After their Oscar-winning Frozen song “Let It Go”, husband and wife team Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez are used to their songs becoming part of pop culture. But with Agatha All Along, for which they wrote “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road”, things became a bit more surreal. “They ended up naming the show after our song from WandaVision, and then each episode of the show was named after lyrics from the ballad,” says Lopez. “It’s the most composer service I’ve ever seen.”
Not only did they need to come up with a song for the new series, they had to write it in eight different styles, from ancient folk to ’70s-style pop. “We wrote the ’70s version first, but it had to feel like a hit and have a love song element to it,” says Anderson-Lopez. “Then we could peel back the layers as we wrote different iterations, like the sacred chant version which came next.”
Though the lyrics of each version of the song were different, showrunner Jac Schaeffer gave the duo a “recipe” of certain elements that needed to be included in each song. “She definitely wanted to have a shout out to all the different elements that define the different witches in there,” says Anderson-Lopez. “So, you’ve got, ‘Our love was forged in fire, water earth and air’… They’re all hidden in words like that, and we needed to bury some directions in there about what can happen, and the rules of the road.”
Since the concept of the song had to derive from a children’s walking song, the pair chose to use nursery rhymes as inspiration for the chorus, with “down, down, down the road” sounding similar to “row, row, row your boat.” “The core of it was already this song that a mom might make up with her kid as they walked along a road,” says Lopez, “and you might be surprised to find this out, but a lot of pop hits contain elements of nursery rhymes because they’re really sticky. Every kid across many cultures know those little songs, like ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ or ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’, simple melodies like that. They unite everybody.”
