People who have known me for a while might not suspect I am a huge Ariana Grande fan right now. Radio pop music/club music isn't normally my jam, but she transcends these into the pantheon of pop greats.

It hasn't always been this way. My personal opinion of her a few years ago was very different. She didn't do much to stand out of the crowd of well produced beautiful singers cranking out pop hits. But something on her new album is different. It's hard to put a finger on, but somewhere between the melodies, catchy phrasing, and meaningful lyrics she hit something. That is what I want to dive into. At a later point I want to do more of a lyrical analysis, but for now we will have to settle for a musical analysis.

Analyzing Music

Below is a summary of the the her work. We can see she has gotten more explicit recently, but overall has had pretty similar albums by these metrics.

Song Characteristics

Many things are very hard to quantify in music, but Spotify does its best. They provide the additional detail by track (I hope to not repeat this every time, but I have a feeling the intersection of 2000 punk, 80s new wave, and current pop stars might be limited) :

• Danceability
• Energy
• Liveness
• Loudness
• Valence (Think sadness, lower the score, the sadder the song)
• Speechiness
• Acousticness
• Tempo

*Spotify does have more, but this is wear I will focus most my analysis. For more information on these metrics please see the Spotify page.

On the below graphs, each point is an album, with the horizontal position reflecting when the album was released. We can see some general trends, but the last point (thank u, next) is notably different in many cases, and not in the way one might expect. She made subtle tweaks to her danceability, energy and loudness, actually taking all down slightly. She also slowed it down a bit. This is not advice I would give many artists, but it worked for her.

So thank u, next took us to the heights of spoken-ness and acoustics. It stayed danceable but put a great emphasis on saying the message and making a full musical tone.

By the Song

Let's look at this another, less condensed way. Let's take each song over time. Each horizontal line seperates the albums, wither her oldest work on the left and newest songs on the right.

Ariana does seem to be a bit sadder, and consistently less energy on her new album, consistent with what we saw in the polar charts.. She also alternates a lot more between more spoken lyrics and more sung lyrics. This is interesting. It adds a layer of variety that gives the album depth.

Final Thoughts Ariana Grande

I don't think I've stumbled on her secret sauce, but she has definitely grown as an artist and is making a different type of song and album. Even on revisiting her older work, I couldn't get into Sweetener. I am glad she didn't wait long before giving us thank u, next.