It’s hardly possible to write something about Bob Dylan that have not been written before. But using computer to analize artist lyrics is rather uncommon, so my first thought was to find most common words used by Dylan in his songs. Bruce Springsteen cites him as one of his influences, so Springsteen lyrics are added as an comparison.
Python was my language of choice to write some simple code that sorts words in order of their occurrence. That task is easy, sure, but you have to get full lyrics first, preferably stored in one place(i.e. file). I haven’t even bothered to look after something like that on the Net. Instead, I used Beautiful Soup to parse artist’s web pages, download lyrics and write them to file. Beautiful Soup is fast and simple Python parser, excellent tool for this kind of job. http://www.bobdylan.com/ and http://www.brucespringsteen.net/ contains new and error-free songs lyrics (from 2009 albums) – you can’t say that about lyrics found on various strange fan-made pages in the internet.
