Irlanda ·
“On a queer dance floor, everyone is ‘girl’”: Mike Sain't Louis on who really owns a flirting song
In a question-and-answer session built from his latest blog essay, the Madrid-based indie alternative artist who calls himself “the first AI singer-songwriter” explains why one word in the bilingual dance track “Mi salvador” raises eyebrows, and why it shouldn’t
Madrid, 25 October 2026. There is one word near the start of the second verse of “Mi salvador” that has made more than one listener stop and look twice. The word is “girl”, and it arrives with no warning, in a line about curves that make it hard to breathe. The song is by Mike Sain't Louis, an openly gay indie alternative artist from Madrid who presents himself as “the first AI singer-songwriter”. It sits on an album called “El día de la liberación” (“Liberation Day”), the final part of a trilogy about a queer planet. So what is a girl doing there?
Sain't Louis tackled the question head-on in a recent essay on his blog. We put his arguments to him in question-and-answer form. His answers below draw on that essay.
First, the basics. What is “Mi salvador” about?
It’s a night of dancing. The saviour in the title is a rhythm, not a hero. It mixes Spanish and English the whole way through, and it’s meant for a club, not for a candlelit dinner. I’ve already told the story of the song on its own page. This time I wanted to talk about something else: who a flirting song belongs to when it plays somewhere like the places we go.
So let’s get to it. Why “girl”?
Because anyone who has gone out at night in Chueca, or in the Raval, or in the bar district of pretty much any city, already knows the answer. On a queer dance floor, everybody is “girl”. The barman, the friend who just walked in, the gorgeous lad at the bar, the drag queen hosting the competition. “Girl, that hair.” “Girl, I can’t believe it.” It’s a greeting, not a description.
Where does that usage come from?
In English, gay men calling each other “girl” has a long history. It comes out of ballroom culture, out of Black and Latino communities in New York, out of drag slang. There it stops describing anyone and turns into a hello, an exclamation, a comment, a wink. It can mean “no way”, “I love you”, “stop making me laugh” or “turn around, I can see you”. It depends on the tone, the eyebrow and the moment.
And in Spanish?
We have our own versions. “Tía” is the most Madrid of them. “Reina”, queen, is the most affectionate. “Maricona”, depending on who says it, can be an insult or a medal. What they all have in common is that they turn grammar upside down. A man calling another man “tía” is doing something small and quietly subversive, even if he does it a thousand times a day without thinking.
You argue that queer people have always taken love songs and made them theirs. What do you mean?
For decades, almost every love song on the radio was written for a boy who loves a girl or a girl who loves a boy. Gay men and lesbians grew up with that repertoire because there wasn’t another one. And what we did with it was very clever: we kept it. We swapped the pronoun in our heads. We put another face on the “you”. We belted out heartbreak songs written for a woman in karaoke while thinking about the classmate who never looked at us.
“Nobody understood an impossible love better than we did. It’s no accident so many pop divas have a gay audience that would follow them anywhere.”
So when a queer listener hears “girl” in a lyric…
They don’t stay on the surface. They hear it the way they’ve always heard everything: with the freedom to put whoever they like in that spot. Inside the song, the scene is the usual one. Someone dances, someone watches, someone can’t breathe. But once it leaves the record and plays in a room full of people like us, the girl can be anyone. The drag queen on stage. The guy you’ve been catching eyes with all night. Your lesbian best friend, who dances better than anyone. You, in front of the mirror before you go out.
Is there a moment in the song where that becomes explicit?
The last verse closes the circle:
Reina on the dance floor, it’s true
At that point there’s no doubt about which language the song is speaking. “Reina” is the word you say to someone on a dance floor full of people like us.
A practical question. You write the words, but the music isn’t played or voiced by you.
That’s right. I write all my lyrics. I’m a lyricist, composer and music producer, and the music and vocal performance are made with artificial intelligence, which I use as a production tool. The words, the idea and the artistic direction are mine. I run my own independent label, MIKE SAIN'T LOUIS. No record company, no middlemen.
Why might Irish listeners connect with this?
Sain't Louis makes no claims about Ireland, and neither do we. But anyone who has spent a Saturday night in a queer bar anywhere, Dublin included, will recognise the vocabulary he describes, the “girl”, the “queen”, the borrowed love song that suddenly fits. “Mi salvador” moves between Spanish and English line by line, so an English-speaking listener catches half of it straight away and can look up the rest in the published lyrics.
Listen and download for free
“Mi salvador” and the entire catalogue of Mike Sain't Louis can be streamed and downloaded free of charge at https://mikesaintlouis.com, with the full lyrics for every song. His music is also available on Spotify, Deezer and other major platforms. The full essay (in Spanish) is on his blog: https://mikesaintlouis.com/blog/girl-reina-tia-de-quien-es-una-cancion-de-ligue-en-mi-salvador
About Mike Sain't Louis
Based in Madrid, Mike Sain't Louis describes himself as “the first AI singer-songwriter” and works as an indie alternative artist with no label but his own. His project PLANETA GAYFOLK has produced 273 singles and more than 280 music videos over roughly two years of work, gathered into a trilogy imagined as a single journey: “Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado GAYFOLK”, “Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK” and “El día de la liberación”. His queer alternative pop is cheeky, uncensored and camp, ranging from electropop to copla and ballads, and its subjects run from exes and nosy neighbours to liberation and mental health. Many listeners found him in 2024, when “Tan Cateto” went viral on TikTok.
Press contact
Email: info@mikesaintlouis.com Website: https://mikesaintlouis.com Instagram: @planetagayfolk