In the hit animated musical series Hazbin Hotel, the demons of hell aren't just terrorized, tortured, and trying to go to heaven—they're doing it all through song. And they're singing using the voices of Broadway favorites such as Erika Henningsen, Jeremy Jordan, Alex Brightman, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Patina Miller, Christian Borle, and many, many more.

That concept, demons and musicals, doesn't sound so far-fetched to songwriter Sam Haft, who tells Playbill: "When you're that tortured, sometimes you're feeling so much you just gotta let loose and break out into song." That does sound like classic musical theatre. 

And it helps to have bona-fide "Broadway heavy hitters" in your cast, which has helped Hazbin Hotel and its songs go viral, notes Haft: "All their friends are all the people starring in every other Broadway show. And so, it feels like it has become a grassroots word-of-mouth thing among the Broadway community."

Haft and Andrew Underberg have written over 70 songs together for Hazbin Hotel. The second season of the show may have just finished airing, but they're actually now writing songs for the show's fourth season—they tend to write the songs at the beginning of production, right after showrunner Vivienne Medrano gives them a breakdown of the season. Meaning they're writing songs before there's any script or animation. 

As Haft explains it: "In those meetings, she talks us through what the song, what purpose the song serves, what characters are participating, what musical influences each character has. And then a series of music references that inspire her." And also how long each song needs to be. 

But how does one write a new musical every year? As Underberg notes, if they're given a deadline, the duo will have a song ready, noting: "If it's due tomorrow, then we'll get something in tomorrow."

It's been a big month in the rings of hell, with the release of the Hazbin Hotel season two soundtrack from Atlantic Records, and the Hazbin Hotel: Live on Broadway concert (streaming now). To celebrate, Haft and Underberg have broken down the construction of seven songs from the back half of season two of Hazbin Hotel—and marvel at how inspiring it is to write for Broadway voices.

"Love in a Bottle" (From Season 2, Episode 6) 

Andrew Underberg: This is Husk's [voiced by Keith David] first solo. There's some background singers, we called them the Huskettes. 

Sam Haft: What's happening story wise is, Husk is a character who has an enforced sobriety. When the show starts, he's drinking consistently, and you see that happening less as the show progresses. And then he really kind of falls off the wagon very hard in this sequence, he's sort of back to his old life. He's gambling. He's drinking to excess. And this is a song that sort of represents the downward spiral that he's going through and sort of the manic moment that he's in. 

Underberg: I think we [first] sang it over just a drum loop without any chords, and then figured out the chords to the melody. This was totally melodically led with just the drum loop.

Haft: It's a moment in which we really get a clearer sense of what's going on under the surface with Husk, which is really interesting. Because Husk is not a forthcoming character. Emotionally, Husk is really closed off. And this is a very vulnerable song, because it's sort of built as soliloquy, so he's not singing as though he's being observed. He's just sort of putting his feelings out into the universe. And we see this kind of dichotomy that he's built for himself, where drinking and this sort of self sabotage that comes with it, drinking and gambling, are an opportunity for him to have control over his self destruction—as opposed to the messiness of having intimate human relationships with the people around him. 

"Losin' Streak" (From Season 2, Episode 6)

Underberg: The first version [of "Losin' Streak"] was lyrically different in that it was also hitting on the drinking a lot more than the final version ended up. We actually started that before "Love in a Bottle," and then "Love in a Bottle" was all about drinking. 

Haft: So "Losin' Streak" lives in more of a place where it is about gambling through the lens of sexual allure. The first stanza talks about Lady Luck. I feel like our reference for this was more cultural than it was musical, and it was the idea of Jessica Rabbit on stage showing up in the red, sparkling dress. And having a moment with Angel Dust [voiced by Blake Roman], where we got to see Angel have this sort of cabaret smoke show beat.

Underberg: And keeping it sparsely orchestrated, which is sort of in relief to Husk's number, which is just so bombastic and fully fleshed out.

Haft: Normally, we get these much more fleshed-out instrument wise. But rather than doing that, just keeping it simple but having those simple parts be themselves more complex—the piano is very complex. And I think that the same is true vocally, too. A lot of our tracks have different layers of background vocals. And this is really—it's pure technique, all about the Blake Roman technique. And this was a song that we moved up in key, which is very uncommon for us with male vocalists, in part because Blake wanted it to live higher in his falsetto register. And his falsetto register is so strong and really crystal clear. And I think a big selling part of that song is his beautiful falsetto and his beautiful vibrato in his falsetto.

