Joe Hendry has revealed how his upcoming WWE album came together almost by accident, while also sharing the original plans for what eventually became his “Fire Logan Paul” song.
During an appearance on INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet, Hendry discussed his album “Beyond Belief,” which is scheduled to be released on October 5. According to Hendry, the project began following his musical performance about The Miz on WWE SmackDown last December.
At the time, Hendry actually believed he was being called up to the SmackDown roster.
“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,” Hendry said.
Hendry recalled even having a conversation with Becky Lynch backstage that added to the confusion.
“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.’ And I was thinking maybe if we recorded it professionally rather than using live audio, it might be a better way to do that.”
That conversation with WWE Head of Music Neil Lawi quickly expanded from recording one song into discussions about an EP. Hendry already had another song from NXT and soon added a track titled “Going Up to SmackDown.”
“And he was like, ‘Alright, 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?’”
Hendry continued, “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.”
One of the songs that ultimately made the album was “Fire Logan Paul,” although Hendry revealed that the track originally had nothing to do with Paul.
Hendry said the same music was initially intended for his planned WWE Raw debut following WrestleMania, with lyrics celebrating his move to the red brand.
“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.”
Hendry had planned to build the joke around his move from SmackDown to Raw, but WWE publicly announcing his upcoming appearance forced him to change direction.
“Because what I was going to say something that rhymed with SmackDown, I was going to say something like ‘back down because I have signed to Raw.’ That was what the gag was going to be.”
After Michael Cole mentioned Hendry’s upcoming appearance and WWE aired a graphic promoting it, Hendry realized the original concept would no longer work. Once he learned he would be involved with The Vision, he decided to target Logan Paul instead.
“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.”
Hendry added, “Well, the one name who’s got the most controversy and fame is Logan. I’ll just go directly after Logan, and the words fit right in. 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.”
Hendry also discussed his songwriting process, noting that most of the concepts for “Beyond Belief” came together within only a couple of days.
“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.”
Hendry cited Weezer as a major influence on how he approaches songwriting, particularly when it comes to building songs around simple melodies and memorable hooks.
“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.”
Hendry explained that he generally starts with the hook before constructing the rest of a song around it.
“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.”
“Beyond Belief” is scheduled to be released on October 5 and features Hendry using his trademark musical style to take shots at several WWE Superstars.
