“Ballad of the Witches’ Road Songwriters Talk Making Magic With the Hit Song

Five episodes in, Agatha All Along has been a hit for Disney+, with the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe project taking audiences back to the world first introduced in WandaVision as it follows what’s next for Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) after Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) left her powerless. But while the series is taking viewers on a journey down the mythical Witches’ Road and giving them new characters to be fascinated by thanks to Agatha’s rag-tag coven, the series is doing something else: giving fans a great new song that they just can’t get out of their head. “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road” has already become a bonafide Billboard hit, but the song — written by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez who were also behind WandaVision’s “Agatha All Along” — isn’t just a banger of a tune. The song also has strong ties to the plot of the series as well.

ComicBook recently sat down with Anderson-Lopez and Lopez to talk about “The Ballad of The Witches’ Road” to find out about how they made their own magic with the song and it turns out that the song not only had to combine elements of the story it’s so integral to with witch lore and more, but the creators had a very creative way of figuring it all out. The duo explained that Lopez read the scripts of the series sent to them by creator Jac Schaeffer out loud and acted out each role in the car while Anderson-Lopez drove.

“Jac sent us eight episodes that were all sort of drafted and it was a summer we were working really hard and the only time we had was when we were driving and I’m the driver in our family,” Anderson-Lopez said. “So, Bobby read every episode playing all the characters beautifully and I could just see how much we were going to love this story and that sort of set the tone for how smart and subversive and campy and joyful the whole thing was.”

Lopez explained that once they had a feel for the story and the characters, they then started coming up with the vibe of the song — starting with the 70s-inspired Lorna Wu version of the song.

“And then we had talked with Jac about a lot about the kind of song that they wanted it to be and we all agreed that we were going to start with the 70s ballad, Lorna’s, because that one was the kind of the most complex and it also needed to sound like it was a number one hit, which is a very daunting thing to be asked to write a 70s hit,” Lopez said. “So, we started there and we knew that there’s these songs, you know, the Fleetwood Mac was one thing she tossed out and Hotel California, there was there’s certainly like a type of song from that time period that casts a spell and we wanted to do that. So, we really started with this vamp… and then Kristen went into her office, kind of locked the door and laid everything out on her writing bed.”

“I have a writing bed and I had like three different screens up, a thesaurus and like 10 pieces of paper with important plot points, dialogue, witch research that needed to be brought into everything and then I knew that I had to take all that but turn it into a love song that would have been a hit,” Anderson-Lopez said. “So what was fun was… doing the puzzle of how I could take all of these words and all these elements and have a through line, which the through line of that song is a little bit of how scary it is to love somebody, how like you don’t know if it’s going to go foul or fair like and then also we had the fun of like knowing the bridge had to be a protection spell, that the bridge had to be this whole other element.”

The writers said it took them just around six weeks to write all of the versions of “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road”, which seems like an impressive feat considering that there are multiple versions of the song in the series. But what might be most interesting about it all goes back to how the duo got their feel for Agatha All Along in the first place. While Lopez read all of the characters as he acted out the episodes in the car, it turns out his favorite character to read for was Lili Calderu, who at the time he didn’t realize was going to be played by Patti LuPone.

“I really liked reading Lilia for some reason and I didn’t know it was going to be Patti LuPone so I sort of did I did sort of more of a Brooklyn kind of voice,” he said.

And of course, “The Ballad of The Witches’ Road has since gone on to give LuPone her first Billboard hit song. LuPone has previously charted on a chart that focuses on albums, but “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road” debuting on the Digital Song Sales chart at No. 22 is her first song. Maybe there’s actual magic in the Ballad after all.

Agatha All Along is now streaming on Disney+. New episodes arrive Wednesdays at 9 pm ET.