Polygon spoke with Hazbin Hotel songwriters Sam Haft and Andrew Underberg about season 2’s music, what changed from season 1, and what it was like working with the performers. This is the second in a series of three pieces unpacking a single standout song from Hazbin Hotel season 2. Part one, on “Vox Populi,” can be found here.
The song: Episode 2’s “Gravity.” Lute (Jessica Vosk), an angelic lieutenant to Adam (Alex Brightman), the first man, mourns his death in a battle against Hell and promises revenge. The imaginary version of him that she’s conjured up in a rage sings backup.
Polygon: “Gravity” was a major standout this season for me, and apparently Hazbin Hotel creator Vivienne Medrano or someone at Prime Video felt the same way, since that’s the song they released early to tease this season. What went into composing and creating “Gravity”?
Andrew Underberg: That one, we were very excited about — first of all, having Jessica Vosk be given a solo, essentially. Alex Brightman is on it as well, and gloriously, but he’s a little softer in the mix.
Sam Haft: One difference between season 1 and 2 was, in season 2, we participated in something called the Writers’ Summit, which wasn’t like a formal writers’ room, but rather a couple weeks on Zoom with us and all the writers, as we broke down the story of the season. We provided the musical side of the planning — who might get songs and where those songs might go. We had some input on that.
Maybe the only thing we came into the writer’s room with a goal of was a Lute villain song. We were really energized to make this song. One recipe of what makes it interesting is that Lute doesn’t have a lot of singing time in season 1, but the singing time she does have on “You Didn’t Know” is highly dynamic. People really responded to it.
So there was a lot of anticipation for Lute having more to sing. And another component of that — Adam sang theatrical rock music that was much more inspired by stuff like Meat Loaf or the works of Jim Steinman. Lute got to live in a more malicious, edgier, scarier place, still under the umbrella of rock music, and getting to explore a version of that.
Adam is frightening in his way, in part because he’s so powerful, and he has such little consideration for others. But ultimately, as a villain, he is boorish and ignorant. Whereas Lute as a villain is truly bloodthirsty in a way that we hadn’t seen a villain so far in the story. So getting to explore something that really lives in a purely menacing place was also a really exciting thing.
Underberg: Coming from a very grounded, human place emotionally makes it easier to write a song, when it’s clear why the singer is upset or is feeling what they’re feeling, which in this case is rage.
Haft: And grief.
Underberg: There’s a lot of meat there to dig into. Which makes for a powerful song. Without that, there’s a question of, “Why are they singing?” And this — there was no question of why she’s singing, because she’s got a lot to work through.
If “Hell is Forever” was inspired by Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman, were you looking to someone different for inspiration or tone in “Gravity”?
Haft: Sort of. “Gravity” has kind of an interesting genre mix. There is some contemporary-rock stuff in there, but there are some verses where she has more hip-hop vocal rhythm, and there’s also the whole sonic component of the chanting. We call them our “Latin scaries,” those sort of chanting Gregorian voices. So it does have an interesting mixture that’s a little unconventional. There’s some songs by Evanescence that have a little bit of that, the harder rock and the kind of Bible-y chant. There’s a band I used to listen to in high school, actually called Within Temptation who had a lot of that.
Underberg: None of those things were actually specific references, though it sort of ended up in that territory. But that was a specific request by Viv, the Latin scaries. [We submitted] a version without them, and she was like, “Oh, but add some Latin choir.”
Haft: Yeah, we had been talking about “Hellfire” from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. So the way that that energy got represented in the song was by adding Latin to the rock.
New episodes of Hazbin Hotel arrive on Wednesdays on Prime Video.
