Introduction

How much did Panic! at the Disco’s musical lyrics and sentiment change as they worked through finding their “sound” and had key band members come and go?


Panic! at the Disco is a well known band that got their start in 2005 and have evolved to be one of the most popular bands of today, their music being featured in Disney films among others. Beyond my question above, I am hypothesizing that their musical lyrics have changed to be more positive as time went on and they got new band members and matured as adults.

Most Common Words

A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out



“A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out” is Panic! at the Disco’s first album, released in 2005 with four members making up the band. Spencer Smith and Brendon Urie were the main writers on this album and were gearing towards a more “emo” style that was popular at the time. Fall Out Boy was also in this genre of music and the lead singer was the one to sign P!atD. Their most commonly used words tend to be those that can easily be associated with a younger audience, espeically those still going through adolescence and teenager-type drama. This makes sense as the four band members formed in high school and were in talks to sign with Pete Wentz (Fall Out Boy’s singer) as soon as they graduated. This is the only one of the albums where the song titles do not influence the most popular words list as the names are more unique, such as “the only difference between martyrdom and suicide is press coverage”.


Vices & Virtues




Vices & Virtues tried to move a bit more away from this type of teenager drama style-lyrics and instead went more into a story mode lyrically. Their music from this album was labeled as more “synthy, ’80s-style new wave and dance-punk,” by Corey Apar on their band biograhpy. The most common words shown below, and the other words surrounding in the wordcloud, show a slightly more mature set of vocabulary and a slightly calmer “vibe”. Unlike the first album which used a lot of spur-of-the-moment or sudden-emotion words, these tend to be more calm. An example of this is “love”, “Sarah”, which is very specific, and “ready”, and “time”. It is important to note as with all the albums that “Vices & Virtues” has songs titled “Sarah Smiles”, “Let’s Kill Tonight”, “Ready to Go”, and “Stall Me”. It’s also important to recognize that “ba” could be used from the song “The Ballad of Mona Lisa” and was simply the beginning of “ballad” or that it is a simple filler word, along with “whoa”.


Death of a Bachelor



In 2015, two years after Vices & Virtues was released, Spencer Smith left the band due to substance abuse issues, which left Brendon Urie as the band’s lead songwriter. He was in charge of the band’s future sound, lyrics, and general category of music. It is from this third album that Urie had control over that the visual word changes are most abrupt, as seen by the wordcloud and the more linear top 10 used words. It is important to note that some of “Death of a Bachelor”’s most popular words are most likely due to the fact that they have songs on the album titled “Hallelujah”, “Golden Days”, and “LA Devotee”. Hey is an outlier in this chart due to the fact that it can be considered a filler word on paper.


Pray for the Wicked



Following “Death of a Bachelor” Urie and Panic! at the Disco put out another album titled “Pray for the Wicked”, which debuted in the Billboard top 200 and produced the band’s first number one single in “Say Amen (Saturday Night)”. “Pray for the Wicked” was also mostly written by Brendon Urie and sticks with a more party type vibe, with the words seeming more postive and upbeat. This cannot be told simply by looking at the wordcloud and top ten words, however. It is important to note that there are two songs, “Hey look Ma, I made it”, and “High Hopes” whose song titles include two of the top 10 words from this album.

Given the fact that all of the albums lyrics show low to medium lyrical change in a sense that you can be provided different “vibes” or feelings when seeing very different groupings of words, it is necessary to delve deeper. In the next sections, the sentiment of each album, both good and bad, will be explored to see if there is a more obvious sentiment change overall. Each album will have two lists in the order of the top 10 negative sentiment words, and then the top 10 positive sentiment words. They will be in the same album order as above -> A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, Vices & Virtues, Death of a Bachelor, and Pray for the Wicked.

Sentiment Values

There are two main features that will allow us to more clearly tell the sentiment of an album from the data above - the n number, and the value attributed to it. For this analysis I will primarily be focusing on the value attribued and the numbers of them.

A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out

Sentiment Values for “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out”. Bad sentiments on the left, good on the right.



# A tibble: 10 x 3
   word          n value
   <chr>     <int> <dbl>
 1 hell          6    -4
 2 fuck          2    -4
 3 shit          2    -4
 4 whore         1    -4
 5 dead         12    -3
 6 desperate     6    -3
 7 goddamn       6    -3
 8 apathy        2    -3
 9 panic         2    -3
10 terrible      2    -3



# A tibble: 10 x 3
   word          n value
   <chr>     <int> <dbl>
 1 wonderful     7     4
 2 love         10     3
 3 pleasant      4     3
 4 beautiful     2     3
 5 inspiring     2     3
 6 charm         1     3
 7 chance        7     2
 8 favorite      4     2
 9 top           4     2
10 applause      2     2


For “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out”, the album uses significantly more negatively valued sentiment words than positive. A difference of four -4 valued words versus one +4 valued word, and six -3 valued words verus five +3 valued words. On negative sentiment, there are no words that have below a -3, whereas there are words from +2 to +4 on the postitive sentiment side.


Vices & Virtues

Sentiment Values for “Vices & Virtues”. Bad sentiments on the left, good on the right.



