‘Cause I’ve Got a Blank Space
Using NLP to Analyze Taylor Swift’s Lyrics
Summer 2020
From belting out “You Belong with Me” in my elementary school bus to dancing along to “Blank Space” as I got ready for prom with my high school friends, Taylor Swift’s songs have been a the soundtrack to my adolescent years. As I grew from an awkward preteen to an adventurous teenager to the clueless college student I am today, these songs have been with me through the happiness, hurt, and frustration of my life.
The reason that I, and many others, are drawn to her music because she writes many of her own lyrics, incorporating her personal experiences on the growing pains of growing up. Wanting to combine my passion for data with my passion of music, I dove into this project and hoped to learn something new about the music I had loved for such a long time.
I set out to tackle the following questions:
Have her songs been getting more repetitive?
What emotional topics are common in her lyrics?
Is it true that Taylor Swift only writes break up songs?
How have the themes of her album evolved as she has matured?
Album Overviews
Pulling charting data from Billboards Hot 100, we can see the performance of her past songs and an overall distribution of her music across 7 albums.
Usually a handful of songs chart really well, the long tail usually results from her entire album charting immediately after release.
Her song were the lengthiest during the Speak Now Era. Since 2010, the average duration of her songs have been decreasing.
Though at first blush, it seems as if Speak Now and Lover have been her best charting albums, when we narrow it down to songs that are ranked in the Billboard Top 5, we see that 1989 actually produced the most mega-hits.
Choose Your Words
Looking at a word map, we see the prevalence of words such as like, love, and you’re, reflecting the romantic nature of many of her songs.
Have her lyrics gotten less creative?
In “Shake It Off,” Taylor tells her listeners to “shake it off” over 70 times. The phrase “look what you made me do” is repeated in her Reputation single 45 times.
One measure of repetition is lexical density which refers to the proportion of unique words in a given text. A lower lexical density implies higher repetition.
These are her top 5 most repetitive songs. Majority are from her 1989 album.
In the graph above, we can see a moderate dip in density especially in her 5th and 6th albums. This also coincides her transition into pop music from country, which could be one explanation as the pop genre tends to be a bit more simplistic.
Looking at her charting positions, its clear that many of her most popular songs are also her most repetitive, which explains why it’s easy to associate with her lyrics.
Let’s Talk About Feelings
Sentiment analysis breaks down the different emotions expressed in each song. I used the NRC Emoticon Lexicon which classify words based on 8 emotions (anger, anticipation, fear, disgust, joy, sadness, surprise, and trust) as well as sentiments (positive and negative)
Totaling the scores across Swift’s entire discography, we see there is balance between the amount of positive versus negative sentiment. And her highest-scoring emotions (anticipation, joy, sadness, and trust) are in line with the personal growth and romantic experiences that her music is best known for.
This gives us insight into specific songs that score highly in each category. These categorizations are not perfect, as “Don’t Blame Me” appears as both a highly positive and highly negative song. And “Shake It Off”, an upbeat tune about self-acceptance, scored highly in negativity and disgust due to the repeated use of the work “hate”, when she sings “haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.”
Relationships Between Emotions
In the correlation plot to the right, we can explore the connections between different emotions in each of her songs. The darker and larger the correlation, the greater number of songs scored high or low on both emotions.
It’s no surprise that songs that were considered angry also were coded higher in sadness, fear, and anger.
And to a lesser degree, songs about trust tended to also cover joy and anticipation.
In Taylor Swift’s albums, track number 5’s have been known for being her most emotional and vulnerable songs including “White Horse”, “All Too Well”, and “Delicate”. I combined the track numbers across all 7 of her albums and found that while the fifth track has a higher than average sadness rating, it loses out to track 7.
How Have Emotions Changed Over Time?
Through the 2 charts, we can see how these sentiments have evolved across her album. Reputation had the highest ratings of anger, distrust, and fear. This was her album after a 3-year break and came in the wake of accusations of being a “snake” from the Kim Kardashian/Kanye West as well as heavy media scrutiny of her personal relationships/friendships in the previous year.
However, there seems to be a bright future ahead. Overall, Swift’s joy score has been increasing and was especially high in her last album, Lover.
What Are The Themes?
After identifying the emotion of each world, how are they combined together to create a message / story for each song? Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) allows us to model topics by picking up on relationships between the appearances of certain words, allowing for unobserved groupings.
I used LDA to separate the songs into 5 central themes, which I named based on the top words under each topic and the songs assigned to them.
Fallin’ is all about the butterflies on the first date and the anticipation of getting to know someone new. In “End Game”, Swift sings about someone who she hopes will be her last. In “Paper Rings,” “King of My Heart,” and “Delicate,” she recalls the story of their first meeting and beginning stages of the relationship.
Break-up Anthems are Swift’s quintessential goodbye songs, the relationship didn’t work and it’s time to move on. “Forever & Always,” “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” and “Should’ve Said No,” are some of her most vindictive tracks, telling exes that they need to get lost. “The Last Time” is a heartbreaking duet with Gary Lightbody of a crumbling relationship in which both parties realize that it is time to let go.
Living Young captures the feeling of growing up from the magic of moving to a new city (“Welcome to New York”), high school heartbreak (“Fifteen”), and being invincible in your youth (“Long Live”).
Got Enemies is where Swift acknowledges some of her celebrity feuds with Katy Perry (“Bad Blood”), Kanye West (“Look What You Made Me Do”), and Calvin Harris (“I Did Something Bad”).
He’s Bad News embodies the feeling of being drawn to someone, even when you know it won’t work out, even in your Wildest Dreams. These include her popular song “I Knew You Were Trouble,” and one of my personal favorites, “Getaway Car.”
This chord diagram shows how her themes have evolved through her albums. For instance, the fallin’ in love songs that were the bread and butter of her early albums have been replaced by songs about celebrity beef and reflections on growing up.
Reflections
INITIAL TAKEAWAYS
Through this analysis, I was able to see how Taylor Swift’s lyrics and musical themes have evolved over time as well as answer my personal questions over the vocabulary and emotions that are common in her songs. Being able to visualize these relationships has given me more insight into the music I listen to.
NEXT STEPS
Though I lack any experience in music theory, a further analysis that I believe would be interesting is looking into how the rhythm, tempo, and instrumentals of the songs have changed over time, especially as Swift transitioned from a country artist to a pop star. There’s also a notable lack of melody in many pop songs today (ex: the monotone chant-like chorus of “Look What You Made Me Do”). Seeing if this trend holds true could give insight as to why certain songs are popular today.