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Thursday, October 11, 2012 at 1:07AM 
I’m a geek! There you go, I said it out loud. I enjoy a wide variety of information and details from history to computer programming, from economics to statistics. And while I know this kind of information doesn’t tickle everyone’s fancy, I’ve learned that hidden inside some of those “geeky details” are some things that songwriters can’t afford to miss.
Over the last several years, I have been working in the world of church music resources with much focus on songs and their use in churches. Having founded WorshipMusic.com and WorshipTeam.com, I’ve had access to many thousands of songs and how they are used, accepted, and adopted into churches. Recently, I decided to see if anything can be learned from gathering statistics on a broad sample of praise and worship songs. I was eager to find if there were any details in the statistical information about songs and lyrics that could give us hints about effective songwriting- specifically in the church/worship context. In my research, I used a baseline of over 6500 published songs including all of the most popular songs used in churches. I studied things such as lyric phrases, writing voice, theme, number of authors and more.
More details of the study will be published later, but I thought it might be good to release some initial thoughts to those of you who are songwriters, since a great deal of “mystique” is often attributed to the craft. This article will focus just on lyrics, since this is a good place to start for lyric writers. The foundation of lyrics is the individual words we use (vocabulary), the kinds of words they are (verb, nouns, adjectives, etc.) and the effectiveness of the words we choose in our songs.
Terse Vocabulary - Focused on Subject
Across 6500 songs in our study, we saw a total of 9,332 different words used. This isn’t extensive, and rates within the scope of what a normal high school graduate might hold as a vocabulary[1]. This tells us, however, that vocabulary development is not happening through worship songs. We are not learning new words (most likely) by listening or singing worship music. I don’t think this is a surprise for anyone. The language of songs in worship and praise has been historically founded on Biblical texts and the language used there (because it was translated) maybe less verbose and articulate in English than if we were writing a new work (say a novel) using the entire breadth of the English language.
Beyond how many words are used I looked at what words are used most often, and what words actually were most effective in being used in songs that were used in churches. First, the most popular words used in those songs (with the number of occurrences)[2]:
None of this is likely a surprise, because these words are the common vocabulary of the subject matter (God, hearts, life, Jesus, king, grace). The point is this: the vocabulary of our songs is terse because we have a focused subject matter. This isn’t necessarily bad, as we need certain words to explain our subject (God, Jesus, King, Lord) and those words are very common throughout the Bible, media and our speech.
Effective Words - Vibrant Descriptors and Verbs
But when you take and look at what words are most effective in songs that become popular, the attention moves away from nouns and moves to adverbs, verbs and adjectives. Here is the ranking of the most effective[3] words used across the 6500 songs (effectiveness ranking in parenthesis):
What the statistics say is that the uniqueness of these words occurring in popular songs is inordinately disproportionate to the norm. These words are unique in their effectiveness at being included in songs that became popular. What does this mean?
As a writer, I can’t help but notice the vibrancy of this second list of words. Can you see how different this list is from the prior list? Instead of being dull nouns (as the prior list was), many of these words are descriptors or verbs. The main point: effective words are full of action, intensity and emotion.
The Final Word
While statistics can’t teach us how to write a great song, they can teach us what word elements contained in those songs prove to be effective for broad adoption in the church. Is there a formula for great lyrics? Perhaps not. But the statistics show that
Writing with you!
Kim Gentes
Kim Gentes is the CEO of WorshipTeam.com in Nashville (http://www.worshipteam.com), and is at the center of both the 21st century church and industry conversations about the future of worship expression - the music that opens us to the God who meets us where we are. As Founder of WORSHIPMUSIC.com (one of the earliest and largest online distributors of worship music in the world), and as a worship leader, songwriter, recording artist and freelance writer, Kim has been a featured speaker and worship leader at events across the US and Canada. He holds a Bachelors of Science in CIS and a Master of Ministry in Classic Christianity. Kim lives in Franklin TN with his wife Carol and their teenage sons, Jared and Cody.
[1] According to Dr. Sebastian Wren, the average adult may know about 50,000 words- although the reality is most of those are duplicates that can be culled away as “word families” duplicates- such that the real vocabulary may be as small as 17000 or even 5000 words. Source: Wren, Sebastian PhD "Developing Research-Based Resources for the Balanced Reading Teacher" BalancedReading.com, Aug 7, 2003. http://www.balancedreading.com/vocabulary.html (17 Sep 2012).
[2] Excluded from this list are determiners, conjunctions and pronouns.
[3] The formula used to determine “effective” is a weighted result of songs that ranked more popular across churches and the particular identifiable attributes of those songs, such as words, themes, authors, etc. Any ranking above 20 is a statistical anomaly and worth considering, since it is beyond the standard deviation of the mean. The words above are extreme statistical outliers.
data, evaluation, lyrics, music, songs, songwriting, statistics, worship in Blog, Creative, Music, Normalize, Songwriting, Technology, Worship 
