The title tells you what happens in “Stabbed to Death Outside San Juan,” but the song tells you why you need to know.

Track: “Stabbed to Death Outside San Juan”
Album: Beat the Champ (2015)

There are a handful of songs with titles like “Stabbed to Death Outside San Juan,” where there is a certain charm to referring to them directly. John Darnielle acknowledges this at live shows by saying versions of “this is a song about being stabbed to death outside San Jan, it is called ‘Stabbed to Death Outside San Juan.'” One such version of this is at this live video performance at a now-closed convenience store in North Carolina. I’m mostly linking that so you can see his hair in 2015, which I emulated at the time, almost exactly in color and length, but certainly not in grandeur. We’ll cover the title phenomenon more as we get into newer songs than this, where the titles have truly gotten long and out there.

Title aside, this is a truly incredible story and arguably the best one on Beat the Champ. Bruiser Brody was a wrestler who was stabbed, to death, outside San Juan. Everyone knows who did it, but as the song says, “shower room full of people, no one hears a goddamned thing.” It is hard to read about the actual event, because it really does read fairly open-and-shut, but it all hinges on that line. You can’t know exactly what happened, but it’s very difficult to believe any version other than what became the truth everywhere except the trial that decided the opposite. The song centers on the event and the victim rather than the aftermath, but most of the time with events like these, everyone other than the victim lives in what comes after the end of the last line. That’s why you need the song to tell about the moment that will never come again.