Interview with John Kiernan (Wrestling Entrance Theme Song Composer)

By Sonia Schnee | Posted on Thursday, January 13, 2022

I’ve known John Kiernan for several years now. (We originally connected when I needed a composer for some videos I produced.) What’s interesting about John — among many things — is that while he’s very much an artist/musician, he’s also a great businessman. He’s figured out how to take something that he’s passionate about (composing music) and make a career out of doing what he loves. He found an outlet as a pro wrestling entrance theme composer, and over the last two years or so he has written over 100 theme songs in a wide variety of genres. His music has been used by wrestlers the world over, and if you turn on your TV set (for those of us who still have one), you can see/hear his music being played during any number of pro wrestling events.

If you are a fan of the pro wrestling world, this interview is a must-read. If wrestling is “not your thing,” this is a still must-read for anyone who is trying to figure out how to make a living doing what they love.  

Scroll to the end to find out how to get in contact with John and to listen samples of his music.

(Video and transcript have been edited for time and clarity.) 

Do you want to give our audience a brief background of who you are and what you do?

JOHN KIERNAN: My name is John Kiernan. I am a wrestling entrance theme song composer from New Jersey. Right up to now, I've written over 100 themes for different wrestlers, for different promotions. I usually say “everybody except for WWE.” That's the only company I haven't worked with. I've worked with wrestlers from AEW, New Japan from Pro Wrestling, Ring of Honor, MLW. So, all around the gamut and various independent promotions. Over the last two years, it's been quite a ride, and before that I'd been doing performances, releasing instrumental music, scoring films, and performing my own music. So, a little bit of everything. But where I've been for the last couple of years has been in wrestling themes, almost exclusively now.

For people who aren't familiar with the wrestling world, can you give us a little bit of a background about how many different wrestling organizations there are and which one you're working with?

So, I usually work directly with the talent. I am the in-house composer for the United Wrestling Network, which under its umbrella has about four or five different divisions, such as Championship Wrestling from Memphis, from Hollywood, in different territories that they exist, as Championship Wrestling from (insert city here) — most notably and most recently, Championship Wrestling from Atlanta.

In terms of how many there are, oh man, there's so many. Now you have promotions out in China, you have promotions here in the U.S., you have Japanese promotions. I don't know how many countries my music has been featured in, but I'll tell you that they've been featured in a fair amount. Wrestling is a big thing, especially overseas. Wrestling's a big thing here in the States, too. 

It's interesting because there’s a little bit of a parallel between, for example, soccer, where you have the World Cup and everybody kind of falls under it. All the different wrestling promotions are kind of their own independent things. Wrestlers go from place to place, but it’s more like they're independent contractors that can go anywhere, unless their contracts are tied to a specific promotion.

Where I come in is — for those who might be familiar with combat sports like UFC — before the combatants hit the ring, you hear that piece of music that plays in the intro. That's usually where my music plays, and if they win, it plays again.

What's the composing process like? Is there a lot of back and forth?

I'll always put it like this. My individual experience may differ from a lot of people because if you are a composer that is contracted to a specific organization then the chain of command might change. Gratefully — and I've been speaking to different wrestlers and different people in the industry about this — I think I'm in a really good position because I get to work with talent, usually individually, even if it is me working with a UWN talent.

Usually, they come to me or the boss comes to me and says, "Hey, we're looking for a theme for this wrestler." I get connected with the wrestler, ask him/her a couple of questions. Usually, the main questions I ask, even if I know who the wrestler is, I'll say, "What do you want the audience to know about you before you even hit the ring? Like, if someone hears your music, what do you want people to feel about you? What do you want them to get before they even see you?”

From there, sometimes they have different references, and they're like, "Oh, I'd like the theme in this style" or "This is something I think would help portray my character in a different way." So realistically, the process differs wrestler to wrestler. Sometimes you'll hear me doing a fairly heavy track like I did for a wrestler named Masha Slamovich. It's very much like a Testament meets Arch Enemy kind of feel. Then there's another wrestler named Mercedes Martinez, and her theme is more of a reggaeton-style. So it's two very different contrasting styles, but it really is dependent on what the wrestler is looking for.

I have worked with organizations where they're like, "Listen, you're just going to kind of work with us, and we want to control that narrative." (For those who are in wrestling, wink-wink, "control the narrative.") But just in general, often if you're working independently, you get to work directly with the talent. If you're contracted to a specific organization, it could be either way. Gratefully, most of mine has been directly with the talent.

You mentioned that you had to dig into a lot of different genres. Do you have a background interest in different genres, or do you have to learn things as you go, adapt to people's requests, and bring on some new skills?

It's the combination of A and B. I think we all have that friend who doesn't hate much. You know? Like, there’ll be a general consensus around a movie where everyone's like, "Oh, this movie sucks" and there’ll be that one person who can find that redeeming quality in it. That's me with music, mostly. You would assume that for somebody who's so entrenched in music or someone who's gone to school for music that there would be this level of elitism, but I listen to basically all styles of music, and I find an appreciation for them, whether it's classical, metal, jazz, rock, anything really out there. I'm a big fan of country music, too.

