“It seems like all I ever do is change”, Taylor Swift writes in the prologue to the bestselling album 1989 (Taylor’s Version), released in 2014. 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, prove 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 also encompasses contributions to film soundtracks, songs written for other artists and unreleased demo recordings. Swift signed a development deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing at the tender age of 14, so there’s plenty of material to work with: 123,553 words, to be exact.

This comprehensive........

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