WWE star Joe Hendry appeared on “Insight with Chris Van Vliet” to discuss various topics, including the release of his new album, “Beyond Belief.”
Hendry said, “So the album kind of came together by accident. So there was a period of time where I was on NXT, and I thought I was getting called up to SmackDown. So I went up to it, but I didn’t know. So I remember it was when I did the song at Christmas about the Miz, and I went up to SmackDown. I remember Becky Lynch asked me, ‘Are you up now?’ I was like, ‘I think so?’ ‘It turns out I wasn’t, but I thought I was at that time. So I remember it was Neil, who is the head of WWE Music, said to me, ‘Hey, we want to put out this single, the audio of your live performance from SmackDown.’ I was thinking maybe if we recorded it professionally rather than using live audio, it might be a better way to do that. And he was like, ‘All right, cool. Well, yeah, let’s record it.’ Then he was like, ‘What if we did an EP?’ Then I was like, ‘Well, actually, the same week I’ve done a song for NXT.’ So I was like, there’s two. He was like, ‘Can you do one more?’ And then I remember, again, I thought I was going up to SmackDown, so I did a song called Going Up to SmackDown. So I made that one, and we got about four or five songs, and we just both thought, you know what, we’re almost there, let’s just do an album. So I wrote 10 tracks in either three or four days.”
On the album mostly being new songs except for “Fire Logan Paul”:
“We added Fire Logan Paul. That’s another interesting story because I was supposed to debut the night after WrestleMania, and the song I had was the same song, but it was ‘Raw, Raw, Joe Hendry signed to Raw.’ Then what happened was they’d announced that I was going to be on Raw the next week. Because what I was going to say something that rhymed with SmackDown, I was going say something like back down because I have signed to Raw. That was what the gag was going to be. But I think Cole had said it, and there was like a graphic. I was like, we need to pivot here and then I found out that I was going to be working with The Vision. I’ve always learned in wrestling that you have to go after the biggest, baddest name. Well, the one name who’s got the most controversy and fame is Logan. So I’ll just go directly after Logan, and the words fit right in. So that’s how the Fire Logan Paul song came about, and then it just kind of blew up beyond what we had maybe expected, and then yeah, had to put it on the album.”
On how he creates a song and if he starts with the lyrics:
“So, I’m reading Rick Rubin’s book right now, and he talks about the creative process and how you have to engineer this situation where stuff just comes to you, and that’s kind of how it works for me. I just get these phases where I was very lucky that when it came to writing the album. I came up with the concepts for all the songs pretty much in like one or two days, and I just spent the other couple of days refining them. So I just, for whatever reason, had all the ideas just come to me. I’m a huge Weezer fan, and I think that’s how I learned music, was playing guitar alongside Weezer songs because their songs are so structurally simple. They’re almost like, kind of rock, sometimes grungy, nursery rhymes. So I’ve learned that if you keep the melody strong and you have a good verbal hook, you can kind of reverse engineer it from there. So it would be a rare situation that I would start with the verse or something like that. It has to be okay, we’ve got fire Logan Paul. Let’s reverse engineer the rest of the song around that hook. I have to start with a hook that I think is going to hit.”
On the throwback ’90s-style commercial for the album:
“Well, that’s exactly what we were going for. So I think the one that was like the main inspiration was the greatest love songs, and the funniest thing was so much has happened in the last couple of weeks. Very grateful I’m getting used a lot and booked a lot right now, that’s how I like it [when] I’m busy. I was about to fly out somewhere and I realized oh, we don’t have the voiceover for this thing. Who do we get to do it? So then I just found myself, again, I had the same pro mic in my house that they had, and I thought, all right, here we go, ‘The new Joe Hendry album.’ So we had a lot of fun making that, and again, so many talented people. The video crew that WWE have is unbelievable. The work that they’ve done on it. There are quite a few people that worked on it, but I’m so grateful to work with the team that we have. Just the fact that we can pick a 90s niche reference and just go all in on it, and just come up with these crazy ideas, like what if I’ve got this song Tables, Ladders, and Chairs, and every line is a gimmick match, and we just show the match. It’s like, why not? And that’s really cool.”
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