Shawn Michaels recently reflected on his iconic “Sexy Boy” entrance music during an interview with Chris Van Vliet, explaining how the theme became one of the defining tools in shaping the Heartbreak Kid character.
“I’m very thankful that the theme song always works. I connect with everybody. Still one of the greatest songs ever, if you ask me,” Michaels said. He noted with humor that at 60 years old, he still comes out to the same music. “I’m one of the few guys that’s never changed his theme song and I never will. And at 60 it’s hilarious to me that we’re still doing it. But that’s the thing. I feel like HBK, that character, even at 60, he can get away with it.”
Michaels credited Jimmy Hart for crafting the theme and helping him embrace the “boy toy” persona that ultimately evolved into HBK. “When it first came out, I can remember hearing it and thinking like, ‘Oh jeez,’” he admitted. “When you go singles and you pitch yourself as a single star, you kind of see yourself more as the action hero guy. Kevin Nash always describes it as the guy that’s flying the helicopter with a cigar in his mouth, the M16 in his hand, and the girl under his arm. And my character obviously was not really close to any of that. But then as I got with Sherri and began to embrace it, I was able to find out who this was. The boy toy stuff that was in the song was so helpful in that—in helping me find out who HBK would eventually become.”
He also recalled the day he recorded the song himself after Sherri Martel’s version, admitting he was self-conscious about his singing. “I told Jimmy, ‘I really don’t have a good voice.’ My voice is so deep and I can’t get high pitches. But he was great. He just said, ‘Don’t worry about it. We’ll make you sound great, baby.’ And they did. It was sort of icing on the cake when it goes from Sherri singing it to me singing it.”
Looking back, Michaels described the whole process as “ludicrous” but essential to unlocking the HBK character. “Once I heard that song, that’s when I began to think about, ‘Okay, I’m going to do this. Who are two people I can connect with on that level, that are this type of showman?’ And it was Freddie Mercury and Elvis. Those were the two people I began to focus on.”
Despite his flashy persona, Michaels confessed the HBK character was far removed from who he really was at the time. “I can’t dance a lick. I can’t sing. Even though I was playing this character, I had no game—as the kids say—when it came to girls and stuff like that. I was very shy. All of that character is 100% based on a bunch of BS that I never actually really had. In fact, as a person, I spent the majority of my life wishing I was that guy, but I was never able to really pull that off in real life. So it gave me this place to jump into—to be this person that was unbelievably obnoxious and cool and into himself, and comfortable in his own skin… because I wasn’t at that time.”
