It has been 20 years since Taylor Swift, one of the newest inductees into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, released her debut album on Oct. 24, 2006. So, what does that have to do with weather?

Remember: Meteorologists are people, too. We like music.

And we especially like music about weather, which is something Taylor Swift has a lot of.

So I let my inner statistics nerd merge with my outer Swifty nerd and did an analysis of all of the weather references in Taylor Swift’s official discography.

Taylor Swift songs by the numbers

Let’s start with the basics and provide a justification for this article: Out of the 256 original, officially released songs from Taylor Swift that we examined, 90 included weather references.

That means over a third of Taylor Swift’s songs reference weather.

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A tour through the eras, if you will: "Fearless" (including songs from both the original release and Taylor’s Version) has the highest percentage of songs that include some sort of weather reference.

The album with the fewest songs with weather references really surprised me: "Red." As much as the album sets an autumnal vibe (largely thanks to "All Too Well"), it doesn’t actually mention weather very much.

She was midnight rain: All Swifties know how much she loves a rainstorm, so it probably shouldn’t be a huge surprise that the most referenced type of weather in her lyrics is rain.

There are 32 Swift songs that include lyrics about rain, and that’s not even counting the songs where the only references are to “storms” or “rainstorms,” which I gave their own categories.

Rain is truly the monster on the hill when it comes to weather in Swift’s music, and it dwarfs the next most often referenced type of weather: sunshine, which is referenced only 15 times.

Fit in her poems like a perfect rhyme: It wasn’t enough to just analyze how many times Swift referenced weather in her lyrics… I had to out-nerd myself and examine how she did it.

There are two major ways that Swift includes lyrics about weather in her music: as a figure of speech (“I'd give you my sunshine, give you my best / But the rain is always gonna come if you're standing with me”)  and as a way of describing a scene and pulling the listener into the song (“There's somethin' 'bout the way / The street looks when it's just rained”).

Of the songs with weather-related lyrics, 52% use weather as a figure of speech, 43% use it to set the scene and 5% use it for both purposes.

But let’s dive deeper, shall we?

Only three albums have songs with lyrics that use weather both ways: "Taylor Swift" (her debut album, which is marking its 20th anniversary), "Speak Now" and "Evermore." 

Four albums use weather more as a scene-setter than as a figure of speech: "Fearless," "Speak Now," "Folklore" and "Evermore," all albums that focus heavily on telling a story.

A few standouts

Okay, we’ve spent plenty of time just talking about numbers and percentages. How about a little time to just appreciate the lyrics for what they are?

I asked some of my coworkers what their favorite Taylor Swift weather lyrics are, so here are just a few of them:

• “Drop everything now, meet me in the pouring rain.” ("Sparks Fly," "Speak Now")
• “And I don't know why, but with you I'd dance in a storm in my best dress, fearless." ("Fearless," "Fearless")
• “He was sunshine, I was midnight rain.”  ("Midnight Rain," "Midnights")

And I’ll go ahead and say here that my weather-lyric love story is with "Opalite," from "The Life of a Showgirl." It’s basically one big weather reference, from dancing through lightning strikes to a storm inside a teacup.

To everyone who made it this far into the article, I hope the sun shines (on you) and it's a beautiful day.

An addendum: the methodology to the madness

I did in fact develop a whole methodology to complete this project about what counts as a weather reference and what doesn’t.

It’s worth noting that this is completely subjective and there are some gray areas about “does this or doesn’t this count,” so ultimately I just did my best.

Here are some of my rules:

• Original album releases and Taylor’s Versions are combined to not count songs twice.
• Songs that are “From the Vault” are grouped with the original album for album comparisons and tracking.
• Songs originally released as singles but are now on an album are grouped with the album. 
• Album comparison is done using the percentage of songs that contain weather on the album to account for albums with varying lengths.
• Alternate versions of songs with changed lyrics and features from other artists are not included (i.e. "Bad Blood" featuring Kendrick Lamar and "Karma" featuring Ice Spice).
• Non-officially released songs and leaks are not included (such as "Let’s Go").
• Songs where Taylor Swift is not the lead artist or where she is a featured guest are not included ("The Joker and the Queen" or "Renegade").
• In order to count as a “weather reference,” songs must include some description of weather conditions or use a meteorological term and not simply something weather adjacent or imply what the weather is like (“The autumn chill that wakes me up” versus “Autumn leaves falling down like pieces into place”).

Sara Tonks is a content meteorologist with weather.com and has a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Georgia Tech in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, along with a master’s degree from Unity Environmental University in Marine Science.

Thanks to Faiza Mohammed for help with combing through the braids of lyrics.