When a wrestler comes to me and they ask me for something specific, it's an opportunity for me to sit down and go, "Okay, cool, let's really dive into this style."

Reggaeton I have probably have the least familiarity with, but when Mercedes Martinez was showing me, "This is what I was using before. This is what I really like," you try to find the things that really accentuate that style. Like, “OK, cool. It's very rhythmically-based. There's a lot of groove to it. So we'll do that.”  

So even if it's a style I haven't come in contact with, there's really not a style that's outside of my wheelhouse. Does that mean I've written in every style? Not necessarily, but I have written it a lot. If you give me something, I can make it happen. If you give me references, if you give me what your character is supposed to be, we're going to come up with something that people love and something that fits what you're looking for. I love all styles of music. Even if I haven't done it, I can do it.  

If there are any wrestlers out there who are listening, John can do it all! Whatever style you're looking for, he can make it happen.

When you talk about being a professional, whether it's a videographer, a composer, or whatever the case is, you have to figure out things in order to survive. How can you maximize all of the things that you do? 

Over time, I wanted to be an instrumental metal guitarist. That's very much my parents' style. If I pick up a guitar, that's kind of the stuff that I play, generally, but that isn't the only thing that you should be able to do if you're looking to create a career as a musician.

You need to branch into other styles. You need to look into other sources of income. You need to look into all of these different avenues that you might not have otherwise. Once you start branching off from one place, the seed is where the tree comes from.

Very well said, and very modest.

What kind of variety do you encounter in terms of your clients? When wrestlers approach you, is it largely those who need their very first entrance theme song, they’ve worked with other composers before, or they want to totally reinvent themselves?

Yeah, it's Column A, Column B, Column C. With entrance themes, when you have a wrestler who's starting to really brand themselves and take their character seriously, an entrance theme can be one of those things that helps bring it to life, but it could be the start of their career, right?

I have worked with talent where they're just like, "Hey, I just got out of wrestling school. I want to start hitting the road. I want to start putting down my promos and things like that, so I need something, just bear basics. Here's what I've always thought for my character." I think what's interesting about those is you get a completely fresh perspective.  

Also, wrestlers change over time. They go to different territories. They decide, "OK, this doesn't really suit what I want to do. I want to go in a different direction with my character." If they go to a different promotion, all of a sudden it's like, "Hey, you're now not this character. You're now trying to fit within this stable, this group of people or whatnot." You end up having reasons where they'll switch.

A lot of the talent that I've worked with recently has been talent that's been around, gratefully, for whether it's 10 plus years or even 7 plus years, but a significant amount of time, they’ve maybe been on TV or in the public eye for quite some time. So with those wrestlers, a lot of the times they have things they're still using, that sometimes are either a) copyright issues or b) they want to expand on that character. 

There are some wrestlers that have come from the big promotion, from the WWE, where that's kind of one of those things — and no digs on anyone that writes for WWE — but you're talking about a publicly-traded company, and they're trying to churn things out fairly quickly, so it's like, "OK, cool. Bullet point. Here's what this is. Go" and then you have to stick with that theme for a little bit of time. So, sometimes wrestlers coming from there that I work with, going out to AEW or huffin' it on the indies, they'll say, "This is what I used here. I like that vibe. Let's stick with it" or "You know what? I want to rebrand myself."

There's a wrestler who just debuted on AEW named Tony Nese. He was the ex-Cruiserweight Champion in WWE. He won the title at WrestleMania. His whole thing is that he's both a fast, high flier wrestler and a strong wrestler. His tagline is, "Move like a cruiserweight, hit like a heavyweight." So with him, when you hear his theme that he was using in WWE, it's very fast. It's uplifting. It's one of these things where you would hear it and you'd want to cheer. It sounds almost like a superhero theme in a way.

When he came off and we started working together, he wanted something that was a little bit more in-your-face, a little bit more driving. So it was a little bit slower, a little bit more methodical, and instead of it being, "OK, cool, here's this guy who can fly around," it focused more on his nickname, which is "The Premier Athlete." He goes in the ring, he poses. He does all these really cool, strong moves that look flashy, and he puts them away. So it was a really good opportunity for him to say, "You know what? Here's what I did like from that, but let's go ahead and make it more in this style. I think that's going to help me speak more in the ring." So it's a combination.  

