Joe Hendry Details How His New WWE Album Became A Reality

WWE star Joe Hendry has detailed the process behind his new album becoming a possibility.

After initially teasing that a new album recorded with WWE was on the way soon, a teaser for the project recently dropped on social media. Taking inspiration from the 90s music commercials, the former NXT Champion gave fans a taste of the new singles, including “Give Joe Hendry Every Single Belt”, “Highland Cow” and “If You Don’t Love Joe Hendry.”

Speaking with Chris Van Vliet, Hendry noted that his Christmas appearance on SmackDown last year got the ball rolling:

“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.’”

Continuing, Hendry added that instead of using the live audio, he wanted to record the song professionally in studio. From there, the project snowballed from a live recording to an EP to a full album. The Raw star also added that the songs were written very quickly:

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.”

Joe Hendry Says Music Video For Album Is “Not AI”

The music video for “Give Joe Hendry Every Single Belt” sees Hendry holding every championship simultaneously. The shot got the fans talking, with some wondering if the shot was legitimate. Hendry confirmed that no AI was used, adding that he felt the weight of the titles that day:

“So, believe it or not, that is not AI. I’m holding all the belts. I am holding all the belts, we don’t know the exact combined weight, but it’s somewhere between two and 300 pounds, because they’re heavy belts, and I’ve been wearing 15 of them or something like that. Every belt that we had available on that you can buy. So I’ve got my arms stretched out like this and I’m like [groans]. So when you see the footage, I’m dying. I had all those belts on for probably like 15-20 minutes. That was tough, man. I burned some calories that day.”