Picture it; Richmond, 2018. An unseasonably warm November Friday evening. I had been waiting for this day for two months. It had been years since I attended a concert and I was looking forward to a fun night with friends. Prior to winning the 2019 Grammy Awards for Best R&B Performance and Best R&B Album, Having Everything Revealed (H.E.R.) was set to go on her second headlining tour – “I Used To Know Her” with her 12th stop being Richmond, Virginia.
The concert was everything I expected it to be and so much more. The concert list was superbly put together to take you on a pleasurable journey through H.E.R.’s best hits to date. Maybe it was the doing of her tour manager or maybe it was the season of my life, but this concert ranks in the top 3 that I’ve ever attended.
I’m going to use Voyant Tools to analyze the lyrics of the 23 songs on her setlist. The night began with “Carried Away” and ended with “As I Am.”
The 23 songs have 6,711 total words and 846 unique word forms. “Against Me”, “Could’ve Been”, “Losing”, “Feel a Way”, and “Lost Souls” were the top 5 longest songs performed while “Be on My Way”, “2”, “Carried Away”, “Focus”, and “Lights On” were the 5 shortest songs performed.
The top 5 most frequently used words in the lyrics of this concert setlist were: you (400); me (231); don’t (118); make (89); and (87). This is not surprising as the majority of the songs performed
Cirrus
According to Sinclair and Rockwell (2020), “a cirrus provides a word cloud view of the most frequently occurring words in a document” (para. 1). Below are the top 105 most frequently used words in H.E.R.’s concert. The top 5 most frequently used words in the lyrics of this concert setlist were: you (400); me (231); don’t (118); make (89); and (87). This is not surprising as the majority of the songs performed are introspective thoughts sung aloud.
Bubblelines
According to Sinclair and Rockwell (2020), bubblelines visualizes the frequency and distribution of terms in a corpus. We now know that you, and, don’t, make, and me are the top 5 words in H.E.R.’s concert setlist lyrics, but how are these words each distributed across each song? For the graphic below, I wanted to see the frequency and distribution of these words in each song. “Each italicized word above is represented as a bubble with the size of the bubble indicating the word’s frequency in the corresponding segment of text” (Sinclair and Rockwell, 2020, para. 1). “Feel a Way” (123) , “Against Me” (74), and “Best Part” (65) had the highest use of the corpus’ top 5 words.
Mandala
Mandalas provide representation of the most frequently used terms to their relationship to the corpus, or in this instance the songs from the concert list. According to Sinclair and Rockwell (2020), “each search term (or magnet) pulls documents toward it based on the term’s relative frequency in the corpus” (para.1). It makes perfect sense that make would be the closest to the song “Make It Rain” due to the term being in the title. Another song that was interesting to focus in on was “2.”The lack of frequency of the top terms in this song, of which only five out of nine were present, caused this song to be on the outer edge of the mandala.
Final Thoughts
Everything was revealed to me during this concert. The majority of the songs in this concert have lyrics where H.E.R. verbally processes and reflects on her experiences with others. In Against Me, she states, “Should’ve listened to my intuition / I put myself in this position / It’s all my fault, look in the mirror / Think, “What am I missin’?” and in Could’ve Been, she sings, “It could’ve been right but I was wrong / Only think ’bout you when I’m alone / Part of me that cared just know it’s gone / And I know, that I can’t, get caught up.” As I became a fan of H.E.R., I don’t think that I had taken the time to realize the themes of the majority of her songs. Completing this assignment allowed me to take a deep dive into her lyrics and truly reflect on the vibe of the concert.
The corpus that was used for this blog post can be found here.