Downstait Recalls Pitching “Kingdom” Song To Cody Rhodes
A Cody Rhodes entrance in WWE usually elicits a loud reaction from the crowd with part of it being because of the song.
When Cody Rhodes enters a WWE arena or stadium for a match, it starts off with Cody saying that “wrestling has more than one royal family” before the song known as “Kingdom” kicks in.
During the song, Cody usually pauses in the aisle, extends his arms and is joined by the crowd chanting “WHOA-OH” at a certain point in the song. It has become a catchy hook that WWE fans have turned into a thing more than other promotions where Cody worked while using that song.
The “Kingdom” song is performed by the band Downstait, who are WWE fans, and admitted in the past that they put the “WHOA-OH” part in the song intentionally as a nod to Cody Rhodes’s past when he was doing the “Dashing” gimmick.
Daren Zachary Call is Downstait’s lead singer and he recently spoke to Chris Van Vliet about the process of coming up with “Kingdom” for Cody Rhodes.
“Cody, right when he broke away, he put out this Twitter thing — and we were kind of a sinking ship to be honest and Ryder kind of gave us a lifeline [as a band in general]. We had some success and we gained a little bit of notoriety just from being involved with WWE, but we hadn’t put an album out since 2013 and we weren’t really thinking about writing.”
“I’m an administrator at a school, Sean’s a lawyer, and my brother runs a body shop. We got old and living in a van or a tour bus is kind of tough, especially on older guys or guys with family like my brother. I just was on Twitter and I was in my feels a little bit like ‘Dude, we’re not done yet.’”
“We just got on SmackDown two weeks ago with the Radio cover, which we did in a bedroom. Cody put out a tweet saying what entrance music should I use on the indies and he said something about throne by Bring Me The Horizon. I was wearing that album out at the time.”
As Daren continued, he spoke about how they were legit WWE fans and he knew Cody Rhodes’ career story from when he started in WWE as a tag team partner of Bob Holly.
“I knew one by being such a big fan of his since he showed up with Bob Holly, I knew this dude’s character. I’m a wrestling historian, I know what he wants to sing about and I know what he’s going through a little bit just because dirt sheets are sometimes right, but at the same time, this dude should be getting a better opportunity. So, we sent him a tweet through whomever we’d already worked for and said ‘Hey man, can we give this song a shot?’, and we sent him a snippet of what we were thinking about.”
“And I sent him…Hard Times Breed Better Men is just straight copped from his dad’s promo, so I was like ‘Without being patronized in this situation and being a dummy, how can I just sell this character a little bit to the guy that’s doing it.’ So Sean and I sat down and went on a little bit of a wine binger and sent something back to him within like four hours and he highlighted the lyrics that everybody is singing now.”
From there, Cody Rhodes would end up using “Kingdom” everywhere he went from NJPW to ROH to Impact to AEW and back to WWE as well.
“We went back and recorded it, sent it back to him, he took it to Wrestle Kingdom, Battleground, Slammiversary, he took it everywhere with him. It was incredible and it gave us enough confidence [that] the old dog can still play with the young dogs. We did that and he started taking it everywhere with him and the song was catching on.”
The next time you hear the Cody Rhodes “Kingdome” theme song at a WWE show and love the WHOA-OH part, you can thank Downstait for that.