It does matter, in a way, if you win the fight in “Hair Match,” but the ending suggests it’s tough for everybody.

Track: “Hair Match”
Album: Beat the Champ (2015)

The song “Hair Match” requires you to know what a “hair match” is, though you can probably get it from the lyrics. In a “hair match,” wrestlers wager that they are willing to be unmasked or have their head shaved if they lose. Wrestling really requires you to buy into the fiction, but the consequences here are actually real, even more than the “real” that you have to believe to watch the match itself. The entire third verse in “Hair Match” is about shaving someone’s head when they’ve lost the match. But is it?

Darnielle answered a question on Tumblr about “Hair Match” and essentially said that he loves that people want to know more, but he’s not saying. When you look at the last song on each album, you notice patterns. One that sticks out to me is the finality of these moments and how bittersweet, if you can even go that far in the positive column, they end up. “In Corolla” is the obvious one, where someone walks into the ocean and dies. I don’t think you’re supposed to hear this and say “ah, duh, I get it,” but you are supposed to feel a certain way. It’s not about losing your hair to face real consequences. For me, it’s the last two lines, where someone walks out of the building after that and looks at the stars. The final line is “and all the cheap cars,” which reminds me of dozens of songs where someone sighs, reflects, and then goes back into whatever comes next. What else can you do, forcibly shaved head or not?