I've always been a bit deficient at discerning lyrics; I suppose that my natural reaction is to respond primarily to sound at first (not just the melody, but the texture of the instrumental sound, even the phonetic sound of the words without reference to their meaning).

Now, I certainly do appreciate well-written lyrics once thay have caught my attention, and I am in general a fairly verbal person who probably reads and writes a bit more than the everage human. But when listening to songs, I don't seem to concentrate of the lyrical content. In many cases, I'll listen to a given piece many times over before fully hearing the lyrics, and only then begin to appreciate those words as an additional dimension of a song whose melody and sound/delivery/ambience I've already learned to appreciate.

Now, when I select songs to perform, lyrical content becomes more important. I believe that we all are at our best when singing words that mean somethihng to us, so we naturally select songs that express our personal feelings and beliefs.

As a listener, I am not always immediately concerned with a given song's lyrical message, but I think it's important that the singer feels a degree of urgency about that message. While I may not hear the lyric in word-for-word detail, I need to hear (or "sense") the singer's commitment and feeling.

That's why we are able to respond to songs sung in languages we don't understand, to scratchy old recordings of performances in unfamiliar dialects, etc. While we may not understand every word, we should be able to understand the performer's feeling.