Agatha's Ballad of the Witches Road Brews up Chart Buzz

Agatha flies up Billboard's Digital Songs chart.

By Aaron Perine

Agatha All Along has managed to spawn a Billboard hit in just three weeks. Fans are streaming "The Ballad of the Witches' Road" and the song is climbing the charts this Halloween season. The Digital Song Sales chart has the Agatha All Along ballad sitting at number 22. That's the first week of numbers available for "The Ballad of the Witches' Road." Marvel/Hollywood Records has managed to sell 2,000 downloads in the United States for the premiere episode's week. Kathryn Hahn, Patti LuPone, Sasheer Zamata, Ali Ahn, and Debra Jo Rupp perform the whimsical song that sends them tumbling on their magical quest. Luminate provided the numbers to Billboard, and this chart performance is just another data point that proves Agatha All Along is breaking through.

Another quirk of this accomplishment is that, somehow, Agatha All Along has eclipsed a WandaVision record. In 2021, "Agatha All Along" had the pop culture world in a chokehold. The massive reveal of Kathryn Hahn's witch as the antagonist of WandaVision resonated outside of the MCU's usual reach. (It's probably why this show even got greenlit!) But, back then "Agatha All Along" hit the Billboard charts at number 36. That means, "The Ballad of the Witches' Road" has started out ahead of that viral moment on the Digital Song Sales chart. An impressive accomplishment for a show that there was open concern about from some corners of the MCU fandom. One core factor links the two together, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez wrote both songs.

While the music seems to be guiding a lot of the fanbase, Agatha All Along has some bite to it. Before the show premiered, Hahn tried to tell Rolling Stone about balancing this softening villain with the joyous moments of song that permeate this Disney+ series. "Our wishes aligned. I wanted [Agatha] to not lose her acerbic nastiness. I wanted to actually see what lies beneath that weird, hard, mean shell," Hahn recalled. "And also to have some music, keep the camp up. All the costume changes, all the stuff that I really loved about WandaVision, the element of performance in her — she really is a great old-school actor who loves putting on the ritz. I wanted that to be part of her still."

The Ballad Of The Witches Road Is Intoxicating

Agatha All Along's musical craze has not gone unnoticed. Just this week, Marvel Studios made sure fans could stream the coven's cover of "The Ballad of the Witches' Road" and Lorna Wu's original 70s hit on different platforms. Despite there already being multiple versions of this song out in the world, it doesn't seem like we're done with different spins on the age-old spell. There are some subtle versions between all these different takes on the ballad if you listen carefully. The "True Crime" version isn't the same as the one Agatha Harkness and her coven performed to enter the magical realm. Expect even more clever tweaks as the weeks stretch on to Halloween.

Jac Schaeffer talked to Variety about what motivated her to get "The Ballad of the Witches' Road" into Agatha All Along. In fact, the idea of having the musical number again was a bit of an obsession for the director. Everyone at Marvel Studios saw the wild performance of "Agatha All Along" during WandaVision. It feels like the lightning has struck twice over there.

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(Photo:

The Ballad of the Witches' Road.

- Marvel)

"I was chasing the song so hard, and it became a thing of, like, the song is the thing. I had this notion of the song working as a spell that gets you, the audience, to watch the show. I'm trying to entice you in the way that entertainment does, and to me, the song entranced me like a spell would," Schaeffer teased. "That then fed into the idea that the song could be used as a literal spell in the show. I was really drawn to the song's multifaceted purpose. And then, of course, I knew the Lopez's would be up for that very specific challenge.

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"We had sort of a temp song for a while because it had all these plot points in it, but it had no melody. It was a guiding track to the story. We gave that to them and said, "Please, please, please take these ideas and turn them into the iconic earworm you're capable of producing." And they did just that," she added. "Writing a song that needs to serve both a thematic and a narrative purpose within the context of the story and to make it rhyme, catchy, and melodically rhythmic is very challenging. But they really enjoyed the puzzle that came with that challenge."

Did you love the latest version of the ballad? Catch all of our pop culture discussion at @ComicBook on social media!

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