Which Describes How You're Feeling

A song asking a question that I've almost never been able to answer.

Welcome to the only newsletter bold enough to write about every song by They Might Be Giants. Join hundreds of subscribers building a little empire out of some crazy garbage.

Cover, Apollo 18 - They Might Be Giants. Released 1992

Which Describes How You’re Feeling?

This track is another beautiful example of the recursive, looping lyricism that makes Apollo 18 such a fascinating listen. The words fold in on themselves like a lyrical Möbius strip, backed by swirling melodies in true John Linnell-ian style—full of word repetition, near-rhymes, and sentences that eat their own tails.

At first glance, the title seems to be asking a simple question: Which describes how you're feeling?

But as soon as I try to untangle the lyrics into something linear, I start to feel like I’m falling into an endless thought spiral. And fittingly, that’s… kind of how I feel all the time.

But How Are You Really?

For most of my life, I’ve struggled with the basic social prompt:

"How are you?"
"How’ve you been?"

I know they’re meant to be casual check-ins, but my brain tends to treat them like a pop quiz on emotional self-awareness. And it has remained true from grade school through today; I didn’t study for the quiz.

Without prescription meds, my mood takes me on a daily journey that can feel less like a gentle carousel ride and more like a roller coaster at a Six Flags that never get in line for.

So, like most people, I default to:

"I’m good."
"Things are fine."

But since my teenage years, even when things were objectively good, I didn’t feel like things were good. My answers never matched my inner experience. Or, as the song puts it:

You said “I’m feeling fine” but it didn’t really rhyme.

Sometimes I think the most accurate way to describe how I’m feeling is:

"Like I’m feeling. All the time."

Which—that actually does rhyme.

Listen to the song.

There’s a Demo Version, Too

When I was a junior in high school, TMBG released a compilation album called Then: The Early Years. It bundled their first two albums—They Might Be Giants and Lincoln—along with the b-sides of Miscellaneous T and a few unreleased tracks. Someday, I’ll spend a post digging into that chaotic little treasure chest. But today, I want to highlight this:

There’s a 1985 demo of Which Describes How You’re Feeling tucked in there.
It’s raw and a little awkward, like a band still finding its footing for the song—but it still works. It has a kind of charm that makes it feel like a mirror universe version of the Apollo 18 cut.

Good Enough for Now

In the end, maybe that’s the point. Some feelings don’t fit neatly into a rhyme scheme. Most days I can’t name the thing I’m feeling, but I can hear a song like this and think, Yes. That.
That describes how I’m feeling. Or at least, it gets close enough.

Which is fine.

Which is fine.

If this song hits a nerve for you too—if you’ve ever struggled to answer "how are you?" without lying, or short circuiting—let me know in the comments. Or just sigh at the ceiling. That counts.

---

If you’d like to get posts like this delivered directly to your inbox (and help me complete the noble, strange mission of writing about every TMBG song), subscribe below.