70 years of love, empowerment, and freedom. Here's a look at Eurovision by its lyrics.
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What you're about to see
Below is a single chart of 1,795 dots , one for every song ever performed at Eurovision between 1956 and 2025. Each column is a year, each dot is a song, and the colour is the song's theme — love, empowerment, freedom, peace, and seven others.
Scroll down and the chart will rearrange itself to tell the story: which themes dominate, which winners broke the mould, how Eurovision's languages shifted over seven decades, and which words belong to one single song and nowhere else. At the end the chart becomes yours to explore.
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Loading 1,795 songs…
Each dot is a song<br>1,795 songs
Each dot represents one song that was performed at Eurovision in its 70 years, coloured by theme. More on this shortly, but let's understand the chart first.
Each column is a year
To the left the first edition of 1956, to the right Eurovision 2025. The dots on a column are the songs performed in that year.
Songs are stacked by finishing position
The winner is at the top. Entries that didn't get a final position are scattered at the end in no particular order.
Semi-finals were only introduced in 2004, so the number of songs increased from then.
The winners!
There was a 4-way tie in 1969, and no Eurovision in 2020 (due to the pandemic) although the songs had been selected.
Let's look at the themes and languages of some of these winners.
Waterloo
ThemeLove
LanguageEnglish
Year1974
CountrySweden 🇸🇪
ABBA! Widely considered the most influential song ever staged at<br>Eurovision, despite the Napoleonic metaphor it's ultimately a love song.
Sweden was famously the first non-English speaking country to sing in English in 1965, and Waterloo was also in English.
Ne partez pas sans moi
ThemeFreedom<br>LanguageFrench
Switzerland 1988 · Céline Dion. A 20-year-old French-Canadian, then almost<br>unknown internationally, wins for Switzerland by a single point — over the UK's<br>Scott Fitzgerald. Within five years she's one of the biggest pop stars on the<br>planet. The Freedom theme reads here as the singer's plea not to be left behind.
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Insieme: 1992
ThemePeace & unity<br>LanguageItalian (English refrain)<br>Year1990<br>CountryItaly 🇮🇹
Italy wins in Zagreb with an anthem about continental unity, referencing the Maastricht Treaty entering into force two years later. With the Berlin Wall just fallen, many songs that year had more political topics.
The song is in Italian 🤌, but the chorus “Unite, unite Europe” switches into English to make sure the message is heard.
Rise Like a Phoenix
ThemeEmpowerment & resilience<br>LanguageEnglish<br>Year2014<br>CountryAustria 🇦🇹
Bearded drag queen Conchita Wurst wins with a Bond-style power ballad. A statement on empowerment, sung in English.
1944
ThemeRebellion & war<br>LanguageEnglish / Crimean Tatar<br>Year2016<br>CountryUkraine 🇺🇦
Jamala sings one of Eurovision's most political winners, smuggled in as a family memoir. The lyrics describe Stalin's 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars, with Jamala's own great-grandmother among them. The contest reads it as a<br>response to Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Mostly in English, but the chorus is in Crimean Tatar.
Amar pelos dois
ThemeLove<br>LanguagePortuguese<br>Year2017<br>CountryPortugal 🇵🇹
Salvador Sobral's love song is a jazz ballad that sounds like the antithesis of Eurovision mainstream.
The first Portugal success at Eurovision is also the first non-English song to win in 9 years.
Toy
ThemeFreedom<br>LanguageEnglish (Hebrew / Japanese)<br>Year2018<br>CountryIsrael 🇮🇱
Netta's hymn to personal freedom in the #MeToo-era: “I'm not your toy”. The English chorus is sprinkled with Hebrew and Japanese.
Stefania
ThemeIdentity & homeland<br>LanguageUkrainian<br>Year2022<br>CountryUkraine 🇺🇦
Kalush Orchestra's win comes three months after Russia's invasion and it's a nostalgic lullaby to the singer's mother. The language is Ukrainian.
Let's look at the themes
I classified every song into one of ten themes: Love, Joy, Empowerment, Freedom,<br>Peace, Identity, Nostalgia, Rebellion, Fantasy, and Music itself.
The songs by theme
Let's look at the themes one by one. ⬇️
Love
Love dominates throughough the competition, with love songs making up more than half of the total.
Winner Refrain — Lys Assia, Switzerland 1956
Winner Nous les amoureux — Jean-Claude Pascal, Luxembourg 1961
Voilà — Barbara Pravi, France 2021 (2nd)
Empowerment & resilience
The "rise up" theme: self-belief, survival, declaring your own worth.
Winner Heroes — Måns Zelmerlöw, Sweden 2015
Winner The Code — Nemo, Switzerland 2024
Rock Bottom — Lynsey de Paul & Mike Moran, UK 1977 (2nd)
Peace & unity
Togetherness, harmony, a better world. Eurovision's idealist and sometimes hippie streak.
Winner Ein bißchen Frieden — Nicole, Germany 1982
Winner Hallelujah — Milk and Honey, Israel 1979
A Million Voices — Polina Gagarina,...