Pop music and padding lyrics

[Tom Ed White]

Hi,

I've been playing with the pop music template "melody-lyrics-chords.ly".
I'm getting nice results, except that I can't figure out how to pad the
lyrics so that they don't get written under instrumental breaks. For
example, I've written a 12 bar intro melody, with the lyrics starting on
bar 13. The lyrics print on bar 1. The \skip function doesn't work the way
I expect, with something like \skip 1*12. The only way I've found to start
the lyrics on bar 13 is to pad the first 12 bars of lyrics with
underscores, where each underscore will pad one syllable.
I imagine there's a simple solution. I did scour the docs. I'm only
interested in simple chord/lyric printouts, with some instrumentals thrown
in, ie "lead sheets." Some sort of argument to \skip that blocks out the
entire lyric bar would be great, like what you can do with chords and
notes.
This seems simple, but it's got me stumped

Thanks,
Tom Ed White