Maxance Vincent
When news of the development of Agatha All Along was announced in 2021, songwriters Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez were not attached to the project. The Oscar and Emmy-winning duo previously worked within the Marvel Cinematic Universe for its first streaming series, WandaVision, for which they won a Primetime Creative Arts Emmy for their work on the song “Agatha All Along.”
Speaking to Awards Radar during a Zoom press day, Kristen Anderson-Lopez recalls the time she phoned showrunner Jac Schaeffer to congratulate her on the show’s announcement but did not know they would be involved until a full year later:
“I reached out to Jac and said, “Congratulations!” of course, but also, “If you need a song, you know where to find us.” A year later, they said, “The time has come,” and gave us these amazing scripts. We got to see what Jac’s been thinking about. She’s so smart about music and how to use it. So much of our job was done by the brilliant mind of Jac Schaeffer before we arrived on the scene.”
Robert Lopez also praised Schaeffer’s vision for the show, particularly how she employs music as an emotional anchor for the characters’ progression within the Witches Road, saying, “She knew exactly what she wanted and had the entire evolution of this folk song from its beginnings as it grew to a 70s classic in her mind. How that related to the story she was telling, both plot-wise and emotionally, was really quite ingenious.”
In its first four episodes, Agatha All Along presents two variations of The Ballad of the Witches Road. One is a classic ballad that summons a door to the Witches Road, while the other is a 70s version of the song that acts as a protection spell. The first song written of the two was the 1970s ballad, which was done with “full scenes from the episodes with all of this language, plot points, witch research, and all these instructions for how the road works,” according to Kristen Anderson-Lopez.
“It also needed to be a love song, a 70s hit, and a protective spell in the bridge. We knew that our job was to combine all of these things into a hit song that you could place in the 70s. From there, we could strip things back and add different elements for the other versions.”
In one of their conversations with Schaeffer, Robert Lopez says that she wanted to cast a spell that lines up with the way in which individuals think about music in its purest form:
“We don’t fully understand how it works. We know how to make it, but we don’t always know why it works the way it does. As a composer, that’s where my mind went. How does this thing happen? How do we conjure these primal, unseen forces with this music in a way that music can? The Church has used music for centuries, but it has now evolved away from that.”
Kristen-Anderson Lopez added that music in and of itself is magic, stating, “One of the reasons that choral singing in harmonies works so well is that it truly is doing magic in that these voices are coming together. They’re making the air change with vibrations. That vibration is coming to your body through your ears, and your body is releasing oxytocin, a bonding, loving, and calming hormone. So music actually does create magic and change your chemical makeup, especially choral and harmonic music. You don’t even have to be singing it. You just have to be hearing it, and it will happen. And I think that plays a role in why these lonely, isolated characters come together and sing this song. There’s a bond there, which creates a coven, and that coven unlocks the road.”
During our video interview, seen below, we also discussed collaborating with a new cast on the songs, setting the musical world of Agatha All Along apart from WandaVision, and what their most rewarding aspect was in working inside the MCU sandbox.
You can check out the full interview below and stream Agatha All Along on Disney+ today.
[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]
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