# A tibble: 10 x 3
   word        n value
   <chr>   <int> <dbl>
 1 hell        5    -4
 2 kill       14    -3
 3 worse       3    -3
 4 lost        2    -3
 5 bad         1    -3
 6 dead        1    -3
 7 hate        1    -3
 8 killing     1    -3
 9 worst       1    -3
10 stall      16    -2



# A tibble: 10 x 3
   word            n value
   <chr>       <int> <dbl>
 1 rejoicing       1     4
 2 win             1     4
 3 love            9     3
 4 loved           5     3
 5 woo             5     3
 6 pleased         4     3
 7 charm           3     3
 8 sparkle         3     3
 9 affection       1     3
10 beautifully     1     3


Based on sentiment alone, the numbers of 4’s and 3’s are about equal on the “Vices and Virtues” album. There is one -4 word, and two +4 words, and then eight -3 words and eight +3 words. There is only one -2 word, and no +2 words. This is in a large contrast to their previous album, and shows a more middle ground. The most used -3 word, “kill”, is also used in a song title from this album, “Let’s Kill Tonight”, and therefore when viewed in context does not have as much of a negative connotation as believed.


Death of a Bachelor

Sentiment Values for “Death of a Bachelor”. Bad sentiments on the left, good on the right.



# A tibble: 10 x 3
   word        n value
   <chr>   <int> <dbl>
 1 hell       15    -4
 2 fucking     3    -4
 3 bad        13    -3
 4 evil        3    -3
 5 lost        3    -3
 6 die         2    -3
 7 hate        2    -3
 8 dead        1    -3
 9 killing     1    -3
10 liars       1    -3



# A tibble: 10 x 3
   word         n value
   <chr>    <int> <dbl>
 1 fun          1     4
 2 love        12     3
 3 praise       4     3
 4 sexy         2     3
 5 perfect      1     3
 6 glorious     4     2
 7 kiss         2     2
 8 sunshine     2     2
 9 debonair     1     2
10 heroes       1     2


For “Death of a Bachelor” it is first thought that the album has more negative sentimental value than positive due to having more -3 and -4’s than the positive side. However, you must take in to account the fact that “hell”, which has a negative sentiment of -4 and was used 15 times, can all be accounted for from one song on their album - “Don’t threaten me with a good time”. When you look deeper into that, it is seen that hell is not used with a negative connotation, but with a positive one, primarily being used in the line “It’s a hell of a feeling, though”. Looking beyond the use of “hell”, however, it can still be argued that the album has more of a negative sentiment due what was mentioned earlier in that it has only -4’s and -3’s and no -2’s, unlike the postive sentiments, which have -4’s, -3’s, and -2’s.

Pray for the Wicked

Sentiment Values for “Pray for the Wicked”. Bad sentiments on the left, good on the right.



# A tibble: 10 x 3
   word        n value
   <chr>   <int> <dbl>
 1 fuck       12    -4
 2 damn        4    -4
 3 shit        3    -4
 4 crime       6    -3
 5 dead        6    -3
 6 killing     5    -3
 7 charged     4    -3
 8 evil        2    -3
 9 guilty      2    -3
10 hate        2    -3



# A tibble: 10 x 3
   word          n value
   <chr>     <int> <dbl>
 1 brilliant     1     4
 2 fun           1     4
 3 overjoyed     1     4
 4 love         26     3
 5 celebrate     1     3
 6 happy         1     3
 7 loyal         1     3
 8 paradise      1     3
 9 perfect       1     3
10 hopes        23     2


Their most recent album of “Pray for the Wicked” is also an album that has the possibility to be argued as a fairly medium sentimental value overall. When we look at the negative sentiments, “fuck” is used all of it’s twelve times in just one song - “(Fuck a) Silver Lining”. In that song it is used in lyric that matches the name, and is used in a mostly negative way, with the lyric that follows it being that gold is better. The song itself could be argued to not be negative as it is about doing better than what the silver lining is. The only other word on this list that is needed to be seen in context is the word “killing”. It is used all of its six times in the song “High Hopes”, and the lyric is “shooting for the stars when I couldn’t make a killing”. This word can be argued that it is still a slightly negative placeholder as it means they are not making money, but the shooting for the stars at the beginning of the lyric add a positive kick to it. Overall, the positive sentiments have much less use, majority only having an n value of 1, while there are two that have high n values. “Hopes” is used so many times as it is from a song named with it, “High Hopes”, and “love” is split up between multiple songs.


Conclusion

By looking at the words most used in their songs from each of the four albums chosen, and from looking at the sentiment values of each, a conclusion can be drawn that their lyrics have matured as they have. That is not to say that the sentiment of each album has become more positive or more negative, but the lyrics they have chosen to use and to talk about, have become more grown and gone past their “emo” phase from “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out”.

It can also be argued by looking at the sentimental values alone that “Vices & Virtues” and “Death of a Bachelor” had slightly more positive sentiments to them than “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out” and “Pray for the Wicked” did, but that is not delving deeper into the song choices themselves, only the semtiment values and the words used in them.

My hypothesis that their musical lyrics had changed to be more positive overall in time as their band memebers matured and others left is not completely supported by the evidence shown. Instead, there is indication of some sentimental change as time went on, as well as a difference in what they’re singing about lyrically, but no drastic change. It would be worth looking in to their music itself as a sound to see how much their sound has changed, rather than just the lyrics as they have had quite a growth there as they and their fan base have grown up.