Exploring the Sadness of Lana Del Rey Albums

Introduction

I’m a big fan of Lana Del Rey, and she is notorious for having sad, depressing albums. However, I wanted to see if data can tell me how sad and depressing her albums actually are. I decided to use the spotifyr package that allows me to pull song data from Spotify. This package also has valance data which is a measure from 0.0 to 1.0, describing the musical positiveness conveyed by a track. Tracks with high valence sound more positive (e.g. happy, cheerful, euphoric), while tracks with low valence sound more negative (e.g. sad, depressed, angry). I decided to take a look at the valence for each Lana Del Rey Album.

Data

NOTE: I hid the Spotifyr code due to it having my own Spotify Dev codes. If you would like to know how I used the package, please contact me.

ldr <- get_artist_audio_features('Lana Del Rey')

ggplot(data = ldr, aes(x = valence, group = album_name, fill = album_name)) +
  geom_density(adjust=1.5) +
  facet_wrap(~album_name)

Findings

Looking at the density graphs, we can see that most of her albums are actually quite sad and depressing. Most of her albums have a valance rating of below 0.25 with the only exceptions being Born To Die and Ultraviolence - Audio Commentary. Born To Die is her first album and despite the name of the album, it does have her ‘happiest’ songs according to the data. I decided to leave the Audio Commentary album to show that talking about a sad album ends up giving quite a happy and cheerful rating (at least the way Lana Del Rey talks about the album).

One prediction I had going in to this data was that Ultraviolence would be the most depressing and sad album of hers. It’s a quite popular opinion that Ultraviolence is considered her most depressing album and each album released after gets happier and happier, with NFR being the most cheerful album. After observing the data, it appears that Honeymoon is the most depressing album of hers. After that, her albums Lust For Life, NFR, Ultraviolence, and Paradise all have similar valence ratings.

I hope you enjoyed measuring the sadness and depression of Lana Del Rey albums with me. Thank you for taking the time to read this.