As far as remembering lyrics...I recently had to learn a large stack of new lyrics during a class I was taking as part of my job. Fortunately, our instrustors had great strategies for us.

The most useful one was based on a US Army touch-typing program (really!) For music, it boiled down to this: play the tune until the melody is burned into your brain and you can hum along with it. When you have that down, start on the words...first verse and chorus only. Once they are memorized, take a BREAK: this is very important, to think about something else entirely for 10 minutes or so.

Then go back and sing through the 1st verse and chorus, and try adding the 2nd verse. Practice until you have that down, and then take another break...and so on until the song is permanently etched in your memory.

This simple system works wonders...especially when you have a passel of lyrics to memorize.