This essay aims to explore the plot and narrative structures that a reader can find in the songs “Love Story”, “Speak Now”, and “no body, no crime” by singer-songwriter and musical phenomenon Taylor Swift, as an example of the narrativity within her discography. Since narrativity is a vital part of storytelling and songs are an important feature of our everyday lives, it is relevant to investigate their stories and narrative structures. The essay essentially claims that if you strip away the surrounding musical elements, these worded lyrics tell the readers stories in themselves, and display narrative structures following the theory of narratology. By using Wolf Schmid’s model of the minimal condition of narrativity, as well as his five features of eventfulness (2010), I have found changes of states in each song that qualify as significant events, which gives a clear sense of narrativity in the selected lyrics. 

Within narratology and literary studies, song lyrics and the stories they tell have been largely overlooked. Furthermore, most of the existing narratological analysis of songs is based on instrumental music and overlooks the worded text. This essay works as a sample of how to implement Schmid’s methods on close readings of song lyrics. It also gives an insight into the kinds of narrative structures, and in turn stories, that can be found within song lyrics, even without the music that normally accompanies them, which unravels the possibility for further investigations of the stories and literary aspects that many of the song lyrics we are exposed to and engage with contain.