Pro Wrestling Inspires John Darnielle’s New Album

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From left: Peter Hughes, John Darnielle and Jon Wurster of the Mountain Goats Photo: Lissa Gotwals

John Darnielle didn’t plan to make an album about professional wrestling. But as songwriters often do when there is a guitar in hand and a metronome ticking, he did some time-traveling to his past. The hulking showmen who fascinated him during a rough childhood in the late 1970s gradually resurfaced in his lyrics.

After a handful of songs had sprung from Mr. Darnielle’s memories of watching bouts on a black-and-white TV, and going to matches at a gritty Los Angeles arena, he committed to a full album on the theme with his band, the Mountain Goats.

Titled “Beat the Champ,” the album conjures up a world of low-rent theatrics and working-class stars. It was inspired by real competitors who worked the regional circuit before wrestling exploded in popularity in the mid-’80s. The songs are full of body slams and men in masks, but Mr. Darnielle took their stories seriously.

“It’s kind of my version of the Knights of the Round Table. Those were my dudes,” he says. The scripted aspects of the spectacle aside, wrestlers often took a serious beating, he adds. “They’re actually being thrown to the mat. They’re going down. They’re taking bumps.”

“Beat the Champ,” set for release next week, is a follow-up of sorts to another tale from Mr. Darnielle: the novel “Wolf in White Van.” The book, about a disfigured young man who invents a complex role-playing game that consumes the lives of its core players, was nominated for a National Book Award last fall, just days after it was published. The novel introduced Mr. Darnielle to a broader audience and proved that his storytelling skills could transcend the indie-folk songs he’s been recording for 25 years.

Mr. Darnielle started writing music under the Mountain Goats name while working as a nurse in a California psychiatric hospital, using a boombox to record songs on cassette tapes. As his music spread through independent record labels, he scaled up with more band members and ambitious album concepts. His songs on “Tallahassee,” released in 2002, trace the history of a married couple. Each track on 2009’s “The Life of the World to Come” was formed around verses from the Bible.

Fans follow Mr. Darnielle’s output in various forms, such as his lively Tumblr page and a novella inspired by the Black Sabbath album “Master of Reality.” (Mr. Darnielle says he has a batch of songs about Ozzy Osbourne on deck.) The Mountain Goats don’t have hit records and aren’t a go-to band for hot TV and movie soundtracks. (Mr. Darnielle’s piping vocals aren’t suited to background music.) But the band’s popularity has grown in step with Mr. Darnielle’s reputation as one of his generation’s most gifted lyricists.

Mr. Darnielle often sings from the perspective of striving misfits and social outsiders, a focus that stems in part from growing up with an abusive stepfather. That complex relationship also creeps into “Beat the Champ.” Mr. Darnielle fondly recalls attending matches with his stepfather, even though he would cheer for the villains—“heels” in wrestling parlance—and mock his stepson’s loyalty to the “baby face” good guys. In the chugging anthem “The Legend of Chavo Guerrero,” he paints his onetime hero, a member of a Mexican-American wrestling family, as his childhood protector. He sings, “Look high, it’s my last hope. Chavo Guerrero, coming off the top rope.”

The symbolism isn’t lost on the songwriter. “There are no heroes without villains. You can’t have a baby face without the heel,” he says.

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Mr. Darnielle, who is 48 years old, lives in Durham, N.C., with his wife and two young sons. He wrote “Beat the Champ” in tandem with his novel, diving into the songs once he had handed in the first draft, then finishing the music after revising his book.

For the album, he watched grainy footage of old matches on YouTube and VHS tapes. On eBay, he found a vintage wrestling magazine that featured “The Sheik,” aka Ed Farhat, infamous for his purported sadism in the ring, and the inspiration for the jazz-tinged song “Fire Editorial.” But there’s spotty documentation of the era before promoter Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation (now WWE) squeezed out competing organizations and made stars like Hulk Hogan household names.

“It’s frustrating that I can’t find the battle royale I saw as a kid, but at the same time there’s something to be said for scarcity of information” in writing, Mr. Darnielle says. “Lost things are deeply inspiring to me.”

On the album, woodwind arrangements by Matt Douglas added theatricality to some songs, plus a subtle nostalgic hook: Mr. Darnielle played clarinet in sixth grade. While most singer-songwriters explore personal emotions, Mr. Darnielle filled his wrestling songs with concrete floors, trash-hurling spectators and other visceral details. “Foreign Object” is a joyous song about jabbing an opponent in the eye. In “Choked Out,” a wrestler embraces the blackness of a sleeper hold: “No brakes down an endless dark incline. Most of the boys won’t ever cross this line.”

The singer isn’t the first to find poignancy behind pro wrestling’s spandex and stunts. In the 2008 film “The Wrestler,” for example, Mickey Rourke played a broken star trying to scrape out a living and a final shot at glory. (Mr. Darnielle says he hasn’t seen the movie.)

Other musicians have crossed into the world of wrestling. Cyndi Lauper and Snoop Dogg have made televised cameos in the ring. Until recently, Smashing Pumpkins singer Billy Corgan helped promote an independent league. Hüsker Dü frontman Bob Mould once wrote scripts for former WWE rival World Championship Wrestling.

There’s a bond between touring musicians and wrestlers who both barnstorm the country, putting on shows, Mr. Darnielle says: “It’s all theater.”

Write to John Jurgensen at john.jurgensen@wsj.com