Philly’s The Wonder Years wrote a theme song for a WWE WrestleMania show. Vocalist Dan Campbell shares the details.
The Wonder Years' Dan Campbell talks about the band's new song, "Year Of The Vulture," the official WWE NXT Stand & Deliver theme song, and Philly's wrestling history.
Unofficial Philadelphia ambassadors and pop-punk band The Wonder Years have a new credential: wrestling theme-song writers.
The band’s new single, “Year Of The Vulture,” dropped Friday. It’s the official theme song for WWE NXT’s Stand & Deliver special, which takes place in Philly on April 6. The song will also play every Tuesday on NXT from now leading up to Stand & Deliver.
For those uninitiated, NXT is the WWE’s development division, where wrestlers can cut their teeth before being thrown into the bigger shows. Stand & Deliver is part of WrestleMania weekend, which will take place over two nights at Lincoln Financial Field. It marks WrestleMania’s return to Philly after a 25-year gap.
“Year Of The Vulture” signals a pivot for the hometown heroes, a song the band specifically wrote for NXT Loud, the collection of NXT Takeover theme songs that include artists like Motörhead, Turnstile, and Code Orange.
It’s also an exciting moment for vocalist Dan Campbell, a longtime wrestling fan — and forever Philadelphia cheerleader — who grew up on the 1994 WrestleMania X special and, in recent years, went as far as taking a wrestling class for his bachelor party.
We caught up with Campbell to hear more about “Year Of The Vulture” and what he’s looking forward to about Stand & Deliver’s Philly takeover.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How did this all unfold in the first place?
Over the summer, our record label pitched NXT because they were specifically looking for a Philadelphia-based band and for one that could speak about wrestling and has an interest in it. [NXT] listened and said ‘we really liked the band but we don’t feel like any of these songs fit.’ So I asked, could we write one to pitch?
We thought about where is this bridge between what we normally do and what they normally do. I asked my friend [WWE pro wrestler] Seth Rollins for insights on the main event. It wasn’t locked in but he said they think it’s going to be Ilja Dragunov defending [his title].
So once you had that intel, where did you go with it?
I said OK, let’s focus on Ilja. I started watching a lot of Dragunov’s matches from last year and a lot of his promo work and just trying to get a feel for who he was and what his narrative arc was. He’s an undersized guy who is willing to lose if that’s what happens — but he’s going to go. So we wrote the song, recorded it, pitched it, and sent it off without very high hopes, to be honest. And it was only about a week later that we got the call that we got it.
How was the songwriting process for this compared to other TWY songs?
A thing that The Wonder Years tend to do is be verbose with our songwriting. So part of it was knowing they’re not going to want a four-minute-long song. But what was really different, for me at least, was lyrically, not writing about myself. [...] To sit here and try to write about someone else’s story was challenging.
It’s also the first time I’ve done what I do in the verse with my voice. We tracked it the same day that we tracked a cover of a Thrice song for a compilation and I was like, ‘wait my voice can do that?’
Have you always been a wrestling fan?
It must have just been on TV. I was maybe 5 or 6, I remember seeing it and liking it. I think the first thing I was attracted to is Ultimate Warrior because it’s just so colorful. He was super energetic, he had these colorful face paintings and tassels hanging off his arms. I’m making myself sound so old, but we’d go to Blockbuster when I was staying at my grandma’s for the weekend, and I would rent WrestleMania tapes and watch the old WrestleManias. Because of that, I fell in love with Bret Hart and WrestleMania X. By the time it got around to like 12, I was totally hooked and obsessed.
Do you think 5-year-old Dan would be excited to know your band wrote a theme for WWE?
I gotta be honest with you. I was so absurdly confident and that age. But what would probably be confusing to me is like, ‘I’m doing the theme song, but is it for me?’ Because I would imagine that I would have been a wrestler.
And then for my bachelor party, because I am the most boring man in the world, none of the classic bachelor party tropes appealed to me. I had a friend of a friend call in a favor and we went to Chikara [a now-defunct Philadelphia wrestling network] to take a pro-wrestling class.
Wait, I’m sorry, what? You took a wrestling class for your bachelor party? How’d that go?
It was me, the rest of the Wonder Years, a couple of the Aaron West people, and a bunch of our friends. I got to do some really fun stuff. They let me come off the top rope and we’re taking super kicks and delivering scoop slams, I had whiplash pretty bad.
It was fun but I definitely realized at that point, oh, I would not have been cut out for this.
What excites you about WrestleMania being back in Philly?
Well, I think Philadelphia is the greatest town in the world. I say that with full sincerity. There’s an energy here that is unmatched and unparalleled when it comes to any major sporting event. There’s already this kind of aura around the city — you saw it with the Phillies and Bedlam at the Bank and the Eagles over the years.
People are going to come and bear witness to that energy that I think is really singular. But on top of it, it’s a great wrestling town and I think that Philadelphia has the best DIY [mentality] toward everything just in its history. It’s the town that [Extreme Championship Wrestling] was born in, like there’s just so much of wrestling that comes from Philadelphia. It’s just kind of deep in the roots of the city and for it to finally get another WrestleMania is really exciting.
TWY are joining a pretty large and diverse Rolodex of artists when it comes to NXT theme songs. What what does that mean to you?
We very much do not give off the aura of rock ‘n roll band. We played a festival in Australia and right before I went on stage, I was mistaken for someone working in catering because that’s how I was dressed to them.
So I didn’t expect to get this opportunity because I’d imagine that a company like WWE and NXT are looking for bands with more of an aura to them. So it really meant a lot to me that we wrote a song that they felt was so compelling that the rest of that was ignorable, the fact that we are like, the most normal looking guys in the world that they were like, ‘man, this song is just so good.’