If this song doesn’t open a pit of dread in your core, then you aren’t really listening.
The Unsettling Genius of Where Your Eyes Don’t Go
It’s a Saturday morning and I really ought to be washing the dishes and taking out the garbage before I settle in with some coffee and begin writing. Excitedly (or unfortunately, depending on how you well you enjoy this post), I have decided to forego my daily routine to write about a song called “Where Your Eyes Don’t Go” by They Might Be Giants. A song, that once I read its lyrics, have been unable to listen without a growing sense of dread and anxiety. Thankfully, my Citalopram prescription allows me to stay grounded these days and not spiral into this song’s bottomless nightmare.
As a teen, when I first heard this song, it felt lackluster on its surface. The melody is pretty, the tones felt warm and round until a bright and sharp electric guitar sings out some chords with the opening verse. I would joyfully sing along without thinking too closely about the words being sung until reaching a point where the melody from the verse “Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah” from the song “I’ve Been Workin On The Railroad” starts playing. That’s one of the first songs I learned to play on the piano as a very little youngster with my Grandma. My brain couldn’t fathom why this is in here. Sometimes, I would just skip the song.
A Personal Journey Through Music and Memory
One evening, I was reading the liner notes on the inside of my Lincoln CD cover without the music playing. Reading lyrics as if they were poems was practice I developed that I always felt helped me connect more to the songs I enjoy. Often, I would learn that I had a lyric wrong. I have shared in previous posts about my long and storied history with intrusive negative thoughts surrounding death and my limited existence as well as my very anxious brain overthinking/feeling things.
Being referred to as “Old Soul” was something I was familiar with which is a very interesting euphemism for “kid suffering with a mental health disorder and probably also the lingering affects of generational trauma and/or a parent with an untreated mental health disorder who suffers from direct and generational trauma.” Yeah, “Old Soul” does roll off the tongue a bit better.
I sat there on my bed, downstairs tucked away from the rest of my family. The black curtains my mom bought me (and would then constantly reference as a sign that I’m troubled. As if *I* was out buying my own curtains. Me, with no driver’s license or source of income.) Reading the lyrics to this song was validating the dreadful thoughts I often had but somehow missed before really focusing on them. It was a Chris Nolan level plot twist in my music life.
The Anatomy of a Nightmare: Lyric Analysis
If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to share these lyrics with you along with exactly how they resonated with me so many decades ago.
Where your eyes don't go a filthy scarecrow waves its broomstick arms And does a parody of each unconscious thing you do. When you turn around to look it's gone behind you. On its face it's wearing your confused expression. Where your eyes don't go.
There was always a sense that something was behind me. In life, in my dreams, thoughts behind my thoughts. Sometimes, the thing behind me was more of a feeling that something bad was going to happen. If nothing bad ever did happen, I knew that eventually I’d be dead and gone forever. That notion was behind me all the time. “That thing behind you knows you think of it and it is making fun of you for it. And if you try to perceive it, it slips behind you still further and is now openly mocking you.”
Where your eyes don't go a part of you is hovering. It's a nightmare that you'll never be discovering. You're free to come and go or talk like Kurtis Blow But there's a pair of eyes in back of your head
No matter what I do, the anxiety, dread, and fear is hiding behind me and I am right to fear it because it is a nightmare that I will never fully comprehend. It doesn’t matter what kind of life I lead, I have eyes in the back of my head always looking for that scary thing.
Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders What the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of. Should you worry when the skull head is in front of you Or is it worse because it's always waiting where your eyes don't go?
At last, I came across a bit of comfort. Here, this band that I loved reached out through the lyric sheet and placed a hand on my shoulder. It’s not just me. These guys also understand and on top of that, they shared that other people are like me too. I can’t think of a better way to have helped me understand my own anxiety and existential dread as a teenager than this song and it’s closing lyrics.
Anxiety is knowing that part of you is going to miss something huge that could hurt/scare/disrupt/make you feel unstable. Which of those things could be on the way? Intrusive anxious thoughts are a defense mechanism designed to keep someone alert and aware of one’s settings as to not be caught off guard. This leads to the question: would it be better to see that impending doom as it approaches? Or is it best for it to stay lingering out of sight so you can try to push it down as far as you can?
I picked up my transparent landline phone and called my best friend. Surely, he has come to the same realization that I had.
“Hey, have you really listened to these lyrics? This song is deep and scary. I had no idea it was this intense. I’m blown away by how it’s making me feel.”
He took it more literally than I did and thought it was about an actual scare crow dancing around and making funny faces at us when we aren’t watching it.
What was wrong with me?
This essay is from my Lincoln album era. Where TMBG started sounding less like a curiosity and more like a mirror we accidentally grew up staring into.
Read more posts from Lincoln - Start Here
Visit TMBW.net, the indispensable TMBG fan wiki
I'd interpret the lyrics pretty closely to this as well. Where do your eyes not go? They can't see inside your head. And we use the idiom "in the back of my head" to express a subconscious thought or paranoia or second-guessing ourselves. It seems a logical interpretation that the song is about how we often are our own worst critics, second-guessing ourselves and worrying how we are perceived by others, or berating ourselves for what we said or the way we acted after the fact, just like someone mocking us behind our back. Except there's no one there, it's just our own intrusive thoughts.
Yeah, exactly this - I don't have any diagnosed disorders, but this is how I interpreted the lyrics... eventually, after uncomfortably ignoring them for years and years.
Episodes of Doctor Who that involve a perception filter or an enemy that plays on perception (Weeping Angels or the Silence) always evoke this song for me. Especially that "jumbled pile of person" line!