"Easy" (From Season 2, Episode 6)

Haft: There were some ideas that we had at first that have been saved for later. And we won't spoil what those ideas are, but as the season got developed further and further (and this is one of the pitfalls of actually starting music this early in the process before the scripts came together) is that everyone's concept of the way Charlie [voiced by Erika Henningsen] and Vaggie's [voiced by Stephanie Beatriz] relationship would develop throughout the season evolved in the process of the season getting written. So, when we first started writing the song that was to go where "Easy" was, it was initially set up differently, and the vibes were very different. 

And then, after we got a clearer sense of where Charlie and Vaggie would be going, then we tried a second crack at it, and it was more of a kind of poppy romantic song, sort of like, "Hey, throw your worries away, and let's just be in love." In this sequence, they're getting physically intimate, and it should have sort of a different vibe than—initially we had gone for a late '90s, early 2000s pop rock. It just didn't feel sexy. And so, we ended up with "Easy," but counterintuitively, "Easy" was not easy. We should have called it "Hard." [laughs]

Underberg: I love the title, "Easy," the obvious choice. I remember when it was, "Love in Hell." But we already have "Love in the Bottle." Like, oh, what else could it be? Easy is the most condensed word for that concept. A good relationship makes everything else, you know, easy.

Haft: It feels like Charlie's having her dark night of the soul throughout this episode, and to have this pick me up that reminds you, the audience, and reminds everyone that this relationship is not a fair-weather thing. It really is functional, it is comfortable, and they pick each other up when they're down, and they are really great teammates for each other. 

Underberg: It was also wonderful to be able to give them a real song. Because Season One, they have a dinky little reprise. And I felt bad. So that was really nice to be able to give them an actual song.

"Brighter" (From Season 2, Episode 7)

Haft: Our first crack at this went completely '80s. The vibe was a lot more double time. It was like a lot more maniac. The kind of thing where you could imagine people in unitards doing calisthenics with little weights.

Underberg: And then we learned, we learned this lesson a few times in season two, that Viv does not like '80s music, at least for certain characters.

Haft: Each character really has their own orchestra and Vox's orchestra [the character played by Christian Borle singing this song] is not 1980s. In modernizing "Brighter," it became really, I would say, more interesting in that it oscillates between half time and straight time; it has this sort of dubstep breakdown at the end, which, I don't know much dubstep has featured in showtune music in the past.

Underberg: I love this sequence of, the telling of the backstory [of Vox] and the dialogue.

Haft: Because really, we're hearing Vox twice at the same time, in the past and present. Ultimately, it's a song about ambition seen through someone who is obsessed with modernity. And that ties into the title, this idea of  brighter, which isn't just something that you say as a superlative for a person, but it's also something you might say as a superlative for a television.

"Brighter" is a song that really could only come from us having spent as much time as we did with Christian in the booth. He gets very like growly and goblin-y at times. He's a brilliant comedian, and he has a brilliant, crystal, clean voice. And we just get his voice as filthy as possible for this song. 

One of my favorite things when we were recording the song was a series of his death screams. There's that bit towards the end of "Brighter" where he sings "brighter" and then a television falls on his head and he has a death scream. And so we have all these takes of him going "brighter!!!!! Ahhhh!!!!!!!!!!!" And it's just a long "brighter" punctuated by the most—I mean, he's hitting like whistle tones. He gets so high. After the first time he did it, we were like, "Is it even healthy for you to try that a second time?" And he did it like five more times.

"Live to Live" (From Season 2, Episode 7)

Haft: "Live to Live" is really fun. The very oddball voice that Alex Brightman does as Pentious really dictated how we wrote it and how we built rhymes. The way he describes it is he's doing Peter MacNicol in Dracula: Dead and Loving It. It's almost an accent that doesn't exist in life. So to that end, it was about reverse engineering, the way he pronounces things. We rhymed "ether" and "eureka," because to him, it's "etha!" and "eureka!"

We often write in a sort of stream of consciousness, chronological way—where a lot of people try and start by writing a chorus, or start by writing one sort of refrain and then extrapolate out the rest of the song from that. Whereas a lot of what we do—and I think part of this is the necessity of the timeline we're on, which is usually quite short—a lot of what we're doing is sort of a stream-of-consciousness process, where we are starting from the very beginning of the song and trying to follow where the song wants to take us.

