Taylor Swift Album Odds: How We All Stopped Fighting It And Became Swifties

Well, it’s that time again: Taylor Alison Swift is about to release a new album! On October 3rd, The Life of a Showgirl will be in our hands, and you know what that means?

Time for some hardcore predicting and theorizing from the internet’s fandom most likely to become conspiracy theorists!

(Of which, to be clear, I am a very, very longtime member. And I could talk all day about how she made us this way, but my editor would cut it because I can’t rant about it every time I write about her. He might even cut this.)

Taylor is, of course, a great songwriter, and most Swifties spend countless hours finding connections and themes in her lyrics. I, for instance, love her use of imagery related to stars, constellations, and the sky in general. Plus the metaphors. Always the metaphors. I might even love the ones that don’t make sense more than the ones that do.

She’s always used color really evocatively and prominently throughout her work, and I’ve always been interested in the ways she weaves them together even across albums, which ones she uses, how often, and when.

And, as a Swiftie, I’m always on the lookout for patterns and Easter eggs. Which naturally leads me to wonder what that information could tell us about how she might use color going forward. What colors will she use next? What colors will she use most? And what better time to consider those odds than when we’re a week out from a new album to answer those questions?

The odds displayed are purely speculative and intended for entertainment purposes only.

What colors will Taylor Swift use most on ‘The Life of a Showgirl’?

To predict which colors will appear on Showgirl, I needed data. So, I set about making a spreadsheet. I love a good spreadsheet.

This one featured thirteen tabs and a few dozen formulas to analyze the information I recorded as I combed through the lyrics of 247 songs.

Yeah. This is the sort of thing I do for fun.

For the sake of clarity, here are some basic rules I used while collecting data:

• I did not count every single shade Taylor has ever mentioned in its own category. For the sake of my clearly already tenuous sanity and data that’s easier to digest (imagine the tiny slivers on a pie chart for every synonym of red that TayTay has ever used!), shades were sorted into twelve color families: black, blue, brown/bronze, gray/silver, green, orange, pink, red, violet, white, yellow/gold, and other.
• Shades with two words were counted based on the first word’s ability to stand alone as a color in day-to-day conversation. For example, “crimson red” and “scarlet maroon” count as two colors while “ocean blue” and “flamingo pink” count as one.
• Compound words like “redneck” and “redhead” were not counted, nor were words that we not contextually being used as a color like “merlot”
• Vault tracks were counted with the album as a whole with the exception of previously released songs (soundtracks, Ronan, etc.) which were counted as other.
• Remixes were not counted individually with the exception of colors mentioned in new verses.
• That said, All Too Well and All Too Well (10 Minute Version) were counted individually including the lyrics that appear in both versions because they’re so different but mostly because I said so.

With the disclaimer that I am fallible, a nerdy Swiftie not a data scientist, and likely made at least one mistake despite my best efforts, let’s dig into the numbers.

Overall, I counted 267 color words. Honestly, less than I expected! Taylor’s use of words like dark, light, and bright may have contributed to my expectation that there would be a lot more. But still, more than one per track is impressive and there’s a lot here to explore.

I broke down the data in two different ways: by color family and by album. This allowed me to see which colors Taylor uses most as well as her usage of colors over time. When looking at the discography as a whole, we can see that her most used color family is red (surprise, surprise, said no Swiftie ever) and Midnights features the most color words with Red right behind it (both feature at least one song with a color in the title, so again not particularly shocking).

I found it helpful to look at the color usage per album as actual numbers to get a firmer grip on the breakdown. Since the number of tracks per album range widely (at least until we get those Taylor Swift and Reputation vault tracks), I also checked out the average number of color words per track to make sure they accurately reflected the total numbers; they lined up pretty well.

Next, I looked at the number of albums each color family appears in to get an understanding of not just how often but how consistently Taylor has used them over her career. A single mention per album still counts when predicting which she’ll use next, so consistency matters. We’ve got black, blue, silver/gray, and yellow/gold appearing in nearly all albums with red in a surprising third place! (More on that later.)

At this point, I imagine some of you are ready for me to get to the point and I won’t subject you to a bunch more numbers, but trust that I made more visuals. If that’s your thing, you can check out breakdowns of each individual color family by album and each individual album by color family at the bottom of the page. Go forth and enjoy, fellow Swiftie geeks!

I will be referencing some of the data found below in my predictions, but I’ll try to do so in a way that is inclusive to those readers currently thinking, “Oh my god, save me from this girl and her charts.”

Without further ado, here are my predictions of which colors will appear in the much anticipated, The Life of a Showgirl!

What colors will Taylor Swift use most on ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ – favorites

❤️ Red | -1887

I mean, who are we kidding? Yeah, shades of red have only appeared in nine of our album categories, but it’s important to note that there has been one in every single album since Red itself. Not to mention, the Showgirl aesthetic is all about opulence and grandeur, which lends itself to the use of words like crimson, scarlet, and burgundy. Plus, Showgirl marks the return of Max Martin and Shellback. The first album they worked on with Ms. Swift? Red. Our girl loves a callback to her previous work.

This one, I’d pretty much bet my life on.

🖤💙 Black & Blue | Both -900

They’re both featured in all but one album category and they’re great words to describe feelings of depression and hopelessness. While Showgirl is promised to be an album of absolute bops, I’m guessing we’re going to have at least some tracks featuring very upbeat misery ala I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.

💛 Yellow/Gold | -568

Once again, we’re talking about an album with a luxurious (and sparkly) aesthetic. Across the discography almost every use of this color family was gold or golden. Expect to see this girl in the mix.

What colors will Taylor Swift use most on ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ – contenders

🩶 Gray/Silver | -300

A pro: once again, we’re luxuriating this era and silver abounds in the album photoshoot. A con: unlike yellow/gold, almost every mention from this color family was a form of gray which is not exactly the vibe of what we’ve seen so far this era.

🤍 White | -150

Not going to lie to you, this one appeared way more often than I expected. Plus, one mention of “black & white” is all it takes. Showgirls famously appear in lots of classic films. I certainly wouldn’t count her out.

💚 Green | +100

I’m on the fence with this one. On the one hand, green is one of the five least used colors in the discography. On the other hand, we’ve got a song called “Opalite” and Taylor has used opal as a shade of green in the past. But then, back on the first hand, opal is both an iridescent gemstone and a shade of green, while opalite is a manmade gemstone that mimics the original stone, not the Pantone swatch.

What colors will Taylor Swift use most on ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ – sleeper

🧡 Orange | +567

Tied for the least used shade across those 247 songs, I normally wouldn’t give her a second thought. However, this is the long, long awaited orange album era and if there was ever a time for a comeback, it would be now.

As for the rest? I’d call it a toss-up. None are particularly well represented in the discography, though a precious metal or some sort of royal purple could put brown/bronze or violet into the mix. Pink doesn’t stir me one way or another (although our favorite queen of chaos released a shimmering pink vinyl variant while I was writing this piece). And something else? Well. It’s always possible. Anything’s possible.

Because that’s the thing about trying to predict Taylor Swift’s next move: she is just about as unpredictable as they come.

Now, without further ado, here are the aforementioned charts of each color family by album and each album by color family. I found these super fascinating and in some cases, really surprising.

I hope you do, too!

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