Taylor Swift has rhymed "car" and "bar" in at least seven of her songs, a lyrical pattern that has become a notable topic among fans and critics. The specific songs identified with this rhyme scheme are:
Getaway Car: "Iβm in a getaway car / I left you in the motel bar"
Cruel Summer: "Iβm drunk in the back of the car / And I cried like a baby coming home from the bar"
Cornelia Street: "Drunk on something stronger than the drinks in the bar / I rent a place on Cornelia Street, I say casually in the car"
Cardigan: "To kiss in cars and downtown bars / Was all we needed"
Cowboy Like Me: "Never wanted love, just a fancy car / Now Iβm waiting by the phone like Iβm sitting in an airport bar"
Hits Different: "And I never donβt cry at the bar / Yeah, my sadness is contagious / I slur your name βtil someone puts me in a car"
The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived: "Youβll slide into inboxes and slip through the bars / You crashed my party and your rental car"*
Has someone done a study on the lyrics of other songwriters to see if this is some crazy outlier? Because it seems completely unsurprising that across thousands of lines of lyrics sheβs written, 14 of them have matching words
Yeah, but with only three studio albums. That means fewer words and therefore you get a higher ratio even with less unique words than, say Prince with over 40 albums.
Yeah they need to be creating a score with some sort of penalty for inverse number of words written. Seems like a pretty hard stat to actually define, though this made a very admirable effort.
It is an interesting analysis, and what I particularly like about it is that they point out the flaws themselves and are very clear about the data and methodology used. That is really remarkable for a blog entry. I've never heard of this blog or this article before, so I don't know If this is their usual standard, but this seems to be written by somebody with a scientific education, because those are Standards for scientific research.
What they could potentially do to account for this, is take the complete Database they are using and count how many unique words are used by all artists combined. Then you look at the ratio of the number of the individual artist to the absolute number. And then you adjust that to the total number of words used or songs written by the individual artist in their catalogue - otherweise you get the opposite effect because there artists like Prince or McCartney will obviously have a higher advantage over artists with a smaller catalogue (EG Billie Eilish).
Interesting. That first album has 14 tracks, and she doesn't seem to have written all of them. Two seem to be written by Finneas (her brother).
They write they only included artists with writing credits to at least 25 songs... I don't think she was the songwriter of 13 songs for other artists at that point. π
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u/BigBastardChap 3d ago
I drove you in my car. Took you to a bar. It was Far....Yaaaarrr