Joe Hendry has revealed the science behind his TNA entrance music.
The Scottish star has become wildly popular over the past few months. His entrance song “I Believe in Joe Hendry” nearly topped the charts in the UK, thanks to a sustained push by wrestling fans.
Meanwhile, his debut in NXT became the most viewed clip on WWE social media this year. Over seventeen million people saw the crowd singing along to his entrance music, despite him never appearing in WWE before.
Joe Hendry spoke with Chris Van Vliet about his entrance music. He explained how Queen’s “We Will Rock You” inspired him to “reverse engineer” how to make a catchy song.
“Reverse engineered it from what I wanted to happen. For me, professional wrestling is all about crowd interaction, so throughout the song you’ll notice we literally show and tell what we want the audience to do. So, say his name and he appears, and you will see the two claps. Whichever version of this song that I’ve had, there’s always been a visual of the two hand claps.”
“Then I literally tell the audience to wave their hands from side to side, from side to side. That’s it. And it comes from, um, I heard Queen talk about how they structured ‘We Will Rock You’ and how they found the perfect BPM for how they wanted people to stomp and clap. Then I looked at the BPM they used for the slower moments, and I went for 120 BPM for the faster bit, which is like your—that’s the kind of hypnotic pop timing.”
Joe Hendry Used A Pitbull Song As Inspiration For His Entrance
Another key inspiration for Joe Hendry’s music is Pitbull. The American rapper is famous for naming places he’s been in his song, and Hendry took that to heart.
Initially, that section of the tune was a road trip song mocking his failure as a wrestler. However, now it has become an anthem for Joe Hendry fans worldwide.
“I couldn’t decide if I wanted to go for it because the song I had before, people liked and it was catchy, but I just felt like it needed a bit more energy.” Joe Hendry said. “So I wanted something a bit faster. The first section is a little bit like ‘International Love’ by Pitbull. I mentioned this when we were driving over that I was actually a musician for a long time before I got into wrestling. This melody was me saying, ‘Oh God, we’re never going to make it with this rock music. We should just be like Pitbull and just name places.'”
“So I came up with this song that was just making fun of how not successful we were. After shows, we’d be driving, going ‘London and Paris and Tokyo,’ and then when I was coming up with the song, it just kept getting stuck in my head. I was like, ‘Maybe this is the one.’ So yeah, it was a song that I made for a joke, making fun of the fact that I wasn’t successful as a musician about 10 years ago, and then it just kept getting stuck in my head. And here we are now.” Hendry added.
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