyric. It stops at the doorway of night.

A sky with no rainbow: «Dark Corners»

Not every sky on the planet is kind. In «Dark Corners», a bilingual song in English and Spanish, there is a line that refuses the most obvious queer symbol of all:

Ain't no rainbow in my sky

It is a striking thing to hear from an artist whose whole project is a queer utopia. The song is about putting on a show, dancing in the corners with your shadow for company, smiling so as not to feel anything. The rainbow is missing exactly where you'd expect it. Mike Sain't Louis has spoken publicly about turning years of relationships with narcissistic partners into music, with professional support, so that people living through psychological abuse feel seen and believed. This sky is part of that honesty: sometimes the colour simply isn't there, and the song lets that be true.

The essay goes on to a third sky, one you can apparently reach up and touch. I'll leave that for you to find on his blog.

Why it landed here

British listeners know a thing or two about low skies and about making a party of them anyway. That, more than anything, is what this essay and these two songs offer: a gentle sky for nights when you need one, and a grey one for when pretending otherwise would be a lie.

Everything he has released streams and downloads free at https://mikesaintlouis.com, with lyrics for each song, and his music is also on Spotify, Deezer and the main platforms. The full essay is here: https://mikesaintlouis.com/blog/un-cielo-de-luna-un-cielo-sin-arcoiris-y-un-cielo-que-se-toca-los-cielos-de-planeta-gayfolk

About Mike Sain't Louis

Mike Sain't Louis is a Madrid-based lyricist, composer and music producer, the artistic director and CEO of his own independent label, MIKE SAIN'T LOUIS, with no record company or middlemen involved. He describes himself as an alt-indie artist and “the first AI singer-songwriter”. His cheeky, uncensored queer pop moves from electropop to copla to ballads, in Spanish, English, French and Portuguese. In 2024 «Tan Cateto» went viral on TikTok.

Press contact

Email: info@mikesaintlouis.com Website: https://mikesaintlouis.com Instagram: @planetagayfolk