Some people start bare basics. Masha Slamovich, she was actually the 4th theme that I ever wrote, a couple of years ago. We've grown to be friends over the course of time, and she's huffed it from everywhere, from Japan, back to the U.S., here in New Jersey. She recently got signed to IMPACT Wrestling and AXS TV, and the theme that we did originally for her, at first was kind of like a Sevendust-y, Russian Tchaikovsky-inspired theme where it was like, OK, she's really trying to push this narrative, so we had strings, we had all this stuff, and she goes, "Yeah, when I come back to the states, I don't want that." I'm like, "OK. Cool. So what do you want?" She's basically just like, "I drive people on their heads and I'm out to kill people." I'm like, "Alright. So here's what we’ve got to do." A complete 180 from that. Now, when you see her on IMPACT and you hear "The Art of Violence," which is the new theme, and you listen to "Russian Dynamite," which was the original, you kind of see the progression from, here was somebody who was trying to find themselves, and here's the person that knows who they are now. So, it's pretty cool. It's a big progression.

Do you ever get somebody who comes in and is like, "I'm not really sure where I'm going next" and you have to really dig deep to figure out what they want to be, what they're aiming for?

It's less so that they don't know who they are and where they're going. It's more so that they don't have — and I mean no disrespect when I say this — they don't have a defined character that reaches outside of "I'm a wrestler." To use some timely or evergreen examples, when we think of someone like The Undertaker, he was around for 40 years or so. His whole gimmick, at least until 2000-something, what that he was The Deadman. That was his whole thing. He was supposed to be a dead guy. OK, cool. That's a very defined character. You're not going to write an ice cream song for him, right? You're not going to write an indie-style song. You're probably going to write a funeral dirge, which is what lasted over 40 years.

But then you have someone like, for example, Bryan Danielson, who's in AEW. His themes have always been great, and they've always nailed them. They basically took "Flight of the Valkyries" and made rock versions of them and modernized versions.

Daniel Bryan's story was always: he's the best wrestler. OK, well, what do you do with that? What do you highlight? There's got to be a little nugget somewhere else in the character that you can pull from. A while back, I had actually spoken to Jim Johnston. For those who are familiar, Jim Johnston was the composer for 32 years for WWE. I messaged him one day on LinkedIn. I was like, "This guy's not going to answer. I'm just some schmuck," and he ended up responding. We had a little bit of a back and forth, which was cool, and I was like, "Listen, you're talking about how it's easy to write themes for The Undertaker, but what if you have a wrestler who's just a wrestler, or just a fighter, or something like that?" and he goes, "There will always be something that you can connect to, even if it's something that everybody else has. There's something that does make them a little bit unique, so you have to continue to dive to that."

So, for example, if someone's like, "OK, I'm an MMA fighter." OK, great. Well, what else are we doing with that? You could just stop there and be like, "Alright, cool, we're gonna make a rock track. That's great," but I think there's depth in saying, "OK, cool. So when you are an enemy fighter, are you more submission-based? Are you more strike-based? Do you feel that you have a chip on your shoulder? Is this something where you had maybe lost a lot of fights and you all of a sudden came around the other side, you trained, and now you're out to prove something?" There's little things that you can extrapolate from someone. Let's get those extra nuggets and pull those out because that's going to make not just the difference in the music that I write, but it's also going to help you even define more of what you're going for.

I will say that a lot of wrestlers tend to have a pretty strong vision of what they're looking for. In some promotions, they have a little bit more freedom than others, but a lot of promotions now are giving wrestlers that freedom to be who they want to be and, in turn, to have the music that they want to have.

In terms of your personal background, how did you find yourself in this world? Tell us a little bit about your journey and how this became a career path.

It's one of those things, like, you never know what's going to happen. You never know where life will take you. I've been a believer in both sides of that. One door shuts, another one opens, and kind of conversely, what's the other side of that coin? You could be one step away or one move away from the next phase of your life.

I've been a professional musician on and off now for about 10-12 years or so, and I was running a wrestling podcast. (You actually got me in contact with Patricia Rogers. She's so cool. Everything that she and her team do for Those Wrestling Girls is so dope. Check them out! Highlighting female wrestling!)

So, some buddies and I had a podcast called The Armchair Bookers, and we were looking for different ways to maximize our visibility. We were like, "OK, cool. What skillsets do we have?" Well, one guy was good at interviewing. For me, one of my buddies went, "Well, you write music. Have you ever thought about writing music for wrestlers?"

When I was in college, the big thing I wanted to do was start writing music for commercials, films, and video games, and one thing that you find, especially in video games and films, it's more at the mercy of the project than it is at your own writing speed. A film could get put into backlog and a game could get put into development hell. 

Wrestlers are some of the nicest people in the world. Everyone's just trying to work together, generally. Everyone's trying to put themselves over, put each other over, so it's cool. Why do I bring that up? Because a couple of the interviews that we had done with The Armchair Bookers podcast, we had become friends with a couple of different wrestlers that were local or on the way up. A gentleman named Ricky Gibson, who now works for UWN under The Midnight Heat, was actually the first person that we interviewed and the first person I ended up doing a theme for. I was like, "Hey, I know how to write music, I know how to release it, but I have no idea how to even get into writing themes for people. There's no roadmap or anything for that." He goes, "Oh yeah, you could go ahead and make one for us."  

