WandaVision Songwriters Breakdown the Surprise Hit “Agatha All Along”

WandaVision’s penultimate episode was released this week, which means we’re mere days away from the show’s final episode. The Disney+ series has been a wild and unexpected ride filled with laughs, tears, and some excellent songs. Most of the episodes featured an opening credits number that paid homage to sitcoms through the ages, but there is one song that has definitely stood out above the rest. At the end of the seventh episode, it was revealed that Agnes (Kathryn Hahn) is actually Agatha Harkness. The moment is capped off with an amazing song titled “Agatha All Along” by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, who are best known for writing the songs for Frozen and Coco. In a recent interview with the New York Times, the dynamic duo break down the hit song.

“None of us knew this was going to be the song,” Lopez explained. “We woke up that morning to find that it was all over the Internet, and it was like, ‘This is awesome.’” In fact, the couple admitted they were “sort of sad” that the show was winding down and they “didn’t know if we’d have any hits come out” from the series.

“It’s got an Addams Family twist with an electric harpsichord,” Anderson-Lopez explained. “It’s super-duper cool and feels like something you’d find in a haunted house.” (In case you missed it, The Addams Family was one of the DVD sets shown in the most recent episode of WandaVision.)

“In a way, ‘Agatha All Along’ was there all along,” Anderson-Lopez added. “We’ve been spoon-feeding a tritone that’s called the devil’s interval — the [soft voice] duh-duh-duh — throughout the series. And then ultimately, when the big reveal happens with the [thundering voice] DUH! DUH! DUH!, everyone had been hearing it steadily, so it felt like an old friend.”

The couple explained that they originally planned to make Agatha’s theme more similar to the “That Girl” theme song, but “it just wasn’t right.” Anderson-Lopez continued, “So then we thought: It’s a show about witches, right? So let’s embrace it. What other shows are about witches and Goth figures? The Addams Family, The Munsters, the ‘Monster Mash’ — all these Halloween-y kind of songs that have this grinding, growling bari sax.” Lopez added, “We also have an electric harpsichord, which is what they use in The Addams Family. That’s the thing going dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit — the repeated chorus.”

The songwriting duo also explained why they added the word “perfidious” into the song. “We knew we didn’t want to say hideous because Agatha is still hot. So I looked at a rhyming dictionary and was like: ‘Perfidious! It’s so great! It’s so perfect,’” Anderson-Lopez explained. “We always have an SAT word in the lyrics somewhere because people appreciate learning a word. And if they already know it, they appreciate being able to brag that they know it,” Lopez added.

If you’re a big fan of “Agatha All Along,” you can check out some of Marvel’s merch here.

The final episode of WandaVision drops on Disney+ on Friday.