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The subjects that keep returning, the voices telling them, and the craft underneath.
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Lennon and McCartney wrote love songs for four years and then wrote almost everything else. This category follows the writing itself: the themes a lyric keeps returning to, the metaphors and the personification, the rhyming patterns, the titles that never turn up in the song or run to half a sentence, songs that never reach a chorus at all, and the reading behind it, from Dylan to the Maharishi to whatever Lennon had picked up that week. It took them years to write, and this is where you can track it, filter it and set one man against another: Harrison turns out to be the real social critic of the group, 32% of the songs he wrote touching the subject against 14% of Lennon's and 10% of McCartney's.
What do the Beatles sing about?
Say the word: love, which runs through more than half of what they recorded, and loneliness through a quarter of it. After that the words are flying out like endless rain, money and nostalgia and meditation and letters and revolutions. Each theme opens into the rest: the years and albums where it peaked, the writer who reached for it most, the other tags it keeps company with and the filters that cut it any way you like.
Good places to start: First person, Bob Dylan influence, Wordplay and Poetic lyrics.
Themes & Meaning
The themes a song returns to, the writing and the reading behind them, what the title gives away before the first line, and the vocabulary the lyric works in.
Thematic or lyrical motifs
Non-musical influences on lyrics or concept
Properties of the song title
Word usage patterns - density, richness, lexical characteristics
Craft & Devices
The devices a line is built from, the voice telling it and the kind of rhyme holding it together.
Point of view, narrative voice, and storytelling mode
Literary and rhetorical techniques used in the lyrics
The kinds of rhyme a lyric uses, including the near ones a singer can get away with that a reader cannot.
Form & Structure
How the words are laid out across the song, section by section, and which lines come back round.
The overall structural form of the song - how sections are arranged and repeated.
The parts a song is built from and how many of each, which is where its shape becomes countable.
A section doing something out of the ordinary, which is usually the moment a song stops sounding like anybody else's.
How the parts of a song relate to each other: what is built from what, what varies, and where the instrumental passages sit.
Repetition in a song, at line, word and section level. Consecutive means back-to-back; Recurring means it returns after a gap.
Word Patternsadvanced
The countable side of the writing: the words that recur, the shape of a lyric, the rhyme scheme and the length of the lines.
Words and phrases that turn up in more than one Beatles song, from a single word like 'ring' to a whole repeated line.
Lyric templates (2-6 tokens) where content words are abstracted to placeholders ([VERB], [WORD]) and function words stay literal. Matches across songs that share a structural pattern even with different content - e.g. '[VERB] me [VERB]' matching both 'hold me tight' and 'love me do'.
Per-section line-end rhyme patterns expressed as letter strings (e.g. ABAB, AABB, ABCB, ABBA). Each letter marks lines that rhyme together by phoneme analysis of the final stressed vowel using the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Lines with out-of-dictionary words are marked X.
The syllable count of each line in a section, written as a pattern. 8-6-8-6 is common meter and 8-8-8-8 is long meter.