Joe Hendry’s debut album only came about because he mistakenly thought he was being called up to SmackDown from WWE NXT.
The WWE star told Chris Van Vliet on Insight that Beyond Belief, set for release on October 5, grew out of a one-off performance.
“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,” Hendry said. “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, she says, ‘Are you up now?’ I was like, ‘Think so.’ And it turns out I wasn’t, but I thought I was at that time.”
Hendry recalled how Neil Lawi, the head of WWE Music, came to him about releasing the audio of that SmackDown performance.
“And he was like, ‘Hey, what if we did an EP?’ And then I was like, well, actually, the same week I’d done a song for NXT, so I was like, there’s two. And I was like, yeah, there’s a couple other songs as well, and 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, you know, Going Up to SmackDown. So I made that one, and we got about four or five songs, and we both thought, you know what, we’re almost there. Let’s just do an album. And so I wrote 10 tracks in, it was either three or four days.”
Instead of going to SmackDown, he went to Raw. The majority of the album is new material rather than songs from his WWE appearances. He said his experience on live television helped the recording move quickly.
“We did all the main vocal tracks for the entire album in five hours. Five hours for the whole thing,” Hendry said. “So that’s not just the main tracks, but it’s the doubles as well.”
He added that he set up equipment at home matching WWE Music’s studio so he could add guitar and keyboard parts during mixing. Hendry said he builds each song around a hook first, a habit he picked up learning guitar alongside Weezer records. Hendry said no tour has been announced, but he would like to perform the record live.
