Written by frontman Chris Cornell, "Rusty Cage" was released in 1992 as the second single from the band's third studio album, Badmotorfinger (1991).

Thayil has said that Soundgarden usually did not consider the time signature of a song until after the band had written it, and said that the use of odd meters was "a total accident".

The song is a part of Soundgarden's compilation album Telephantasm DLC Pack for Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock.

The Johnny Cash version also appears in the Mob of the Dead zombies map in Call of Duty: Black Ops II's Uprising downloadable content.

[14] The video features Soundgarden performing the song in a white room amid scenes of the band members being chased through a forest by dogs, farmers, and a man in a truck.

All songs written by Chris Cornell, except where noted: "Rusty Cage" was covered by Johnny Cash on the 1996 album, Unchained, which won a Grammy Award for Best Country Album, and Cash's version earned him a Grammy nomination for Best Male Country Vocal Performance.

On Cornell's Higher Truth acoustic tour in late 2015, he started including "Rusty Cage" in the set-list, employing Cash's country-rock arrangement of the song.