If there was one thing that Jac Schaeffer always knew was going to be part of the witches’ brew that became “Agatha All Along,” it was music. The showrunner had a lot of different ideas on what form that could take, but in the end, it became “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road” — and crafting the song was a delicate process.
Of course, Schaeffer knew that songwriters Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez were the people she needed to call first. The trio had previously worked together on “WandaVision,” Marvel’s first series on Disney+, which also happened to introduce Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha Harkness. They did so with another hit song called “Agatha All Along,” which earned a Grammy nomination.
But “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road” required a whole lot more lore in its lyrics.
“When we first got the job, Jac gave us a list of things that had to be in this song,” Anderson-Lopez explained to TheWrap in a new installment of How I Did It, presented by Disney+. “It had to include the five elements. It had to include instructions for the road. It had to include a bit of a MacGuffin word that got wrong. There were all these things, like a recipe that had to go into the soup.”
With such a list of ingredients though, Schaeffer noted it became a bit of a balancing act.
“It was a tall order to try and figure out how much plot goes into the actual ballad,” she said. “We knew that it would be a heavy lift, that the lyrics needed to carry our mythology. It was a very dense mythology, and we didn’t want to be too prescriptive in a way that would hamstring us later. We very much leaned on the Lopezes as poets.”
Schaeffer also sent the idea of the ballad to costume designer Daniel Selon early on, to give him a well-rounded idea of the women he needed to come up with looks for.
“She sent me her original outline and it had so much information in it, so much character, so many specific things about placement, time, the feeling tone of each witch, and it also had all the information about the ballad,” he recalled.
“That it was a song, that it was a spell, that it was a story, that it was a myth, that it was a con. I was completely enamored with it. I was able to offer her options and ideas that played into the complexity of that original concept.”
In the end, the Lopezes wrote several versions of the ballad, including a 70s cover version with clear inspiration from multiple rock icons. The duo admits that it was “like being asked to write a hit” single. And shooting each version was nothing short of a concert for everyone on set.
“I really thought we were going to blow the roof off the joint,” Schaeffer said. “It felt more enormous than, I think, anything I’ve been a part of, and it was the combination. Of the music itself, the power of the performers.”
“Even the crew was like, ‘Way to go, that was cool,’” Bobby Lopez recalled. “‘Rockin’ witch song, man!’”
“The Local 1 guys came up and they were ‘That was really awesome. I’ve not seen anything like that,’” Anderson-Lopez agreed with a laugh.
You can watch Jac Schaeffer, Daniel Selon, Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez go in-depth on creating “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road” in the video above.
“Agatha All Along” is now streaming on Disney+.
