Songs

As we can see, Bob Dylan was the most prolific in the 1960s and his song output decreased over the decades. However, in the 2000s, he made a comeback.

Words

Unsurprising for a popular song writer, in general, but perhaps surprising for Bob Dylan, in particular, “love” is the most frequently used (non-stop) word in his lyrics.

Word Use Across the Decades

These results are perhaps the most interesting. Although “love” is the most commonly used word overall, “time” is the most frequently used word in Dylan’s lyrics in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s and is in the top 8 during the 1990s and 2000s. (Although “time” is a very commonly-used word in general) In the 2010s, neither “love” nor “time” is in the top 8 and things get a bit dark.

Word Use Across Albums

Now we look at the most popular words for each album.

Lexical Analysis

Lexical diversity has increased slightly over the years in Bob Dylan’s lyrics. In other words, he’s been using a wider range of words.

Lexical density has decreased slightly over the years. That is, his songs “say less” over time. Given the high density and complexity of his lyrics from 1964–1966, this is probably not surprising. However, lexical density has been making a comeback in his most recent songs.

TF-IDF

See Wikipedia for a definition of TF-IDF. Using TF-IDF on albums is quite informative. We see which words are important on a particular album.

Acknowledgements

This article is highly indebted to the techniques used in “Lyric Analysis with NLP & Machine Learning with R” written by Debbie Liske.

Code

My code is available in the bob-dylan-haikus project.