Let’s just get straight to the point: I don’t really listen to lyrics that often. With some music I do, like for example with Gorillaz and Twenty One Pilots, but in a lot of cases I find them hard to follow. Especially because English is my second language. I listen more to the music itself. I’m probably far from the only one, but it seems like my taste in music is mostly based on if I can vibe to the song.
Most often it’s the music in the song I listen to most before I discover what the lyrics are about. It’s how I discover most songs and musicians. I sometimes listen to a song for years without even knowing what it is about. I often need to look up the song on Genius to actually see what the meaning of a song is. Now there are some cases where I do listen to the song for the lyrics. The songs Lovely by Twenty One Pilots and Let It Happen by Tame Impala have really given me a lump in my throat a couple of times last year. But the music also plays a role in why it moves me so much.
For some time now, I discovered that music sounds the best for me when I can really feel it. When it touches me, it makes me feel like I’m flying through space, et cetera. I'm currently really hooked onto furry musician snuffles, because his music really touches me for some reason. It sometimes seems to me though that if I focus too much on feeling music, I feel it less. The same thing happens when I focus too much on visualizing the song. It’s fun trying to turn music into something visual, but it can also ruin the feeling I have with the song.
A lot of my playlists are based on the association I have with songs. For example, I associate the song Little Talks by Of Monsters And Men with vacation, and Close To Me by The Cure with home. I love listening to music that I (vaguely) remember from my childhood. Twenty one Pilots also has a bit of a nostalgic value for me. My sister used to listen to it a lot at some point, which is the reason I started listening to it (and now I’m a bigger Twenty One Pilots fan than her since she started listening to it less and less).
Coldplay, which is a band I also really like, is partly my favorite because I just find their music beautiful, but also partly because of nostalgia. The Wild, a 3D animated movie we had on DVD as a kid (of which I just found out only has a 19% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and was probably kind of a Madagascar knock-off), had a scene where they were driving through New York City with Clocks playing in the background. That’s probably one of the reasons why it’s my favorite song now and why I associate it with driving at night.
So yeah, I mostly listen to music for the vibe. Music really is something magical to me, and some music can really touch me deeply by hitting me with a wave of beautiful sound.