The Greatest Professional Wrestling Concept Album EVER: Track By Track

Killer Lyric: So desperate to escape / I came to you / hands wrapped in adhesive tape / That was when we were young and green / In the dawning hours of our team.

An almost childlike fable set to the tune of bright chords played on a steel guitar. The lyrics, on a superficial level, tell the story of an 18-Man Battle Royal match inside a cage. This was a common stipulation that allowed rookies to gain ring experience in front of a crowd while masked amongst chaos. The narrator teams up with a newbie running a masked frog gimmick, preventing him from enduring the humiliation of being unmasked by a heel. A new tag team is formed.

However, it was a much more personal song to Darnielle, like many tracks of the album, wrestling is a theme used to channel a much more personal experience, in this case the birth of Darnielle’s son Roman. He told Stereogum:

“It’s about the labour and delivery room […] It’s about seeing your son for the first time. I mean, this is the sort of thing I would usually be coy about, but I’m proud of that song. I wrote it with my son on my lap. It’s about how they’re about to show you your son’s face and you feel this profound instinct to protect — to say, ‘Nobody gets to see you.”