I enjoy listening to music. I do, a lot! I end up listening to hours worth of music in between my everyday chores. As I am someone a bit imaginative (tend to think in visuals) the whole experience - listening to a song is heavily associated with the imagery that a particular song manages to conjure up in my head or the atmospheric 'feel' that it fills my senses with and the emotion that it evokes.

Bottom line - while listening to a song, the literal 'music' affects me more than the words that makes up the song in the first place! Somehow my brain is so receptive towards the 'sound' part of the song (the rhythm, or the texture, the frequency of various guitar strings, or the beats emerging from dual drum sets and so on) that its almost impossible for me to distinguish the bones of words from their flesh of harmonic.

Now, I'm pretty sure that it's got little to do with the singer's passionate distortion of the word which at times makes it hard to make out or my level of understanding of the languages in which the song is being sung (not that that's not ever the case) but mostly I'd say its just the way my mind works - the fabric of the music and the pure aesthetic value of those few words that jumps out here and there in the song could very well paint a totally different picture in my mind than the one singer/song writer intended.

Having said all that, however I'd always felt that there are songs out there that always manages to totally shift the mechanics of my music-listening experience - the ones that makes me really want to learn the words to...

Right now, I'm listening to one of those songs.