“They were just guys selling their characters, and I really related,” Darnielle said, calling from his North Carolina home. “It was . . . the very physical struggle of good and evil.”

As a kid during the 1970s, John Darnielle escaped into wrestling broadcasts. In his Southern California bedroom, the Mountain Goats frontman-to-be would turn on his black-and-white television set to watch the superheroes he discovered in the ring.

It’s no wonder the musician related. The violence and morals of pro wrestling that coaxed Darnielle into fandom also came to play throughout his childhood in his stepfather’s home. The musician has written extensively about his relationship with his abusive stepfather, including on his 2005 album, “The Sunset Tree.” Beyond the couples and teens and immigrants who live in his songs, Darnielle, who brings the Mountain Goats to the House of Blues on Tuesday, has himself been a suicidal teen, a meth addict, a singer-songwriter, an idol, a villain.

Now, he’s a father, an author, a National Book Award nominee. And in certain ways, a wrestler, though it’s harder to see who he’s fighting.


As he grew older, Darnielle became more interested in the people who walked from the ring, unlocked the Plymouth in the small parking lot beside the Olympic Auditorium, and drove home to families like his own. Having spent three years focused on his novel, “Wolf in White Van,” and his two kids, on Tuesday Darnielle released his latest Mountain Goats album: “Beat the Champ,” an ode to the private lives of his former wrestling heroes.

The concept initially was a hard sell to his bandmates. “My first thought went to some other kind of garage-y bands over the last 20 years who kind of embraced wrestling and the mask and that kind of thing,” Mountain Goats drummer Jon Wurster recounted in a phone interview. “It’s kind of already been done. But when he presented the songs, the songs are not really about that kitsch element of wrestling; they’re about the real personal lives of these guys.”


After decades of friendship with Darnielle, fellow Mountain Goat Peter Hughes knew it would work out. “I didn’t grow up being into it the way he did . . . but the thing is, I’ve come to just trust him,” Hughes said in a phone interview. “Of course it’s gonna be good — it’s freaking John! He writes these amazing songs.”

That he does, at least in the eyes of contemporary critics. Sasha Frere-Jones called Darnielle “America’s best non-hip hop lyricist” in The New Yorker. Magazines such as Paste and Rolling Stone have joined in the praise. Yet for all that listeners might relate to the people and situations that he sings about, for Darnielle the songwriting process is less catharsis than “an executable dance.”

“I make a song, craft goes into it,” Darnielle explained. “I’m not crying when I make the song. I’m not having the emotional experience when I make the song. I’m taking the tools that I’ve developed and the skills that I’ve learned. But that’s not really a tribute to my personality in any way, that doesn’t make me a special person. The intimacy is really with the song, not with me.”

In many ways, the Mountain Goats develop intimacies with their songs after years of performance. In an article he wrote for the NPR Music website, Hughes described recorded songs as “baby pictures” — snapshots in the infancy of a performance, something that transforms with time.


“There’s an enormous difference between playing a song on a stage in a live setting in front of an audience and just playing it in a studio or in a rehearsal room or in your house,” Hughes said. “You just kind of open yourself up to the song just going to different places. . . . They’re living, breathing things.”

Letting a song take on a life of its own can happen in the studio, too. “Heel Turn 2,” the sixth song on “Beat the Champ,” is punctuated by a long instrumental section: an improvisation by Darnielle. Soft piano echoes through empty stadiums. The musician’s voice lingers — “I don’t want to die in here.”

Darnielle reiterated Hughes’s notion of songs taking on lives of their own. “A performance is where a song lives,” he said. “It’s where you should put the last full measure of your love of the song. Night after night, you want to be living it and letting people share in the creative part of it.”

His complicated relationship with performance appears throughout “Beat the Champ,” as some of his working-class wrestlers retire and reflect on their nights in the ring. In “Southwestern Territory,” the song that opens the new album, Darnielle depicts wrestling as a job in the memories of an addled performer. The chorus repeats, “Climb the turnbuckle high / take two falls out of three / blackout for local TV” — the executable dance.


“I relate to wrestlers as performers, because wrestlers use 100 percent,” Darnielle said. “If you’re bothering to perform, you should put it all up there . . . people pay to get in. And I think wrestlers have always taken that seriously. Somebody paid five bucks to get in, and they deserve to see the blood they paid to see. That’s very inspiring to me.”

Brooke Jackson-Glidden can be reached at b.jackson-glidden@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @bjackgli.