Textual Analysis of “Harry Styles” and “Fine Line”

Lexy Echard
4 min readOct 25, 2020

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After trying to make a word cloud out of my 34,000 tweets and failing, I decided to do a textual analysis of both of Harry Styles’s albums: “Harry Styles” (2017) and “Fine Line” (2019). I took every song from each album and made them their own word cloud. Every song between the two albums have a lot of feeling and thought that went into them. The similarities and differences between are shown in a different light while you look at them in this new perspective.

This first word cloud is of both the albums. I choose the shape of a butterfly due to a big butterfly tattoo Styles has on his chest. For the individual word clouds I choose the shapes ‘H’ and ‘S’ for obvious reasons. I debated making the second albums word cloud in the shape of an ‘F’ for its title, but decided against because it looks better as ‘H’ and ‘S’ in my opinion. Another reason I choose the letters is because there was no one shape that would represent each album as a whole.

In the word cloud above, I was careful to make sure every word was shown. This is why the shape is a bit off and some words are not legible. I believe both albums are equally represented. As someone who has listened to every song countless times, I am able to see which songs most of the words come from. At first I thought that the second album would dominate it.

“Harry Styles” and “Fine Line” album covers.

The ‘H’ word cloud represents Styles first album, “Harry Styles”. The colors correspond to the albums main color scheme as seen above. The most used words throughout this album are ‘know’, ‘get’, ‘none’, ‘angel’, and ‘good’. I anticipated the more medium sized words represent the album more, such as ‘creature’, ‘home’, ‘woman’, and ‘bullets’. If I were to make a word cloud based off of how I felt about the album and not the number of each word, I would make those words a lot bigger. Another thing I would add is the word Kiwi. Kiwi is the name of one of the songs but since Kiwi is never actually said, it is not apart of the word cloud.

Word clouds of “Harry Styles” and “Fine Line”

The second album, “Fine Line”, represented by the ‘S’ has a much wider range of songs. You can see this as the words are different and almost random. The language used has so much freedom, I think these words are so diverse and it is hard to see a clear theme throughout every word. Each song is represented on this word cloud. There isn't anything I would add to this word cloud. The tone and feel of the album is accurately represented.

The biggest difference that you notice right away are the colors. “Fine Line” is so much brighter, the words are also a lot happier seeming. Such as “sunflower”, “high”, “sugar”, and “kindness”. If you were to show me both letters with no context I would prefer the ‘S’ due to these reasons.

Another big difference between the two is that there are more normal words that are represented more in the first album. I think this is indicating that this album was playing it safe. The words in the second album have a much bigger range. Moreover on this, the more popular songs are a lot more apparent on the second albums word cloud. The two biggest songs on the first album (“Kiwi” and “Sign Of The Times”) are barley shown.

A big similarity between the two is the word ‘know’. The word is bigger portrayed in the second albums word cloud, almost as if Styles had a better of idea of what he was doing the second time around. As if he knew what his album was about and he was more confident with it. I definitely don’t think this was on purpose, but it is very interesting to see the progression.

If you were to just look at these two without any context, I definitely would not be able to tell you what they were about, especially for the first album. The album titled is represented in the ‘S’, which makes it recognizable than the first. This assignment was very interesting to see how these word clouds played out. I’m glad I chose these albums as my topic, it has made me look at them in a new perspective.

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Lexy Echard
Lexy Echard

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