It’s so hard to explain. It’s what Simone said, feeling its quality without realizing it. There are just certain songs, genres, pieces, composers that “strike” me. There are some patterns, but nothing that can unify everything I like. It just has to sound good to me. Being a classical music fan at heart, though, I don’t really care what lyrics are about in music with singing.
Just yesterday I was listening to Carl Orff music with the lyrics “Diceris male te a tuis unguentate glabris marite abstinere, sed abstine”. I freaked out when I found out what that meant. Same with “o tua mentula, mentula, mentula, mentula, mentula.” Lyrics just don’t matter to me. I do like the sound of words, though, part of the reason I listen to so much foreign music that I can’t understand. I don’t need to know what the song is about, I just the sound of the language that it’s being sung in.