We report experiments on the use of standard natural language processing (NLP) tools for the analysis of music lyrics. A significant amount of music audio has lyrics. Lyrics encode an important part of the semantics of a song, therefore their analysis complements that of acoustic and cultural metadata and is fundamental for the development of complete music information retrieval systems. Moreover, a textual analysis of a song can generate ground truth data that can be used to validate results from purely acoustic methods. Preliminary results on language identification, structure extraction, categorization and similarity searches suggests that a lot of profit can be gained from the analysis of lyrics.