This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: "It seems like all I ever do is change," Taylor Swift writes in the prolog to the bestselling album 1989 (Taylor's Version), released in 2023. In fact, change is a core part of the Swift marketing machine, which revolves around the evolution of her "eras." Since the release of her debut album in 2006, Swift has transformed from a ringleted country ingenue to a slick city dweller to (for her latest album cycle) a sequin-clad showgirl.
That cycle has just been extended with the arrival of The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore, featuring four new bonus tracks, including the single Patient Zero. The lyrics to these tracks, however, show that Swift can be associated with continuity just as much as change. To investigate Swift's lyrical language, I created a bespoke digital database—a corpus—of every publicly available track by the artist.
I've called it the Taylor Lyric Corpus (or TaLyCo for short). Aside from the 247 songs spread across her 12 studio albums, the corpus also contains lyrics from extended-play releases, charity singles and non-album singles. It encompasses contributions to movie soundtracks, songs written for other artists and unreleased demo recordings.
Swift signed a development deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing at age 14, so there's plenty of material to work with: 123,553 words, to be exact. This comprehensive collection of Swift's writing makes it easy to pinpoint recurring patterns over the course of her 20-plus-year career. In the upcoming book The Lyrics of Taylor Swift, my colleague Suzanne McClure and I look in particular at Swift's lyrical fascination with color, counterfactuality, embodiment, opposition and time.
Many of the patterns we've picked up on have carried over into Swift's four new Encore tracks. Take, for example, her strategic use of color, described by one critic as an "obsession". Swift may have an entire album devoted to red—a color she once called "really powerful" as it signals everything from "passion and love and affection" to "jealousy and anger and frustration"—but her most overrepresented color is in fact gray.
In her new song Pink Clouding, Swift continues her habit of placing the inherently colorless color alongside brighter hues for contrast ("gray (gray) rocking where the arrow hit"). Think "Did I paint your bluest skies the darkest gray?" from coney island (2020), or "Gray overpass full of neon names" from Ruin the Friendship (2025) on the original The Life of a Showgirl album. In her Encore track, there are syllabic and semantic echoes that make the contrast between "gray rocking" and "pink clouding" even more obvious.
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