Maroon 5 Text Analysis

By: Kate Wallace

Background

Maroon 5 released their latest album, Red Pill Blues +, in 2017. The internet is filled with articles about how Maroon 5 has “gone downhill” since their first release, Songs About Jane, in 2002. Some people close to the band seem to agree. According to a Time article, James Valentine, the band’s lead guitarist, said that the band has always had an internal tension between pop and rock, but with their latest album, “Pop won.” One of the producers on Songs About Jane, Matt Wallace, agrees with Valentine. He says he loved the bands battle between pop and rock which is why he was interested in working with the band as they were starting out, but now says “they’ve gone too far in the pop direction” and “the best thing they could do is make an album like the first one. Songs About Jane came from a very personal place. The new stuff seems like amazingly constructed pop.”

Hypothesis

I wanted to see if Maroon 5 has actually gotten more poppy from a lyrics and composition point of view. According to New World Encyclopedia, “pop music is often distinguished… by stylistic traits such as a danceable rhythm or beat, simple melodies, and a repeating structure.” I think that Maroon 5’s latest album will be more repetitive and more “danceable” than their first album Songs About Jane. Although the change in style occurred musically, I feel like the most common words used will be similar throughout all of their albums.

As of now, Maroon 5 has six studio albums:

1. Songs About Jane (2002)
2. It Won't Be Soon Before Long (2007)
3. Hands All Over (2010)
4. Overexposed(2012)
5. V (2014)
6. Red Pill Blues + (2017)

Repetitiveness and Unique Words

If a song had less unique words, I concluded that it was more repetitive. To test for unique words, I used the Genius API to get lyrics for all of Maroon 5's discography. I then counted every word on every song by album. I also removed stop words like “a, an, the, etc.”

Below is the code for "Harder to Breathe" from Songs About Jane. I did this for every song on the album excluding covers, remixes, and songs just credited to Adam Levine. This is because the covers and Adam Levine songs aren't soley Maroon 5 and the remixes are the same lyrically as the originals for the most part.

After I created these lists, I realized that their most recent album, Red Pill Blues, has a few songs that included a rapper. This was throwing off the count because raps are not repetitive in nature, so the number of unique words was very high. Before Red Pill Blues, M5 only one song with a rap in it, "Payphone" from Overexposed. So, I took out all of the rap verses to even the playing field. Below is an example; I removed all of A$AP Rocky's rap from the song "Whiskey." This changed the songs unique word count from 77 to 43 which is pretty drastic.

After this, I went to the environment section of R Studio and looked at the number of “Obs” because that showed the number of rows. The number of rows is equal to the number of unique words minus stop words. Here is a photo to show what the "obs" looks like in R Studio:

I then took the average for each album by adding up the count from each song and dividing it by the number of songs on the album. I did this using excel. Once I got the averages, I made a table in excel showing each album with their unique words:

I then created bar graph in excel.

Songs About Jane had an average of 9 words more per song than Red Pill Blues. This means that Red Pill Blues was more repetitive as each song on the latter album had less words. The other albums (in the middle) seem to be within a few words of each other, so the most dramatic difference is seen between the first album and the last. This goes along with my hypothesis that the groups latest release is more poppy because repetitiveness is a characteristic of pop music.

Danceability

Next, I looked at “Danceability” which is a ranking done by the Spotify API. Spotify describes “Danceability” as “how suitable a track is for dancing based on a combination of musical elements including tempo, rhythm stability, beat strength, and overall regularity." To test for this, I took each album and arranged it by danceability along with the track name. Here is the code:

Next, I used R to generate the mean for each album.

Finally, I put these values into excel to create the graph.

According to the graph, the "danceability" has been going up with each album, with the exception of the fifth album, V. It almost increased an entire .1 in "danceability" from the first album to the most recent. This means that Red Pill Blues is their most danceable album, which goes along with my hypothesis that album number 6 is more poppy than album number 1.

Common Words by Album

Finally, I went back to the Genius API to see if the words Maroon 5 used have stayed consistent. This time I did a count per album. I used the top 100 words for each album. I took out filler and musical words like “ooh,” “la,” “woah,” and “yeah” by removing those lines of data and adding more words to compensate (ex: if I removed two words then I used the top 102 songs for each album.) Here is the code:

I then created a word cloud for each album using the package wordcloud2.

Songs About Jane Word Cloud

It Won't Be Soon Before Long Word Cloud

Hands All Over Word Cloud

Overexposed Word Cloud

V Word Cloud

Red Pill Blues + Word Cloud

These word clouds are very interesting. All of the albums have "love" in their top 3. For V and Hands All Over "love" is the number one word. When looking at the word clouds, most of the words seem to be very emotional including "heart" and "feel" as well as feelings themselves like "bad" and "happy."

It's also important to note that many of the bigger gray words are very album specific. Many of the words reflect names of songs. For example, the Hands All Over word cloud has "moves" and "jagger" and "leave" and "wanna" which are clearly from the songs, "Moves Like Jagger" and "Never Wanna Leave This Bed." "Jagger" is mentioned 16 times which is a lot of repetition in one song, especially for it to be showing up in the top 10 words on the entire album. Throughout all of the albums, words that appear in titles of individual tracks on the album have a significant count. This makes sense because typically artists will name the song something that appears in the chorus, which repeats.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it appears that Maroon 5's albums have stayed pretty consistent lyrically, but have become more poppy. The most significant contrast in results is seen when comparing Songs About Jane and Red Pill Blues which is what I expected because the albums were released 15 years apart. I concluded that it is more poppy based on the difference in "danceability" and unique words.

As far as the assumption that the band is going "downhill," I think it depends on who you are. I personally loved Songs About Jane and tend to agree that Red Pill Blues is a bit too poppy, but the band is still creating hit records after almost two decades, so they must be doing something right.

According to Billboard Red Pill Blues actually reached a higher spot than Songs About Jane with #2 and #6 respectively. This could be because there are many pop radio stations who promote poppy music.

It'll be interesting to see what Maroon 5 does next and if they continue with the trend of "amazingly constructed pop" or if they switch it up with their next studio album.