Chris Jericho was born on November 9, 1970. Raised in Winnipeg, he pursued two ambitions that eventually became parallel careers: professional wrestling and singing in a rock band. With Fozzy, his voice led “Judas,” the 2017 song that also became his wrestling entrance music.
The music ambition began well before Fozzy. His father’s record collection introduced him to the Beatles, while buying a cassette of Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Ozz pushed him toward heavy metal. Recalling those formative years in a 2022 interview with Metal Hammer, Jericho resisted the idea that music had followed wrestling fame. “The truth is, it was always there – I was always doing it.” His early band Scimitar gave him a place to put that enthusiasm into practice.
A backstage meeting with Stuck Mojo guitarist Rich Ward at a WCW show led toward Fozzy. They began with covers, fictional identities and a comic backstory that claimed other bands had stolen their songs while they were stuck in Japan. As their writing developed, Jericho and his bandmates decided the joke had run its course.
Their third album, All That Remains, arrived in 2005 with entirely original songs. In an interview with SLAM! Wrestling that March, Jericho described the group’s growing chemistry as the reason to make the change. He also dropped his McQueen stage persona, bringing his familiar name into a band developing its own musical identity. His contribution included lyrics: speaking to Metal Temple in April 2005, he identified Ward as the principal composer while explaining that he also contributed to the words. Moving beyond covers gave that partnership room to develop.
By the time Fozzy made Judas, released in October 2017, Jericho and Ward were ready to reconsider how much control they kept in the studio. They brought in producer Johnny Andrews and agreed that he would have the final say. Jericho told The Rockpit in 2017 that accepting another person’s decisions took adjustment. The practical result was a willingness to remove parts that didn’t help a song. Neither “Judas” nor “Painless” needed a guitar solo simply because Fozzy were a guitar band.
Jericho also had a clear idea of the album’s shape. On first hearing “Judas,” he knew he wanted it as the title track and opener, though the first-single choice was debated. Elsewhere, the band abandoned a twelfth song that wasn’t working. The finished album contained 11 tracks, reflecting their stated aim of making each one strong enough to stand as a single.
There was still room for his own history in the writing. Discussing Judas with Distorted Sound in 2018, Jericho identified “Wordsworth Way,” “Three Days in Jail” and “Running with the Bulls” as songs to which he had contributed. For material written by his collaborators, his responsibility was to make someone else’s words work in his voice. “I have to sing it, I have to introduce it to the world,” he explained.
“Wordsworth Way” brought that record back to Winnipeg. Inspired by U2’s “Cedarwood Road,” Jericho used the name of his childhood street as a starting point for lyrics about growing up. He brought those memories into an album on which he had deliberately shared more of the songwriting.