I don't think they were really expecting much because we were coming from the podcast perspective, and they heard the intro that I had written and it was kind of like a mid-2000s, Three Days Grace kind of thing. It was cool, but you wouldn't think much of it. It's like ten seconds at the beginning of a podcast. Then, I wrote this theme for them, which was this '80s inspired theme, and they were like, "Oh my God, this is really cool." So we started talking again. I was like, "How do you do this?" and he was like, "Well, basically, what you're doing now. Just start reaching out to people, talking to them." I was like, "Is that really it? I know there's copyright and things like that." They were like, "Dude, the wrestling industry is still so up in the air and so independent that there's so many floating ideas, so many floating laws."

So I kept reaching out to different people we had interviewed. Ricky Gibson and Eddie Pearl, to this day, I continue to be friends with. They've referred so many people to me over the course of time, and I'm super grateful for that. Masha Slamovich, same thing. Over the course of time, it just became that people started to learn my name. There were referrals.

I still do a lot of client outreach. For anyone running a small business or a big business, it doesn't matter how big or small you are. Always continue to network, always continue to communicate. Not everything is referrals, and you've still got to put in a lot of legwork, even if it's 30-40% of your business. 

Two years later, I'm sitting almost at over 100 themes, and I have probably about 20 in backstock now that I'm working with. So, it's a combination of referrals and reaching out. There were a lot of people that I never thought I'd even get to work with or that would even know my name. It's just crazy to see now.

It took the passion of composing, which is my big love, of being able to write and put music together, and now finding that outlet for something that I enjoy from an entertainment side, which is pro wrestling.

It's a great story for anyone entering a new career, a new industry, to just talk to people. There's no harm in asking. 99% of the people that you'll meet will want to be helpful.

How does it feel to turn on your TV and see/hear your theme played? What’s that experience like?

It's been very humbling. I've always considered myself more of a composer than even a guitarist or a producer. I love the creation of music. I love being able to just take a blank landscape and all of a sudden, “Wow, now it speaks to somebody.” Right? Being able to hear it live, it's a very different experience.

When you hear that other people are resonating with your music, it's really humbling because it’s like, “Hey, I'm just in my studio, writing music for wrestlers.” It’s really cool that I get to work with them, but all of a sudden when you hear that person go live and you see that the music that you wrote is the first thing that resonates with the audience… Like they say in wrestling, it doesn't matter if they're cheering, if they're telling you go away, if they're booing you. If they're quiet and they're dead, then that's when you know that you're not being effective.

There have been a couple of different instances where a wrestler has come to the ring and the crowd gets up, they get really happy, sad, whatever is the case, really animated and the first thing they hear is, for example, The Premier Athlete's theme (Tony Nese), or Dani Jordan's theme when they were using it for AEW, or Darren Young's in New Japan. It's just really cool to see that the music takes on a life of its own because the wrestler is so in tune with what they're doing and in tune with that.

My wife and I run a music school here in Midland Park called The Piano Workshop at Bergen County. I always tell my students, "We all start wanting to be a professional musician." Or let me even scale that back. We all want to pick up an instrument because we see our favorite musician on stage, whether that's a Taylor Swift, a Machine Gun Kelly. For me, when I was younger, that was Blink-182. Even if it's Britney Spears.

For me, being able to come back around all these years later and be like, OK, this is where we’ve come from. All this hard work, all the blood, sweat and tears, so to speak, that you put in, you're all of a sudden able to see the fruits of your labor come to fruition in that way. So it's humbling to be like, OK, cool, we actually took something that we had a passion for and now here we are with it. I was 13, let's say, when I realistically started really getting into music. I'm 33 as of this interview, and I think that humbles 13-year-old me. I'm like, that's crazy. I was sitting in my bedroom in Key West, literally jamming on the guitar — it had an MxPx sticker and a Yamaha sticker and it was like 20 bucks, given to me by my brother — and then all of a sudden, we're here. It's absolutely crazy.

Have you found that social media and Instagram, in particular, have made it easier to connect with wrestlers, potential clients, and to network?

The majority of my business is done through social media.

I think we see a lot of negativity that happens on social media. Gratefully — and knock on wood — I've always had generally positive experiences. You'll get the people every now and again who have their opinions. I don't mind opinions. I mind if you're being a jerk about it, you know? But very rarely have I run into somebody who has genuinely been like, "I'm just a bad day every day.”

I think wrestlers use social media so much to connect with people. It's also the way that their name gets around so much. If someone does a cool move, has a cool match, they end up being able to connect and get it shared.

I feel like a really big way for me to connect with people is through DMs, through Instagram. Probably Instagram, Twitter and Facebook have been the biggest three. I have my YouTube, which I'm always updating with new music, and I have a playlist that I put up of the themes that I've worked on. I think that if if social media wasn't around, it would be much more difficult for me to grow my business, both from a referral standpoint and a communication side.

