There are tracks you play to get ready for the night and tracks you play when the night is finally over. «Holy Stillness», from the catalogue of the Madrid artist Mike Sain't Louis, is the second kind. It arrives like the moment the music in the flat downstairs stops and you can hear the fridge, the street, your own breathing again.
Mike presents himself as the first AI singer-songwriter: lyricist, composer and music producer, with the music and the vocal performance made with AI. He writes the words and builds the world around them. Most of that world is loud. This corner of it is not.
The world exhales
The lyric opens like a blessing whispered at the door of a child's bedroom:
Holy stillness, gentle night, / The world exhales, the dark turns kind,
I keep returning to "the dark turns kind". For many people the dark is where the bad thoughts live. It is where the old arguments replay, where the face of the person who hurt you appears on the ceiling, where you check your phone one more time for a message that will never come. To imagine a dark that becomes kind is not naive. It is a small act of rebellion.
The next line moves from the world to something fragile inside it:
A fragile light begins to breathe, / Hope arrives so quietly.
Hope here does not kick the door down. It does not come with fireworks or a key change. It arrives quietly, the way a cat comes into a room, and you only notice it once it has already settled on the bed.
Rest without fear
Then the track turns to address someone directly:
Rest now, little one, / Rest without fear, / All that was broken / Softly disappears.
Who is the little one? It could be a child. It could be a pet. I like to read it as the younger self, the boy who was frightened for years and never got to rest without fear. A lot of recovery work is exactly this: going back and telling the little one that he can sleep now.
That reading feels right given what Mike has shared about his life. Two long relationships, twenty years in total, with partners whose behaviour was narcissistic. The aftermath, when they turned the people around him against him. The years when writing songs was the only way to tell what had really happened. And the long road of diagnosis and treatment that followed: post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, social phobia, avoidant personality disorder, anxiety. He is in treatment today. «Holy Stillness» sounds like something written from the other side of the worst of it.
Hands that tremble
The second verse is one of the most tender passages in the whole GAYFOLK catalogue:
The air is warm, the stars lean low, / Hands are trembling, hearts all slow, / No more crying, no more fight, / Only love remains tonight.
"The stars lean low" is such a strange, lovely image. Not stars far away and cold, but stars bending down to look, like relatives around a cot. And the trembling hands are honest. Peace after trauma is not stillness of the body. The hands still shake. The heart is only just slowing. The fight has ended, but the nervous system has not quite received the memo.
The planet at night
Planeta Gayfolk, the name Mike gives to his whole universe, is usually lit by disco balls and pink neon. It is a camp, funny, often ridiculous place where survivors dance in shop windows and heartbreak is allowed to wear sequins. But every planet has a night side. «Holy Stillness» is a walk across that side, after the clubs close, when the streets are wet and empty and the only sound is a distant tram.
I imagine the videoclip version of this in my head as long slow shots: curtains moving, a window with a small lamp, a city seen from a rooftop with no one on it. Nothing happens, and that is the point.
Let sorrow cease
The final plea is simple:
Rest in this peace, / Let every sorrow / Finally cease.
It is not a promise that sorrow will cease. It is a request. A prayer, in a secular way. And that difference matters. Recovery does not come with a guarantee. You ask, you rest, you try again tomorrow.
Where to find it
The whole catalogue, this track included, can be heard and downloaded for free with no registration at https://mikesaintlouis.com/en/descargas, and also from the free shop at https://gayfolkplanet.com/tienda. Keep it for the nights when the dark does not feel kind yet. Play it quietly. Let it lean low.