lyrics project

Years ago I read a blog post from someone who had collected all the lyrics from all the songs that Suede had released and then produced an analysis of which words were the most commonly used in Brett Anderson’s lyrics.

I thought this was a great idea and decided to try to do the same thing for David Bowie’s lyrics because I hadn’t seen anyone do anything similar in all the hundreds of books, fanzines or magazines about Bowie I have collected.

I set out expecting to find some stellar insights into his published lyrics and to see some obvious links like space>Mars>spaceboy>planets or perhaps London>New York>Berlin>Tokyo. Sadly there was nothing like that to be found but I did find some other interesting observations.

I collected a set of lyrics from some of the many sites which publish them; the official site used to publish all his lyrics but this was dropped when it was relaunched in 2013. Only the last 2 albums are published on there now.

Album Totals by WordSum
The Next Day2968
David Bowie2950
1. Outside2403
Never Let Me Down2002
Space Oddity1793
Hunky Dory1652
Diamond Dogs1588
Hours1540
Ziggy Stardust1500
Heathen1482
The Man Who Sold The World1320
Reality1299
Young Americans1270
Lodger1185
Aladdin Sane1180
Scary Monsters1180
Station To Station1014
Earthling934
Lets Dance860
Blackstar859
Black Tie White Noise859
Heroes823
Buddha of Suburbia648
Tonight473
Low293
Albums by Word Count

error: All material on this site is copyright Robin Jeeps 2022.