I always try to be as personal as I can with the wrestlers that I reach out to, and vice versa. I've seen people online that are like, "Oh, I just sent an email blast to 10,000 people and 10 people responded. What's going on?" My thing is I'd rather get 1/64th of the work but know that the person that I'm working with and I really do connect. I try to find out about as much of the industry as possible. I try to find out as much about a wrestler that I want to reach out to as possible. That way, when I do send a message or I do reach out on Twitter, it's not just "Hey, I write music, hire me." It's more like, "Hey, here's what I know about you. Here's what I really appreciate about what you do. I want to offer my services." It's not a tongue-in-cheek, "Hey, you're great. By the way, I do this. Maybe we could work together? Nah, I'm just kidding. But maybe...? I don't know!" None of that stuff because that's just ballocks. It doesn't get you anywhere. It just makes you look like a hack. It's legitimately, "Here's what I like about what you do. Here are my services. I'd love to work with you. Let's see if we can make something happen," and usually people resonate with that. Social media is definitely helpful. There's a tact to how you do it, but it's just how you'd speak to people in general, you know? People really resonate with that.

Excellent advice for any industry. You really want to be personable. Like you mentioned, it's easier now to mass email or mess message people, but if you write that extra little personal something that shows, "Oh, I actually took the time to look and see what you're about and what you've done,” that really goes a long way. 

I think every business person, whether they're in a big company or a small company, can look at it the same way. Know who you're reaching out to. There are definitely tools out there where it's just like, "Hi, (insert tag here)," and it adds the person's name, and you pray to God that they didn't put in their last name and their first name in the same thing because it's totally not personable to say "Hi, John Kiernan." Nobody says that. They just use the person’s first name.  

Sometimes wrestlers will have different accounts — some for personal, some for their stage stuff. So I always try to be respectful and go to their stage stuff. When I work with wrestlers, there are some that I refer to by their kayfabe names. There are some that I refer to them by their real names. It's always for me preference. There's one person, Lilith Grimm, who I've worked with. We did a theme that was very tribal, very much like a Heilung-style, and we were able to get the hurdy-gurdy player from the band Eluveite to play on it, too. It was really wild, really cool. I still call her "Lilith" to this day because that's what she prefers. Her real name is out there, she has a profile and all that, but I still refer to her as "Lilith" because that's what she wants. Other wrestlers don't care, but you always want to be respectful of that. So I think the more you can learn about somebody, the more you really try to connect with somebody, the more social media can work for you to help you grow.

I'd say, it's still rare to find someone who has both the creativity of an artist as well as a business mind, someone who can figure out how those two worlds work. You have the mind of a business owner and someone who knows how to grow their brand. Looking at your Instagram page, it's not just a whole bunch of random stuff. There's a thought process to what's being posted and how it looks.

Even if you are someone who enjoys, say, playing the guitar for fun, there are definitely some things that business do that you can look at as a model. Look at what businesses are doing. It doesn't hurt. It can only increase your exposure. There's always something to learn if you're just willing to listen and apply.  

Absolutely. I've been grateful over my life, whether it's been in or out of music, to work under people who were very strong leaders. Whether that was my time at previous places like Apple, or even just talking to people like Winifred Phillips who is a video game composer, and really just listening to what they do and how they communicate and really the respect that they put down.

It's really interesting. I think each wrestler is their own individual business, and you end up seeing that there are wrestlers who really take that brand seriously, there are others that kind of sit in the middle, and there are others that are like, "OK, cool, what work will come to me, will come." Like, they don't have much on social media, their email is difficult to communicate with. Just with a little bit of tailoring and a little bit of tooling, you can end up being able to connect with way more people.

One thing I try to do pretty frequently is, every day I'll post a story of one of the pieces of music that I've written for a wrestler. I'll tag the wrestler and it gives them traction, it gives me traction. It also gives people the ability to go right to listening to it, to subscribe, to follow, things like that. At least once a week, I usually get one referral from doing things like that because, again, wrestlers are following me, I'm following wrestlers. The industry is kind of like that ouroboros of learning about what's out there, right? So, from things like that, you may get a connection here and there. It's not about seeing someone like a Kardashian — and I'm not bashing them either. It's not like seeing a Kardashian who has 230 million followers and go, "That's my goal." The point is, you need to know your market. You need to know what you're trying to accomplish, and even getting your stuff sometimes in front of 10 people, if it's the right 10 people, then that's fine. You know you're able to grow.

I think what's been a really big thing for me is there are some wrestlers that I haven't heard of until they reach out, or I reach out. There are some wrestlers that all of a sudden reach out, and I look at my DMs and I'm like, "Why are you reaching out to me? I'm nothing! What are you doing?" And it's cool. It's all through the same channels.

I also think that there's going to be competition no matter what. Some people are like, "Don't give away your secrets." Listen, in any industry, there's going to be competition. If someone is successful in an industry, then they're going to duplicate and replicate. So the competition's going to exist, whether you want it to or not. So it's better to create an industry, than it is to just live on an island on your own. You know what I mean?

