Former WWE music composer Jim Johnston recently appeared on the All Access Entertainment podcast, where he discussed his creative process for producing entrance themes and explained why he generally avoided taking musical suggestions from wrestlers themselves.
Johnston was asked whether creating a wrestler’s entrance music involved sitting down with the talent to understand their character in addition to studying footage of them.
According to Johnston, those conversations almost never happened if he could avoid them. “Virtually never. Whenever I could avoid it, I avoided it.”
Johnston explained that he found input from wrestlers largely unhelpful because their suggestions tended to be based on their personal musical tastes rather than what would best serve their wrestling character. “It’s really not helpful because the vast majority of the wrestlers, amazingly, don’t really get it in the sense that their suggestions are always what they listen to in the car, you know, like something Metallica, like Metallica, this Metallica song, something just like that.”
Johnston believes attempting to replicate an existing commercial song is generally counterproductive when creating entrance music. “And there’s nothing more self-defeating, and it almost never works out that you base a theme on a commercial song.”
He also revealed that he disliked occasions when established WWE stars became influential enough to convince Vince McMahon to license an existing song for their entrances. “And I always thought it was just a horrible idea when guys got big enough that they could convince Vince to let them use a commercial track.”
Johnston’s reasoning is that entrance music should create an emotional association exclusively with the wrestler. With an existing song, fans may already associate the music with completely unrelated moments in their lives. “Because this is music. This is pure emotion. And if suddenly your entrance theme is a theme where, it was playing the first night a guy slept with his girl, his association is sleeping with his girlfriend, not with you.”
According to Johnston, the goal should be for the opening moments of a wrestler’s entrance theme to immediately make the audience think about that performer and nothing else. “And when you come out, you want people to only be thinking of you. That is the only thing in the universe you want them to be feeling is you.”
Johnston pointed to The Undertaker and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin as examples of entrance themes successfully creating that connection. “And I think that happens, like in a case like Undertaker or Stone Cold, people aren’t thinking about other songs or other experiences. They’re thinking about, what is up Austin’s sleeve tonight, and just taking in the moment and the excitement of it.”
By contrast, Johnston believes using recognizable commercial music risks dividing the audience’s emotional attention between the wrestler and whatever memories they already associate with the song. “But if your part of your mind, and more importantly your heart, is kind of being over here, it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I remember that song.’”
Johnston concluded with a straightforward assessment of the practice. “That’s just dumb, I think.”
Johnston worked as WWE’s primary music composer for more than three decades and created some of the most recognizable entrance themes in wrestling history, including music associated with The Undertaker, Steve Austin, The Rock and numerous other WWE stars.
