The Machine Never Gets Tired. The Songwriter Does: What a Working Day Really Looks Like for Mike Sain't Louis

MADRID, 25 October 2026 — At three o'clock this morning, the clocks in Spain went back to two. Much of south-eastern Australia moved the other way at the start of the month. Either way, someone was handed or robbed of an hour, and it is a good day to ask a question that the debate about AI music keeps skipping: what does an AI songwriter actually do with his time?

The assumption, usually, is nothing much. Type, click, publish. The case of Mike Sain't Louis, the Madrid indie alternative artist who calls himself "the first AI singer-songwriter", suggests the opposite, and it is worth taking seriously.

The fast part is the shortest part

Yes, generating a track is quick. Mike takes a lyric to Suno, the AI tool he uses for the music and vocal performance, chooses a direction, and within minutes he has a complete arrangement. Compared with booking a studio or begging a friend to play guitar on a Saturday morning, the difference is enormous.

But generation is the oven, not the recipe. Before it come the ingredients; after it comes the tasting, the rejecting and the starting again. His output — 273 singles and more than 280 music videos — took about two years, not two weekends.

"The machine takes minutes," he says. "I take as long as I take. And everything that makes a song mine lives in that gap."

A lyric moves at human speed

He writes every word himself, and there is no shortcut for that. An idea can arrive on the Metro in ten seconds and take days to find its shape. Sometimes a lyric comes out nearly whole. Sometimes there is a chorus he loves and two verses that aren't good enough, and they wait in a drawer until the missing line turns up.

Take "Buscando el polvo perfecto", roughly "Looking for the perfect hook-up". It is a savage satire of dating-app culture, written in the voice of the cruellest user imaginable: too fat, too bald, too old, too camp — blocked. The joke only works because every insult is precisely the one real people hear, and the chorus stretches the app's name into a mocking chant. Then a former fling in Toledo offers cynical advice, and the narrator finds it depressing. The ending flips the whole song: on the newly discovered planet GayFolk there are no apps, no complexes, and people are not simply objects.

That turn, from cruelty to a place where cruelty has no purpose, is not something a tool proposes. It is a writer's decision about what the song is for.

A factory with no closing time

Here is the part nobody mentions. The tool never yawns. It does not need Sundays off. Ask for another version and you get one, and another, until sunrise. For someone with more songs in his head than hours in the day, that is a gift — and a trap.

Mike has written about nights spent choosing between near-identical takes, eyes dry, coffee cold, unable to tell whether one is better or whether he is simply too tired to hear. At that point, he says, he is not creating. He is working a shift nobody assigned.

That is where the second song comes in. "Judith Becker" begins on one of those days when the bags under your eyes reach the floor from crying, and after work all the narrator wants is to binge a whole season of the Spanish sitcom "La que se avecina", the episodes with the most Judith Bécker. It is funny, a little absurd and painfully recognisable. Its refrain lands a quiet verdict on fake partners and false friends: "Mejor estar solo con mis animales / que rodeado de gente falsa" — better alone with my animals than surrounded by fake people.

"Rest is part of the job," Mike says. "I learned it late. A song written by someone running on empty sounds like it. The comfort show and the dog on the sofa are not time off from the work. They're what keeps the work honest."

Why Australians should listen

Australia has one of the strongest independent music cultures in the English-speaking world, and the burnout of self-managed artists is a familiar story here: day jobs, late nights, admin and art crammed into the same hours. Mike's routine is that story with a new tool in the middle. The lesson does not change because the tool is AI. The person still needs sleep.

There is also the simple pleasure of hearing someone mock app culture this sharply. Swipe fatigue is not a Spanish invention.

Where to listen

Both songs are free to stream and download at https://mikesaintlouis.com, with full lyrics, along with the rest of his catalogue. His music is also on Spotify, Deezer and other major platforms. The core of the project is the GAYFOLK trilogy — "Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado GAYFOLK", "Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK" and "El día de la liberación" — the journey to a planet where everyone can live as they are.

About Mike Sain't Louis

An indie alternative artist living in Madrid, Mike Sain't Louis is a lyricist, composer, producer, art director and the CEO of his own independent label, MIKE SAIN'T LOUIS. His queer, uncensored and frequently hilarious songs, gathered under the name PLANETA GAYFOLK, cross electropop, copla, alternative pop and ballads. Many listeners found him through "Tan Cateto", which went viral on TikTok in 2024. With professional help, he also writes about years of relationships with narcissistic partners, to make psychological abuse visible.

Media contact

Mike Sain't Louis — MIKE SAIN'T LOUIS (independent label) Email: info@mikesaintlouis.com Website: https://mikesaintlouis.com Instagram: @planetagayfolk