13 Impossible Words

I'm a geek and a poet, a writer and an artist, a programmer and a statistician. Throughout my time as a fan, one of the major draws of the Cure's music for me has always been the literate, intelligent and beautiful lyrics of the songs.

A favorite tactic of Robert is to write songs based on books and poetry, and compress them into a coherent, lyrical form. The brilliant condensation of "Les Yeux des pauvres" into the song "How Beautiful You Are" is a perfect example of this. However, the vast majority of the lyrics simply come from Robert's own life experiences, thoughts and feelings. As I have explored previously in this blog, there are common themes which permeate the songs, such as descriptions of the ocean, the stars, sun, moon, nature, cities and of course, relationships and the vast range of human emotion. Taken together, they describe a life lived fully and offer an intriguing glimpse into the heart and mind of a modern-day poet.

As a geek, I have always been fascinated by the visual depiction of data, and when the Wordle applet was released upon the world this summer, I played with it several times but never had the chance to do what I always wanted to do with it, namely, run a dataset of all the Cure's lyrics through it! Well, now my Cure lyric geek / artist / statistician desires have been fulfilled, and I present to you two sets of Wordles. I'll give you some background on how the data was handled after you take a look at the following:

Top 13 Words in Cure Lyrics
(click to explore)

Knowing about the themes that recur in Cure songs, when I first ran Wordle with the Cure lyrics dataset, I was a little surprised to see the top 13 composed of these words! And a big shock was that the most common word in all of the lyrics was the word Never, followed closely (and not nearly as shockingly) by LOVE.

Here are the top 13 words in numerical order, with the word frequency count next to them.

1. Never (288)
2. Love (237)
3. Want (198)
4. Time (187)
5. Always (166)
6. Know (163)
7. Away (151)
8. One (143)
9. Ever (139)
10. Nothing (137)
11. Go (135)
12. Get (128)
13. World (124)

I love how poetically these words go together, and the way that the Wordle depiction puts them together creates an artistic vision that can be read in many ways. These words manage to distill many of the important themes in the Cure's music into short, 2-3 word sentences that convey a great range of meaning and emotion, in concise, haiku-like form.

Here is a larger dataset in Wordle, of the top 300 words in Cure lyrics
(click to explore)


About the data:

The Cure lyrics analyzed here were taken from a document available online. This document is fairly comprehensive, containing lyrics for demos and other rare tracks. I am not certain of the source or editor, or I would be happy to link back to them. In order to clean up the dataset for analysis, I removed most of the extraneous information such as brackets and album titles. I didn't spend an extreme amount of time cleaning it up however, as Wordle removes a lot of unimportant data such as often-repeated common words (and, the, if) and pronouns (you, me, my). I also manually removed the words "like" and "just" as common words. You can access the raw text that I created here, if you'd like to play around with it in Wordle or another analysis engine for yourself. I've also made the dataset available on Many Eyes if you'd like to try a tag cloud or word tree there.

Finally, just for fun, here's a Wordle of my blog :


Update: Cure Lyrics Word Doc by aussietiger - Thank you!