Welcome to The Gospel According to David Bowie.com

On this site David Bowie's lyrics from his twenty six studio albums are analysed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), a program developed by James Pennebaker to investigate psychological constructs represented in text. It’s a quantitative analysis of psychological processes reflected in the words Bowie uses rather than a qualitative interpretation of the meaning of his songs.

The LIWC is a serious program used by serious psychologists to investigate serious topics such as adaptation to trauma by exploring the link between linguistic processing and immune function, suicidality and other physical and psychological health issues.

But here we're just using it to have a bit of fun ... with perhaps some insights and enlightenment along the way, For example, here are some of the topics we cover:

• How healthy is a Bowie album? (Or: "The Rise and Fall of Cognition and Emotion")
• What is David Bowie’s recipe for success? (Or "The Battle for Britain ... and America")
• What does Bowie like about his own work? (Or: "The Best of Bowie")
• How low is “Low”? (Or: "Blue Blue Electric Blue")
• Which album is the new “Hunky Dory”? (Or: ... er ... actually that's it, "The New Hunky Dory")
• How do you win the hearts of the Bowie faithful? (Or: "All You've Got To Do Is Win")
• What's Bowie saying in his long songs? (Or: "God Knows I'm Feeling Good")
• What's love got to do with religion? (Or: "Sex and the Church")

If you want to know more about the LIWC and how I prepared the lyrics for the analysis then you can read those pages if you like (see the links above) but you don't need to - you can go straight to the Psycho-Lyrical Analysis and it will still make sense even without reading all the technical stuff.

If you have any theories about any of the analyses I’ve done, you can get in touch. But I’d also like to hear from you if you have any suggestions for more analyses I can do. Here are some that I’m in the process of doing at the moment and that will appear shortly:

• Time May Change Me - how Bowie's lyrics have evolved over the years
• Pin Ups and Nite Flites - covers versus Bowie's own material
• The Berlin Triptych - how these albums are the same and how they are different
• The Side Effects of the Cocaine - what Bowie says when he's under the influence

If you want to know my credentials are, what makes me such an expert, you can click on my page above. But briefly, my name is Nick Troop. I’m a musician and I’ve released three albums under the name CatDesigners. I’m also a psychologist (yes, a proper one, so that’s “Dr Nick” to you) and I work in the School of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK as a Principal Lecturer in Health Psychology. Last, but by no means least as far as this website goes, I’ve been a huge Bowie fan for 25 years.

Finally, please remember, while I am a scientist, and while I am using scientific tools and analyses, this is not science so DON'T TAKE IT TOO SERIOUSLY.

Luv on ya

Dr Nick Troop