Underberg: A lot of times, it means there's only one verse. So Pentious just has a verse. But that musical idea does not return, because we have to move on to more intense feelings. And Sera [voiced by Patina Miller] comes in, and then Pentious has something else to say all.

Haft: In that way, they're more like musical scenes than they are structured songs with verse pre-chorus, chorus, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge, chorus. They're really just kind of following the contour of a human interaction.

"When I Think About The Future" (From Season 2, Episode 7)

Haft: Every part of this song that is not reprise is a part of the song that we iterated on quite a lot.

Underberg: Yeah, eight or nine demo versions before it was approved.

Haft: There came a point at which we stopped numerating our works in progress and just started playing them for Vivienne. And then she'd be like, "Well, maybe mess with this, and then that." In terms of actual iterations, it was probably 13 or 14. But part of that is it's not really one song, it's like nine songs that have a series of transitions between them. It doesn't really make sense to call it a "One Day More" [from Les Miz]. Because "One Day More" sort of has this chorus that characters join in and layer upon. 

The song that I would compare it to is a song from a musical that I'm always championing, which is Bat Boy. The musical's song is "Comfort and Joy," which is sort of Bat Boy's "One Day More." But unlike "One Day More," it doesn't live on one continuous refrain. It goes from scene-let to scene-let. And you're seeing these little sort of vignettes of these characters before this big moment in the story.

Underberg: Structurally, "When I Think About the Future," Sera's section at the end is a return to the beginning of the song. It turns into a book ending.

Haft: Sera's part really is kind of the anchor to the whole song.

Underberg: It also teases us up for the next episode as well. As opposed to, "Yay! Things are good." It's the opposite.

Haft: The song has a lot of jokes and gags throughout. But then it ends us on this really somber, contemplative note with the incredible Patina Miller just really acting the hell out of that section.

"Hear My Hope" (From Season 2, Episode 8)

Haft: This is a song that that really does—it doesn't serve the story function of a "One Day More," but like "One Day More," it does live on a continuous refrain where we diverge from and come back to it. I would say it's unconventionally structured, because in "Hear My Hope," the refrains are basically purely chorus, and you go from chorus to bridge A, from chorus to bridge B, from chorus to bridge C, and then back to a chorus. And when we come back, every time we return to the chorus, we add more vocal layers. We start adding counter melodies towards the end. "Hear My Hope" is a song that is very conscious that it is a song and it is about these characters uniting in song and using their voices for power.

Underberg: And the one person who doesn't sing, Vox, is in the scene, but ends up just screaming at everyone who is singing because he refuses to take part in this. That was another fun Christian recording session because he just got to scream, like an angry man toddler.

Haft: It's the reversal of Vox's power dynamic. Vox, who is on such a steady escalation of power throughout this season, is at the end reduced to sort of a whining child without a body. One thing we would have to talk about is that large middle section [featuring] Patrick Stump’s [character] Abel. Every once in a while, we will have a song where we will be so conscious of who the actor playing the role is, that the song really exists to let that actor shine. And there could not be a more clear moment of that than the very Fall Out Boy-sounding middle section that we give to Abel.

This song has to do so much heavy lifting in the plot. The show is a musical. It makes sense that we need to resolve the grand conflict of the season and sort of tie up our a story with song, but it was a really daunting task. I think one of the biggest challenges that we had was even conceiving physically what was happening. We had a lot of conversations and doodles; a lot of ideas of, like, "Are they doing this? Are they putting their hands out to gather their power?" Trying to conceptualize what this scene looked like. Because if we were writing this for the stage, we would obviously have the benefit of a director and a production designer and being able to actually start to put things together and see things come together physically. We didn't really have the benefit of that long process that is informed by production. And so, a lot of this came down to conversations with Vivienne and her animation team.

Underberg: As it turned out, all we needed to do, really, was give them enough time to stop the explosion. They couldn't just sing for 30 seconds and have it stop. That wouldn't make for a very satisfying scene.

Haft: And I think the idea that their voices coming together are stopping this. And the more voices join in, the more they are able to stop this. It creates a plot incentive that is also a musical incentive. The way that the song builds is also the way that their power builds. 

Underberg: Yeah, that's cool. That was an unusual power for the song itself to have.

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Photos: Hazbin Hotel: Live On Broadway Musical Event

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