Adding phonetic pronunciation to a staff?

[Kevin Cole]

I'm not sure I can explain my question well, but here goes:

I'm transcribing a piece that has "mostly" English lyrics under the
staff. It shows two verses (\set stanza "1." and \set stanza "2.")

Between the two, occasionally, there is the phonetic pronunciation of
a non-English word or phrase, in italics. So at the beginning of the
piece, there are two lines, but eventually there are three...
Something like:
___________________________________________________

(Measure 1)
1. Let the farm - er praise grounds ...
2. Im - mor - tal and di - vine ...
...
(Measure 18)
1. ... cruis - cin lan My dar - lin' lit - tle cruis - cin lan
       kroosh - keen lawn                         kroosh -keen lawn
2. ... cruis - cin lan My dar - lin' lit - tle cruis - cin lan
___________________________________________________

(The middle line is in italics.)

Is there a relatively human-readable, uncomplicated way to achieve
this without making lots of voices for everything? Ideally, I would
just want to have something in a new lyricmode variable that says
"skip 18 measures and then add text following these note durations
without showing any notes and then skip 2 measures, etc". Something
like using "\repeat 18 { s2. } kroosh - keen lawn \repeat 2 { s2. }
kroosh - keen lawn" or

(As I was writing this, I came up with a brute-force trial & error
"solution" using "  \repeat unfold 60 { \skip 1 } some lyrics \repeat
unfold 5 { \skip 1} more lyrics" which works, and is fairly readable
in source code, but perhaps there's an even more readable / better
way.)