Right. There might be someone else who does what you do, but it's the relationship that you've built, which is also, of course, tied to your quality of work.

There's a gentleman who works for AEW, who's their main go-to composer. He is “The Guy.” His name's Mikey Rukus. When AEW started, he's the guy who had written all the music. He's the go-to. He's the composer for the company. When I was doing my podcast, I got the opportunity to interview him, and it was cool because we interviewed so many different wrestlers, but I had gotten the opportunity to sit down with somebody in wrestling that was also a musician. So instead of just asking about, "What matches are you looking forward to?" it's was like, "OK, cool, what's your rig? You're using a seven-string. That's awesome. What did you think of this and this?" It was really cool.

One of the first times I ever saw my music on a large promotion was in AEW. They were starting up this show called Dark, which is where they bring in some other talent. (It's a YouTube-exclusive show.) They were able to ask other people, "Hey, do you have music that you can submit for us to use?" I don't know how public they made that. There wasn't a website, but I remember I was sitting working one day, and Mikey Rukus was just like, "Listen, do you have any music you can send it to me? Anything just randomly that we might be able to use?" and I go, "Yeah, when do you need it?" and he's like, "Five minutes from now." I'm like, "Legitimately five?" He's like, "Yeah. I can send you the releases." So I'm like, "I'll send it to you in three! I just happen to be at my computer now." He didn't have to do that. All of a sudden it became the theme that Dani Jordan used for a couple of months while they were using music for the enhancement talent. That was a song I wrote back in 2011 that I had released on a record and things like that. So it was cool.

I think Mikey's always been gracious with me in terms of both being a friend and giving advice in the industry. Even Tony Nese, he came to me to write a theme. I guess there might have been somebody else who was working on something for him and maybe the guy didn't answer his messages, something like that, and so Tony Nese came to me. We worked on something. He ended up loving it, which I'm always proud of. He didn't tell me he was going to AEW. I don't think he knew he was going to AEW. (When I say "going to AEW," wrestlers often will work in different promotions. AEW is one of those promotions where once you're assigned to them, it's a little bit more exclusive, like you're usually going to work exclusively for their programing.)

So we finished up the theme. He did a couple of different shows, one actually for UWN, and then all of a sudden he goes "Hey, I'm going to AEW to work on the program Dark." (One thing about Dark is that they don't use music for the enhancement talent now. It's just quicker for them to get people in the ring. "Enhancement talent" refers to people who aren't, let's say, signed to the company and are just there to make the onboard talent shine.) So I go, "Yeah, no problem, I'll go ahead and I'll obviously give you the music, give you the release. I'll speak to my guy, Mikey Rukus over there. He knows me and he knows how I work." I send over the music to Mikey Rukus, and he goes, "Yeah, he's going to be on Dark. I don't know what they're going to do with him." What that means to me is they're not going to use this music for Dark, obviously. I go, "OK, cool makes sense." I kind of knew that going into it. All of a sudden, I'm watching Dynamite, which is their TNT show, and Tony Nese is sitting in the crowd. No music, but he's sitting in the crowd. I'm like, "That's weird for a Dark person" and he goes, "Yeah, they told me, like, 10 minutes before time, just go sit in the crowd." I go, "OK." So I reached out to Mikey again. I go, "So... What's going on?" He goes, "Oh yeah, they're going to allow him to make an entrance on Dark." I'm like, "OK, cool. Can you tell me anything?" "No." "OK. NDA." They start using his music there and he goes, "It's really up to Tony Khan if they want him to continue using music.” He's like, "I like it. It's cool" and then all of a sudden fast forward, and now he's using it on Dynamite. Tony Nese is signed to AEW officially now. Mazel tov and congratulations to him. He deserves it so, so much.

It's one of those things. You don't know where connections and how connections are going to go. I'm always grateful to have someone that dedicates that time, even to just speak on a friend basis, and continues that connection that way. It was something that I was like, "Oh, here's a piece of music that's going to be written for Tony Nese. Tony Nese is great. He's going to go around and do all this" and then all of a sudden, he's on AEW. and I'm like, "That's nuts!" and Mikey is cool with using the music. So, there we go.

You never know which way things were going to go, who knows who, and who's going to be connected with someone at some point.

have you actually gotten to go to wrestling events and physically be present while your music is playing?

Something always comes up when you have a child and you have a job. So, unfortunately, not yet. There might be a few things coming up that I will be going to, and especially now in Jersey, there are so many different wrestling events that happen, whether it's South Jersey, or up here in Bergen County, or down by the Shore. There's so much wrestling going on that I have to be able to get there one way or another. So hopefully soon I'll be able to see it in person. The most that I've seen it is on TV. My son is two-and-a-half. I don't have him watch wrestling, obviously, right now. When he gets older, cool. But, you know, when all of a sudden I was like, "Oh, Tony Nese is going to be on Dynamite,” I'm like, 'Watch the TV! This is crazy!'" So he got to see that. But I haven’t seen it in person yet.

