Taylor Swift: my database of her 123,553 lyrics reveals hidden patterns

“It seems like all I ever do is change”, Taylor Swift writes in the prologue to the bestselling album 1989 (Taylor’s Version), released in 2014. In fact, change is a core part of the Swift marketing machine, which revolves around the evolution of her “eras”.

Since the release of her debut album in 2006, Swift has transformed from a ringleted country ingenue to a slick city dweller to (for her latest album cycle) a sequin-clad showgirl. That cycle has just been extended with the arrival of The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore, featuring four new bonus tracks, including the single Patient Zero.

The lyrics to these tracks, however, prove that Swift can be associated with continuity just as much as change.

To investigate Swift’s lyrical language, I created a bespoke digital database – a corpus – of every publicly available track by the artist. I’ve called it the Taylor Lyric Corpus (or TaLyCo for short).

Aside from the 247 songs spread across her 12 studio albums, the corpus also contains lyrics from extended play releases, charity singles and non-album singles. It also encompasses contributions to film soundtracks, songs written for other artists and unreleased demo recordings. Swift signed a development deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing at the tender age of 14, so there’s plenty of material to work with: 123,553 words, to be exact.

This comprehensive collection of Swift’s writing makes is easy to pinpoint recurring patterns over the course of her 20-plus year career. In the upcoming book The Lyrics of Taylor Swift, my colleague Suzanne McClure and I look in particular at Swift’s lyrical fascination with colour, counterfactuality, embodiment, opposition and time.

Many of the patterns we’ve picked up on have been carried across into Swift’s four-strong new Encore offering. Take, for example, her strategic use of colour, described by one critic as an “obsession”. Swift may have an entire album devoted to red – a colour she once called “really powerful” as it signals everything from “passion and love and affection” to “jealousy and anger and frustration” – but her most over-represented colour is in fact grey.

In her new song Pink Clouding, Swift continues her habit of placing the inherently colourless colour alongside brighter hues for contrast (“gray (gray) rocking where the arrow hit”). Think “Did I paint your bluest skies the darkest gray?” from coney island (2020), or “Gray overpass full of neon names” from Ruin the Friendship (2025) on the original The Life of a Showgirl album.

In her Encore track, there are syllabic and semantic echoes which make the contrast of “gray rocking” and “pink clouding” even more obvious.

I’m addicted to the ‘if only’

Aside from an obsession with colour, Swift has also been described as “obsessed by how others perceive her”. Critic Quinn Moreland wrote in 2022 that: “Swift sees the world seeing her, and rather than shut it out, she absorbs it.”

Nowhere is this more evident than in the opening verse of new song Cleveland!. Swift offers a sardonic assessment of herself which borrows heavily from public perception: “And with all of that money, why’s she dressed like trash? / When she smiles, it’s annoying.”

This absorption and repackaging of the wider world’s perspective represents a meta-perspective – my view of another’s view of me – and it recurs in songs including 2014’s Shake It Off (“I stay out too late / Got nothing in my brain / That’s what people say”) and 2024’s Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me? (“I’m always drunk on my own tears, isn’t that what they all said?”).

Elsewhere on Cleveland!, an amorphous “they” suggest that the track’s romantic lead “could find someone younger”, compounding Swift’s fascination with unrealised scenarios and matching her overuse of the modal verbs “would”, “should” and “could” across the rest of her discography.

Swift is also prone to zeroing in on specific body parts, and the Encore additions are no exception. Across her four new tracks we have mention of arms, elbows, faces, hearts, lips and shoulders – all body part terms to tick off the lyrical bingo card.

And to cover the body, an abundance of clothes: cardigans, Eagles T-shirts, skirts lilac and short or tight and little, black dresses and old faded blue jeans all figure across past tracks. With the release of Encore, her existing lyrical wardrobe has been supplemented by the “church dress” and “hand-me-down sweater” in new track Babylon – reminiscent of the knitwear left under someone’s bed in folklore’s lead single, cardigan (2020).

Across Swift’s discography, we’ve found that these clothing items are rarely neutral, but instead act as metonyms entwined with identity formation. There’s also often a gendered element; literature scholar Claire Hurley proposes that Swift “locates embodied female knowledge inside clothing”.

Swift’s latest Encore tracks have met with a polarised response, including among some fans who have negatively compared the lyrics to those of earlier albums. Yet our corpus-based studies suggest Swift is writing much as she has always done – producing lyrics which are highly detailed, suffused with speculation and colourful in every sense of the word.

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