While popular songwriters like Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo and Hozier have captured massive international audiences with their gripping, emotional lyrics, new research suggests that songs over time have lost their feelings. A study from Michigan State University included nearly 40,000 English-language songs from 230 artists across different genres, which were released between 1947 to 2024. Researchers looked at the level of emotion expressed in the songs by using a program called LIWC - the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count - which analyzes text-based language for emotional components, like words associated with anxiety, sadness as well as social references and references to friends and family. The findings were published last month in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts. Logan Gibson is one of the authors who led the study. He told CTV News in a Sunday interview that when looking at how music by specific artists changed over time, all emotions, both positive and negative, declined. “This could suggest emotional stability as people go throughout their lives,” he said. “They’re able to handle their emotions better.” Anxious players Though researchers found that both good and bad emotions in artists’ lyrics declined throughout the years, lyrics that conveyed anxiety went against the trend. For example, specific anxious-fuelled lyrics included phrases like “I’m nervous,” “I’m shaking,” and “palms sweating.” Additionally, references to family and friends went down over the course of time. When looking at lyrics over historical time, researchers found that both positive and negative emotional lyrics decreased, while emotionally angry words increased. The researchers suspected that this could be a reflection of the increase in loneliness over the decades. “The greater anger that we see (in lyrics), we thought it was being associated with that same social isolation, where greater social isolation in previous studies has been shown to lead to increases in anger,” Gibson said. William Chopik, another researcher involved in the study, explained that the study simply tallied the words in the lyrics and didn’t dig into their meaning. “It really just counted different types of words, rather than trying to analyze really deep metaphors or things like that,” he said. “Oftentimes it would just flag associations with really clear words.” Different emotions for different genres The study also looked at whether specific genres of music fell above or below for a given word category, using pop music as the reference group. They found that rap had fewer angry words than pop, while metal had more. When it comes to the study’s takeaway message, Gibson said over historical time, less emotional lyrics could reflect shifts in themes and what songs are about. “Maybe the things that are resonating with audiences aren’t highly emotional, they’re actually less emotional,” he said. That could be because of changes in the way the music industry works and what people are looking for in music, depending on what resonates with them, Gibson added. Chopik said that what cultures produce can be “really informative to the moment that we’re thinking or what we’re concerned about.” “At least from our study, it looks like massive cathartic release of emotion is not necessarily the thing that popular artists are singing about,” he said.
