Writing Style
Beatles songs are famously efficient and hooky, and It would appear that McCartney’s solo repertoire continues that commercial appeal, as he tends to reach the choruses relatively early (both in general and in comparison with Lennon’s solo tracks) in his songs. Alternatively, Lennon, always known to be more verbose than his partner, scored notably higher than McCartney in lyrical density. Both writers use more slang in their solo years, maybe as a result of pop culture’s trend towards informality.
Courtesy MyPart
Overall, the data comes to contradict the preconceived notion that the pair’s individual writing became more sophisticated over the years, as their earlier Beatles tracks are richer in everything from usage of rhymes and number of groups of rhymes, to perfect rhymes at the end of lines — a crucial ingredient in advanced songwriting. It would appear that through their partnership, Lennon and McCartney created a “tighter” linguistic song-making machine. One only needs to catch a glimpse of Peter Jackson’s “Get Back” series — which provides a fly-on-the-wall perspective of their creative songwriting process during their last days together — to understand how teamwork gave their songs a distinct, added edge.
Musical Composition
While many saw McCartney as the Beatles’ composer and Lennon as the primary lyricist, their solo scores are almost identical in compositional features such as number of chords, inversion, unique chords, and number of seventh chords. In fact, our analysis reveals remarkable similarities between Lennon and McCartney’s respective individual works, as well as the songs they co-penned during the early 1960s.
2. Taylor Swift & Bon Iver
Lyrical Themes and Moods
One of the most interesting contemporary collaborations is the unlikely union of pop superstar Taylor Swift and Justin Vernon, aka Bon Iver, a renowned figure from the alternative Americana/folk scene. Though on the surface the two could hardly be more different, their recurrent collaborations since 2020 — on a pair of songs they co-wrote for her albums, “Exile” and “Evermore,” and two Big Red Machine numbers that have them vocally hooking up, “Birch” and “Renegade” — clearly demonstrate their musical chemistry. These powerful tracks are equally marked by Swift’s solemn intensity and Vernon’s air of mystique.
The data reveals that Swift deals more with themes such as infatuation, love, and romance as a solo artist than in her collaborative work with Bon Iver. Her solo works (compared to solo Bon Iver and Swift-Vernon collaborations), also score higher in sex, hedonism, pleasure, yearning, longing, loneliness, and anger. In their collaborations, Vernon’s touch brings in themes and moods of success, criticism, feelings of detachment, cruelty, and realistic observation.
