Miguel S. was born in Guadalajara and raised in Chicago.
He writes songs that live in both places — switching between Spanish and English mid-verse, mid-chorus, sometimes mid-line, the way his thoughts actually work, the way conversations in his family actually sound. He calls this code-switching. Linguists call it translanguaging. His grandmother calls it "the way we talk."
For seven years, he released music this way and faced a problem he couldn't solve: English-speaking audiences loved his melody and his voice but missed the meaning of the Spanish verses. Spanish-speaking audiences connected with the emotion but couldn't always follow the English bridges.
Everyone was getting half a song.
The Invisible Wall in the Middle of the Music
This is a problem specific to multilingual artists that the music industry has no good solution for.
You can release with subtitles on a platform that supports them — but most platforms don't, and the experience is clunky. You can release two versions of the song, one in each language — but that splits your audience and dilutes the specific point, which is that both languages belong together. You can write liner notes — but no one reads liner notes anymore.
Miguel had tried all of these. None of them worked.
"The songs are about living between two worlds," he says. "The whole point is that the two languages are in the same sentence. If you take one out, you've changed what the song is. You've made it a lie."
He watched videos of his live performances and noticed the moment the language switched: the English speakers would smile but their eyes would go slightly unfocused, still in the music but no longer in the meaning. The Spanish speakers would do the same in the reverse direction.
"I could see it happening," he says. "A wall going up, right in the middle of the song."
He'd been looking for a way to take that wall down for years.
The Discovery
Miguel found LyricMV through a conversation in a forum for independent Latin artists. Someone had mentioned using it for a Spanish-language release and had been surprised by the transcription accuracy on Spanish vocals.
Miguel's situation was more complicated — he needed the tool to handle a song that switched languages three times in four minutes.
He tested it with his most code-switching-heavy track, a song called "Ambos Lados" (Both Sides). The song opens in Spanish, shifts to English in the pre-chorus, returns to Spanish for the second verse, then splits the final chorus: he sings the first half in Spanish, the second half in English, the two languages completing each other's sentences.
He uploaded the track and watched the AI transcribe it.
"It handled the Spanish sections well," he says. "Maybe 92% accurate. The transitions — where I switch mid-line — it got most of those right too. There were a few places where it heard a Spanish word and tried to make it English, which I fixed. Total corrections: about eight minutes."
He formatted the lyrics to make the code-switching visible on screen — Spanish lines in one weight, English lines in a slightly different weight, so viewers could track the shift.
He chose a template with a warm, earthy gradient. He thought about his grandmother's kitchen. He rendered the video.
What Happened When Both Walls Came Down
He posted the video on a Friday. By Sunday, something he hadn't anticipated was happening in the comments.
English speakers were writing about the Spanish verses.
Not in translation — in feeling. "I don't speak Spanish but I understood exactly what that verse meant." "I had to replay the second verse four times. I don't know why but I cried." "Is there a translation anywhere? I want to know what those words say."
Spanish speakers were writing about the English sections.
"I've heard this song fifty times. I never noticed how the English bridge changes what the Spanish chorus means." "The way the last chorus works — both languages finishing each other's sentences — I've never heard anything like that."
"People were hearing the whole song for the first time," Miguel says. "Not just their half. The whole thing."
The video reached 180,000 plays in six weeks. More significantly, it was shared in communities Miguel had never reached before — a Spanish-language music blog in Mexico City, an English-language indie music newsletter in London, a bilingual cultural magazine in Miami.
A professor at a university in Texas used it in a linguistics class about code-switching in contemporary music. She emailed Miguel to ask if she could include it in her course materials.
"I grew up being told that writing between languages was confusing," Miguel says. "That I should pick one and stick to it. That I was making it harder for people. It turns out I wasn't making it harder. I just didn't have a way to show people what they were hearing."
The Specific Gift of Showing What's Being Said
For multilingual artists, the lyric video does something that no other format accomplishes: it makes language visible without removing it from the song.
A translation note at the bottom of a YouTube description is an afterthought. A subtitle track is a concession. But lyrics appearing in sync with the music — in the original languages, in the original order, formatted to honor the switching — that's the art itself, finally legible.
Miguel's music had always been whole. His audience had always been receiving fragments.
The lyric video didn't change the music. It changed the receiver.
What He Tells Other Bilingual Artists Now
Miguel gets messages regularly from musicians who write in multiple languages and face the same wall.
"I tell them: the wall is not in the music," he says. "The wall is in the presentation. You wrote the song in two languages because that's how your mind works and that's what truth sounds like to you. Don't compromise that. Find a way to make it legible instead."
For him, that way was a lyric video. 50 minutes of editing. A simple template. Both languages on screen, side by side, sentence completing sentence.
The wall came down.
Make your multilingual music legible to the whole world →
Miguel S. is a bilingual singer-songwriter based in Chicago. Born in Guadalajara, he writes music in Spanish and English and releases independently. His work has been featured in bilingual cultural publications across the United States and Latin America.