Let’s somehow schedule all your clients and your life so you have a week off so it lines up exactly.

Exactly. It's one of these things where it's like, if you're the one that puts the kid to sleep, then you have to hope the kid gets to sleep by the time that the show starts. So you're like, "Alright, cool. Please go to sleep. Please. Please go to sleep a little bit earlier today."

"I'll write some sleeping music for you."

 Exactly!  Some dreaming entrance music.

Hey, there's a lot of kids that need to go to sleep. The next big thing. We'll get you on Shark Tank somehow.

Oh, man. In front of Kevin O'Leary? Absolutely! I'd be like, "Yeah, I work with wrestlers right now, but have you ever worked with babies?" and they're like, "Please make this quick. I don't know where this is going."

It might be the most-watched episode yet.

“Babies? I'm intrigued! Yes!”

I will say, we're joking about the baby music now, but even through wrestling, I've been grateful to get other work, too. Some light film work here and there for a short horror movie. I've done different podcast introductions, too.

One thing that I'm grateful for is that wrestling themes, I'm probably writing three or four entrances a week, on a good week. One or two, if I have a little bit more time. But in general, it's still so many different styles that if a wrestler says, "Hey, I need something in this style," I could send them a piece of music that I've written in style a, b or c. Even a podcast. There was a podcast I recently did where it was all about women in business, and they were like, "Do you have something that's a little bit more technology-focused but has a little bit more of an upbeat nature?" I was like, "Yeah, yeah, definitely" and I sent them one of the tracks that I'd done, and I got to work on a podcast intro there. Someone was looking for a synth-wave track for a gaming channel. I was able to do something there.

The wrestling themes, I'm writing them at such a ferocious pace in so many different styles that it's giving me a reel of content. It sounds wacky to say that in two years it's been over 100 themes in so many styles, but that's kind of the life as a professional musician. I've been able to say, "Oh, I'd love to be part of this project. Here is a collection of music that I've written so you know that I can write in a variety of styles." That's the other part I've been really, really grateful for.

Do you have anything coming up that we should know about? Any big projects that you're excited about?  I'm sure there are some things you can't totally reveal, but anything in the works that you can tease us about and we can follow up with you later?

 There's always so much music. I won't say I do these crazy break-the-budget videos, but I'll always do audio-visual art for my music. If a music video can be done, cool. I have an artist that I work with who's phenomenal, for the majority of themes that I put out. His name's Hiban Huerta. He's out in California. He works with NWA. He does a lot of great stuff.

Marina Shafir is a wrestler who just wrestled on AEW Dark. I just finished up a theme for her which is very different than what you would assume, for those who know Marina Shafir. She has an MMA fighter background. It's not rock, it's not metal. It’s classical, which is crazy. When she told me why, I was like, "This totally works. Let's do it. I'm here for it. We'll write something in a Romantic-style."

I'm back-stocked on about 20 themes right now to release, and I'm back-stocked on probably about 20 themes that I have to start. So, there's always something coming.

There is a wrestler named Jase Osei who I worked with recently, and hopefully in the next couple of weeks I'm going to be releasing his track which features Josiah Williams on it. Josiah Williams was the backstage vocalist for WWE NXT. He’s a great guy and phenomenal rapper, so that one should be coming out soon.  

I will say, there's lots of stuff, surprisingly, that's planned for 2022. Just follow me on all the things — Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, YouTube. Sometimes I end up releasing things without a release plan — and that's the worst thing after we just talked for 20 minutes about independent business shit, but that's where we are sometimes! But there will always be something cool in the pipeline, is what I'll say.

What's the best way for people to reach out to you? Do you have one particular platform that you seem to check more?

 I think Instagram and Facebook have probably been the two that are the easiest to check and communicate. Instagram and Facebook follow the same handle, @JohnKiernanMusic. I'm on Twitter also, but it is the black sheep. It's @JKiernanGuitar because of character limits. JohnKiernanMusic@gmail.com is also where I am fairly communicative.

So Instagram first, I would say. Email second. Facebook third or whatever. I check all of them fairly consistently. JohnKiernanMusic.com is updated fairly frequently, too.

~ 

WRESTLING ENTRANCE THEME SONGS BY JOHN KIERNAN:

JOHN KIERNAN: This is Masha Slamovich. She's fantastic. The first video is how she looked when we did her first theme, and the second is how she looks now. She’s really elevated her brand. Originally, she was just a person that had a Russian background. Then over time, she started working in Japan. Japan is more of a rough style, versus WWE, they're very careful. She came to me basically being like, "I want to kick people's heads in." I'm like, "OK." (Masha Slamovich debuted with her new theme on IMPACT on AXS TV last night, January 6th!)

