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I, too, am slow to pick up lyrics and chiefly focus on the sound of the song. The moments when a new piece of music makes your body ring the way a chair might vibrate when it's on pitch with a tuning fork? Those moments make this life worth living.
But sometimes, the lyrics are the art I'm focused on. If there is poetry to the words, if there is cleverness to the words, they catch me, too. I do love words. An example of this is the work of Stephen Sondheim. If you've ever heard "A Little Priest," or "Finishing the Hat," you can't help but love it. Or in the case of Avenue Q, you'd grasp the tone, but it would be missing something without its very funny and bittersweet words.
Maybe lyrics only matter to me in musical theater. This is one reason why Andrew Lloyd Webber kind of makes me nauseous, since his revolving-door lyricists' lyrics are unimpressive and take a back seat to self-important music. Enter critical nature from stage left, shaking fist.
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