If “Toss a Coin To Your Witcher” is still finding its way around your head, you’re not alone. Two and and a half months after The Witcher dropped on Netflix, Jaskier’s genre-mashing ode to Geralt is still the catchiest earworm this side of Rivia. But how did the medieval pop-rock anthem come to take over our brains and playlists (and lives)? To find out the answer, Entertainment Weekly sat down with the team behind the show, who did a deep-dive into everything that went into the making of the song.
“I was in my car and I was just feeling bad for Geralt not getting paid and that’s when I started to sing to myself, ‘Toss a coin to your Witcher,'” co-executive producer Jenny Klein told the publication, about the genesis of the chorus. “It was when I was driving and then I pulled over and fumbled with my voice memo to record the lines and then I rushed home instead of going to the errand I was supposed to be running. And I just wrote out the lyrics in like 10 minutes. It just spurted out. It was really fun.”
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Figuring out the score was equally intuitive. Composers Sonya Belousova and Giona Ostinelli told EW the lyrics “were so perfect” that “the music almost wrote itself.” Of course, they went through several versions (ranging from a historically accurate medieval tune to “something very contemporary”), but when they heard the version that would end up in the show, they knew it was the one.
“We were obsessed while making it,” Ostinelli told the publication. “We wrote many versions but as soon as we wrote this one it was stuck in our heads.”
“I remember going to a yoga class and instead of being in savasana, I had it in my head,” Belousova added.
The hard part came after. In the interview, the composers revealed that the path to the final version involved 7 to 8 more months of work and 64 test instruments from all over the world. Then actor Joey Batey had to record it, too, and, well, just read the full interview over at Entertainment Weekly, where the team also gets into how Freddie Mercury was an inspiration for Jaskier, what they really think about all those fan-covers, the secret behind all the tavern songs, and more.