This first theme we did, I called it "Variations on Marche Slave" because it is actually a Tchaikovsky piece. Back then she was like, "I really want to dive into the Russian thing,” but then when she came back over to the States, she was like, “I want people to know that I'm violent.” So, it became a different thing. If you're familiar with Kill Bill, we inserted what we call the "Masha Death Whistle." That's the first thing that you hear. Like when think of Stone Cold, you think of the glass breaking. That first thing that you hear. So the new theme is way more in your face.

This one is very “Heilung." Heilung is a band, and they're very world-based. You see them and they have the tribal headdresses, they have the deer heads with the antlers. This is the one that has the hurdy-gurdy player. Already, you see the person has that presence about them. She's tatted up, she's got the purple hair, she's got the mask. I don't know how she got the mask. It's so cool. It's like a skeleton mask that when she moves her mouth, it moves. I'm like, "That's fucking wild." They gave her death metal entrance theme music, and she was like, "That's not what it is. My gimmick is not that. My gimmick is like a bone collector demon. It should be something that feels like I'm being summoned from somewhere" and I'm like, "I agree."

This one is for a Jersey-based team called The StepDads. They were using this total '80s, '90s cheese ball stuff, like "Pour Some Sugar on Me", that kind of thing, but they did want to be tongue in cheek. They were sending me the Family Matters theme and things like that. They were like, "We want that." Like, total sitcom. The wink and the nod. You'll hear when that comes in. This one, I had to bring in a saxophonist.

This gentleman here is named Effy. He's a guy who's very big on the independents. He's very much a wrestler of the LGBTQ community. His thing is also about kind of bucking the corporate media. His theme, usually, is "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" by Elton John, but when he works with promotions that have TV, you obviously can't do that unless you get the rights. So the company I work for, UWN, was like, "We need something that's kind of like that." Effy himself said, "The theme needs to be gay. It needs to be super gay. And if it's not super gay, I'm going to cry. Big gay tears." His words, not mine, but you know, you ask and we deliver.

This was kind of my first time going into dubstep. I don't really know much about the style, but we did it. This was for Rowdy Roddy Piper's daughter. Her name's Teal Piper. Their gimmick is called House of Heathens, which they kind of say is like The Purge. They don't do the whole purge thing, but they kind of see themselves as that. So the point with this was making it almost post-apocalyptic in a way.

The voice that you hear at the beginning is hers, and the voice that you hear throughout is mine through a vocoder that I don't know how to use. I say that because I knew that I wanted something very robotic and I was just like, "I don't know how to do this." I was messing around with a vocoder, and if you change your voice up even like a semitone, it does this jump so it sounds like this kind of apocalyptic radio. Teal Piper sent me her vocals, which are her saying, “House of Heathens.” I said, “Have you ever seen Resident Evil? She goes, “Yeah.” I go, “Do you know the Red Queen? She goes, “Yeah, the little girl.” I go, “You know when she says, ‘You're all going to die down here’ and it's just this complete robotic monotone? Give me that.”

This is for Marina Shafir. It starts kind of big and grandiose, and then it shrinks down to an Edith Piaf kind of thing. I had no idea what she wanted at first. She kept giving me that period piece sound and I'm like, “Are you sure?” and she's like, “Yeah, I'm totally sure.” So I kept giving her these pieces that has a little bit more drive. I was like, “How deep do you want me to go?” Eventually it got to a point where it's what you hear here.

This one here is very much a straight-ahead rock track. This one I wrote with my buddies in It Lives, It Breathes. They are a band that wrote a couple of different themes. They had such success with one theme they did, that they got other wrestlers asking them for stuff. The singer of It Lives, It Breathes, Kevin, was like, “We want to bring you in on this one.” I ended up writing all the guitars and basically everything that is a string. This theme was the first one of mine that got onto TV.

This is for a wrestler that hasn't debuted yet. Her name is Airica. She's like 16. They're out in the Midwest. Her thing is like being an anime character basically come to life. So if you're familiar with J-Rock and K-Pop, this is very much in that style. I actually brought in a vocalist who I found on Instagram from Malaysia to sing this one. It’s very much like My Hero Academia.

This one is for a wrestling group (referred to as a “stable”) called The Division. This one is probably one of my favorites for a few reasons. Number one, the people in the group (there's like six of them) are all the nicest guys and girls in the world.  

“An Angel’s Song” and “YAKATA” are both basically revolving around the same theme. As one of my buddies put it, “I like how you're taking liberties with wrestlers.” What he meant by that was, this is kind of a stable theme. If you listen to each of these, you're going to hear that the thematic material is the same.

“We Are Change” is kind of like the parent theme from which all the others exist. Rico de la Vega is very proud of his Puerto Rican heritage. His theme’s a little more reggaeton. Notorious Mimi, she wears angel wings to the ring. I wanted to have something with the group that even if you leave, you can have a theme that stands on its own, but you could also have something that ties you back into the family.

This theme was released on December 30th, 2020. Mercedes Martinez debuted on AEW on December 29th. She is now signed with the company.