Downie was inspired to write this song after reading The Killer Inside Me by American author Jim Thompson. Michael Barclay's excellent book The Never Ending Present contains this quote from Gord: "It was probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever read." Like most of Downie's work, this song is about a collection of things. The song, Gord said, "was never about one historical incident. It was about trying to evoke the claustrophobic atmosphere around guilt and shame."

In search of El Dorado, the mythical land of gold and plenty, the Conquistadors were Spanish soldiers and explorers who were sent to conquer the Inca Empire for Spain. The Inca's ruled over what is today Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Columbia, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. The conquest of the Inca territory lasted 45 years, cost hundreds of thousands of lives and solidified Spain as the dominant colonial power on earth.

The opening of "Locked" may be a shark-tale in the first-fish-narrative. This particular shark seems to have swallowed one of the historic Spanish soldiers. Sharks do have a reputation for being scavengers of the sea. Although this is not true, as sharks keep a pretty strict diet (YOU try counting carbs with no fingers.) A longstanding myth does exists about a soldier being discovered in the stomach of a shark.

One variation of the myth says "A shark will swallow anything – up to half its own size in one gulp. Several hundred years ago, a naturalist wrote that the headless body of a knight in armor was found in a white shark’s stomach. Inside another was more recently found a sea lion, a horse and the body of another seven-foot-long shark." As for the "they don't know how old I am" lyric: " Scientists often examine animal teeth to determine age, but this technique isn't possible with sharks because they go through so many teeth during their lives. This makes determining the age of a shark difficult, so the lifespan of sharks isn't known." The estimated life span of a Great White is 40-50 years.

From what I've been able to gather from Herman Melville's novels and Bill Curtis's mob specials on A&E, being entombed in a shark is sorta like being locked in the trunk of a car. In either case, you find yourself at the will of someone who is bound to wind up sleeping with the fishes.

Canada's most famous trunk incident happened in October 1970 when a group of incompetent bandits and amateur terrorists turned to murder to achieve their political ends. The Front de la Liberation du Quebec (Which loosely translated means "reactionary cowards with guns and silly looking toques") murdered Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte and informed police that they could find his body in the trunk of a car at Montreal's St. Hubert airport. The murder and subsequent man-hunt was part of the infamous October Crisis.