Sentiment and Emotions in Taylor Swift’s Albums. A Journey through the Eras

Abstract

American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift has navigated different musical styles throughout her career, ranging from country, to pop, to indie folk. Her albums are characterized by establishing the beginning of new eras, each marked by a defined aesthetics and sound. This research aims to scrutinize the evolution of Taylor Swift’s lyrics throughout her discography in terms of sentiment and emotions. The main objective is to find out whether actual alignment exists between Taylor Swift’s lyrics and the supposed eras that according to the artist have marked her work. To do so, we examine her discography in terms of sentiment and emotions. We use a mixed-methods approach to analyze each album’s lyrics using several advanced text processing tools. To deal with sentiment, we analyze Swift’s discography using an advanced sentiment analysis system that offers time series analysis. On the other hand, we extract the most salient emotions using an advanced corpus query tool designed for content and discourse analysis that allows the identification and raking of emotions according to Parrott’s list. The results show that love and sadness dominate Swift’s discography, with a predominantly negative sentiment. Additionally, there is a mismatch between the emotions in her lyrics and their sentiment classification, indicating that Swift’s style does not rely on explicit positive or negative terms. Instead, her use of rhetorical devices and subtle language conveys meaning through more implicit forms.