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Suicide notes and poetry have been used in text analysis to identify emotional states and mental illness, although there have been no corpus linguistics studies examining the lyrics of musicians who have died by suicide. The present study aimed to fill a gap in the research on understanding the suicidal mind and the development of protocols for using language to predict suicide risk and to prevent suicide. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, a computerized method for text analysis, is often used to examine suicide writings. In the current study, lyrics written by Kurt Cobain and a reference corpus of late 1980s/early 1990s grunge were analyzed to explore different linguistic categories in the lyrics of authors with suicidal intent and those without. For the four broad psycholinguistic variables three (clout, authenticity, and tone) all had a |14| point difference in percentile rank. For linguistic, and psychological variables, multiple were found to differ significantly (first-person plural pronouns, third-person singular pronouns, and anxiety). None of the four broad psycholinguistic variables were found to have significant difference in Cobain’s writing over time. Reasons for the obtained results as well as implications for research and for practice are discussed.

Suicidology has a rich history of looking at the relationship between language and suicide via the review of suicide notes, memoirs, and other writings. This research has identified differences in the language of persons with suicidal intent and without suicidal intent. No prior research has been done regarding the relationship between lyrics and suicide. The current study aimed to identify differences in the lyrics written by artists with suicidal intent and without suicidal intent. A keyword analysis was used to compare a corpus of lyrics written by Kurt Cobain to that of similar late 1980s/early 1990s grunge music. The three words with the strongest keyness were “gimme”, “daddy’s”, and “stay”. The first and second most frequent words (“yeah” and “girl”) were identified as well as the collocations for these words as well as the collocations for of the words stems “depress*”, and “gun*” and the word “death”. A discussion of the results and implications for practice and future research will be reviewed.