There is no single lyric book
The musical archive contains several kinds of evidence. Treating them as one clean master text would create false certainty. The current quantitative core contains 115 textual track-states, but that number is not a count of unique compositions: “Throwaway Lines,” for example, exists in both Peak Arousal and Let the Alpine Play and is deliberately counted twice when the question is historical form.
| Project | Textual states | Words | Lines | Evidence note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Peak Arousal | 8 | 456 | 132 | current / printed source |
| EGOTERRORISM | 51 | 2,492 | 649 | OCR-derived liner recovery |
| Electronic Lover | 1 | 109 | 20 | current / printed source |
| Let the Alpine Play | 16 | 825 | 200 | current / printed source |
| Live Player/Dead Serious | 39 | 2,584 | 514 | current / printed source |
Evidence states
- printed / current source — lyric text exposed by an official project page, manual or source document;
- publication witness — song text printed inside another work, sometimes before or after formal release;
- liner recovery — text reconstructed from visual liner material; EGOTERRORISM figures are therefore approximate;
- performed witness — what the voice actually sings, which may overlap, extend or alter the printed page;
- remembered / reconstructed witness — language recovered after the original text or performance state was lost;
- reused witness — the same verbal object inside a later song or prose work.
What the numbers are allowed to mean
Line length, pronoun rates and lexical footprints are useful for discovering differences among records. They are not claims about speaker identity, intention or theme. A word such as high, light, bar or spell has multiple possible senses; raw counts are always subordinate to close reading.
What is deliberately outside the core
Several Electronic Lover songs exist as masters without a complete printed lyric source in the present archive; LP/DS currently exposes 39 lyric-bearing tracks and 12 tracks with no lyric text in the player; cover lyrics belong to repertory rather than JQD authorship; early improvised or lost text is not silently reconstructed from guesswork. These absences are documented rather than filled.
Reproducibility
The project-level figures published here come from one normalized snapshot, not from a claim that the corpus has stopped changing. LP/DS explicitly remains live and mutable; future witnesses may alter the counts without invalidating the historical snapshot.