You don't need to read or know all this to be able to read the rest of the site so only read this if you're (a) really interested, (b) a bit of a nerd or (c) incredibly bored [delete as apporpriate]

Preparing the Lyrics

Most of the anlayses here use the songs from Bowie's twenty six studio albums. I'll be doing things in the future with some of his other material but 266 from 26 albums is enough to be going on with. Also bear in mind that I used the tracklisting from the original releases and not included the extra tracks added in later re-issues. This is because I've assumed that the tracks on the albums in their original releases represent some kind of statement that Bowie wanted to make at the time. The additional tracks included on re-releases may reflect a different statement that Bowie wanted to make many years after the original release (mainly that he wanted to be able to re-sell them to people who already owned the albums ... and, yes, that includes me ... I have up to 5 versions of some of Bowie's albums).

Anyway, to do this analysis, the first thing I had to do was to get hold of the correct lyrics. That was harder than you might think.

BowieWonderWorld.com helpfully had all the lyrics in one place so my starting point was simply to cut and paste all these into a textfile. However, I soon discovered that there is no single source of all of Bowie's lyrics that are completely correct. Even the lyrics published in the CD booklets are not always correct. For example, regardless of what the Diamond Dogs booklet says for "1984", there is no such word as "arrove" - I even looked it up to check (just in case). And, anyway,  not all of Bowie's albums come with lyric sheets.

So I cross-referenced the lyrics with other websites like TeenageWildlife.com and various other lyrics sites although even here I discovered that the same mistakes often seem to be repeated all over the place. I also referenced song books, CD/album inserts and lyric sheets. Finally I listened to every single song, sometimes several times, just to make sure. It was actually quite a long process and not much fun - I couldn't simply enjoy listening to the songs because I had to really focus on getting the lyrics correct.

Once the lyrics were correct I had to change the text so that the LIWC could analyse it. I had to change the spelling to US English and to re-write words in a form that the LIWC would recognise. This involved writing (some) abbreviations in full and making sure words like "he'd" were expanded into either "he had" or "he would". It's easy for us to identify when it should be "he had" or "he would" based on the context but the LIWC doesn't understand context, it only counts words, so I had to help it out.

To give you an example, apostrophes can indicate possession or that a letter is missing. Depending on which letter is missing, the apostrophe could be disguising the tense of a verb. In the above example, "apostrophe d" could either indicate the past participle of "have" (i.e. "had") or a conditional tense (i.e. "would") which makes a difference to the LIWC. The examples below also make a difference to the LIWC because, in spite of the same "apostrophe s" in all three examples, the first is present tense, the second is past tense and the third indicates possession:

• "Jimmy's ill with chicken pox" was changed to "Jimmy is ill with chicken pox"
• "Tommy's learned to ride his bike" was changed to "Tommy has learned to ride his bike"
• "Tommy's mum found out" was left as "Tommy's mum found out"

So the lyrics I analysed weren't quite as Bowie sings them. However, this is not a problem because the LIWC is identifying the grammatical, social or psychological process indicated by certain words and these remain unchanged regardless of whether the text is "corrected" into proper English or not.

But there were some fascinating errors in some people's efforts at writing out Bowie lyrics. Some of these were just down to the "interpreter" not being aware of some colloquial or local information, particularly when Bowie was singing about London. For example, one source began London Boys with the line "cow bell strikes". This should be "Bow bell strikes" - as any Londoner will tell you, you can only be considered a real Cockney if you were born within earshot of Bow Bell (i.e. the bell of Mary le Bow Church on Fleet Street in London). Another source had people walking "the Botella lanes" in Silly Boy Blue - this should be "the Bordello Lanes"

Other examples are a bit more bizarre

• "Kiss the window merry child" was changed to "Kiss the wind oh merry child"
• "infertible" was changed to "invertible"
• "The crops of few, the cattle gun" was changed to "The crops are few, the cattle gone"

Other details

Songs were not included if there were too few lyrics or entirely in a foreign (or nonsense) language that can't be analysed by LIWC: These include "Don't Sit Down" (Sapce Oddity), Warzawa (Low) and "V-2 Schneider" ("Heroes")

Backing vocals aren't included in the analysis unless they are fundamental to the narrative or meaning of the song. In other words, where they are not just part of the arrangement but if they link with the lead vocal and if the lead vocal does not simply sing over the top of them (an example of this is "Glass Spider")

Another potential problem is that choruses are repeated (obviously). This is an issue because words included in the chorus contribute a greater percentage of words to the overall song than words that are only included in the verses purely because they are used more often. Nevertheless, words in choruses are included as many times as the choruses are repeated, working on the assumption that they are sung as many times as they are relevant, i.e. that there is a reason why thee words have been included in the chorus. However, where a chorus repeats to fade this is considered to be simply part of the arrangement and only the first two of these choruses are included. The exeption to this is where variations in the chorus appear in the fade out (e.g. a few words are changed here and there that make the meaning slightly different).

So now you know some of the issues you'll see it wasn't simply a matter of downloading a bunch of lyrics and analysing them. This was a long process that involved making a lot of decisions about what should and what shouldn't be included.

Really quite a tedious process. That alone should earn me some Brownie points just for sticking with it so you don't have to.