How the Agatha All Along songwriters captured musical magic in their iconic TV & film bops

Songwriters Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez have been haunting us (in a good way!) with some of our favorite musical earworms for a long time in so many iconic film and television titles, the most recent being when they took us down the witches' road in Disney+'s hit miniseries Agatha All Along!

The married duo are two-time Oscar winners, recognized for penning “Remember Me” from Pixar’s Coco and “Let It Go” from Frozen. (The latter also garnered them a Grammy.) Lopez is technically amongst the EGOT elite, having won a Tony and Emmy as well. His Tony comes from the musical Avenue Q, which contains some of our favorite tracks of all time, including “If You Were Gay” and “My Girlfriend, Who Lives in Canada.”

They began their foray into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with WandaVision, which gave us the majestic (and mega viral) tune “Agatha All Along,” which then later became the title for Agatha Harkness’ standalone show.

Out had the opportunity to chat with the musical duo about how songs evolve, and according to them (and we’d agree!), if music and magic aren’t the same thing, they are at least related to each other.

“I do think that music and magic are, if not the same thing, at least very closely related,” Lopez tells Out. “Because it's like this thing that can transform a person and the practitioner doesn't really know exactly how it works. So, you know, we're dealing with spirits, we're dealing with forces we don't quite understand. To me, it's not more powerful in any song than 'The Sacred Chant.' I think that one, definitely, because it's designed to sound like a magic ritual. And a spiritual moment.”

“I'm here to talk about the science behind the magic,” Anderson-Lopez adds. “There is something that actually happens, especially in music that has layered harmony. It releases the hormone oxytocin, which is the bonding hormone that is released when you hug someone or when a mother is nursing her child. And so harm harmonies create more of that oxytocin release. It is magic because this thing, voices are producing vibrations in the air that travel to your ear, into your body and actually have you secrete a substance that creates love and bonding.”

“So if that's not magic, I don't know what is.”

The pair also touched on being able to take creative risks with each other. Risk, in many senses, has been the name of the game with Agatha All Along, giving us not one, not two, but three major characters confirmed to be queer. While this shouldn’t feel like a risk in 2024, it still feels like outside of the series there’s still aggressive underrepresentation in these major film/TV franchise universes.

Anderson-Lopez was generous enough to open up the risk-taking in her and Lopez’s songwriting process, saying: “We have this thing called conscious dialogue. This is when we're so mad at each other that we're shaking. And it's not only about the song, it's about everything. We sit in a chair and we have to face each other, and one of us gets to go first and one of us gets to say everything we're feeling, and then the other person has to reflect it back, and you don't move on from that until the other person has gotten it right. And then the other person gets to talk, and the other person just has to reflect their point of view back. And what that does is it slows down the argument and slows down the process. So we hear each other before we start our counter arguments.”

“It slows it down. It forces us to hear the other person first,” she continued. “In speaking it, you just hear it, and hearing it in your own voice, you're like, 'Oh, I can see how that makes sense.' It's this wonderful thing that we use in all areas of our marriage. It is really important to just trust. I wouldn't know I can take creative risks with him in a way that if I had to send something to somebody I don't know as well. I might be a lot more nervous. I know for a fact I'd be more nervous because we needed to send a song to collaborators last week, and I was feeling very vulnerable about it in a way that I don't have to feel with him.”

By utilizing talented and in-demand songsmiths like the Lopez & Anderson-Lopez team, both WandaVision and Agatha All Along have continued to push the stylistic boundaries of the MCU — and we can't wait to hear what that means for the future of Marvel bops!

Agatha All Along is streaming on Disney+.