Hazbin Hotel’s composers break down ‘Hear My Hope’ and its Lord of the Rings link
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 third in a series of three pieces unpacking a single standout song from Hazbin Hotel season 2. Don’t miss part one, on “Vox Populi,” and part two, on “Gravity.”
The song: Episode 8’s “Hear My Hope.” In the season 2 climax, Emily the seraph and Hellborn demon Charlie Morningstar work together to stop Vox’s overcharged anti-Heaven weapon before it explodes, kills them, and takes out half of Charlie’s hometown. The whole cast, friends and enemies alike, joins in. Meanwhile, Abel (Fall Out Boy frontman Patrick Stump) and Lute (Jessica Vosk) face off and Abel takes charge, while Alastor (Amir Talai) and Rosie (Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer) negotiate a new deal for power.
Polygon: “Hear My Hope” is a tough one — a lot of important story beats happen very quickly in this song.
Sam Haft: It was a lot to tackle. I would say it has the most in common with season 1’s “You Didn’t Know,” in that there are a number of things that need to happen in the story within that song. And the big challenge of that song was figuring out how to make all of those things happen, how to build in these plot points and essentially make it a musical series of scenes.
Andrew Underberg: It’s also diagetic. [The characters] know they’re singing. That’s a key difference between the song and—
Haft: And many other songs. I mean, I think Charlie is diegetically singing in “Happy Day in Hell.” They’re diegetically singing in “Loser, Baby.”
Underberg: But the point of the singing [in “Hear My Hope”] is that their singing serves a plot point, regardless of what words they’re singing.
You could certainly say that for the choral parts of the song, as the Overlords join in one by one. But are Alastor and Rosie consciously singing? Are Lute and Abel?
Underberg: I think it has those sections where the song functions more like other songs, in which there’s maybe an argument, kind of an internal dialogue. But the choral main sections in “Hear My Hope,” their voices are actually serving a purpose, a dramatic physical purpose.
Haft: Yeah, exactly. A physical and a mechanical purpose. “Hear My Hope” is the first song in the show that really explicitly taps into something that’s alluded to throughout [the show], about music and power. This is something I could nerd about at length — a commonality between the Hellaverse and Lord of the Rings is that in the lore of Lord of the Rings, the world-building is built around this idea that reality was sung into existence. There are implications in [this song] that these characters’ voices and these characters’ music give them power. “Hear My Hope” is the first example we’ve seen explicitly of these people’s power being manifested through song to achieve an end.
As composers, how do you approach building all these different pieces that have different character tones and story functions so they hold together as one number?
Underberg: The transitions into them is part of it. Going into Abel’s section, we knew it was a pause moment, almost, right? So on the screen, we were going to see everything slowed down — that’s really in his head. So yeah, that was important, to figure out how to get into it. And then once we’re into [his perspective], it can do anything it wants. It’s mainly about creating the transitions in and out to make a section feel seamless, like, Oh, of course we’re landing here, and Oh yeah, we’re coming back to where we had been before, and it doesn’t feel weird or uncomfortable.
Haft: If anything, it’s almost treating those sections as no different than another part of the song, but just like they require an elaborate key change to get into.
Underberg: And making sure we’re in the right key. The cast members — for Patrick Stump, it only took us one session. We recorded “Like You” with him before we understood his range fully, which essentially is, “the higher the better.” So for his later songs, we made sure to give him the proper register.
Haft: Patrick Stump is one of only two instances of actors asking us to move a song up [in vocal range].
Underberg: Usually it’s the opposite.
Haft: For male actors asking us to move a song up, the only other instance of that is that [Angel Dust voice actor Blake Roman] asked us to bump up “Losin’ Streak” this season. Just for it to live in that really sweet falsetto that he has.
Obviously we want to hear you “nerd out” about Lord of the Rings and music as power — was that on your mind throughout this season?
Underberg: As a little tidbit, the first song we pitched a title for, the original title of [“Hazbin Guarantee (Trust Us)”] was “The Two Towers,” when the hotel had more of a tower form, and then V Tower is a tower,
Haft: The hotel is less towery-looking this season.
Underberg: That was the main reason given to us why [that title] didn’t make sense, which I guess is fair. But we did like that.
Haft: The idea of music having power in Lord of the Rings… This is such a creator-driven show, and that’s not something that’s on their radar so much as that’s something I privately nerd out about, because I’m one of those weird people who likes Lord of the Rings that much. But that was something I clocked in season 1, when there was that imagery of Lilith empowering Sinners — you see these musical notes streaming from her over the rest of Hell.
Charlie’s magic also takes the form of strings or streams of musical staffs and notes.
It’s such a theater-kid idea that music has power. There’s that classic thing [in musicals] of, like, When you’re feeling so much, that’s the moment you switch from speaking to singing. When you’re feeling too much to use words.
It really is sort of the logical endpoint of singing rather than using words. Singing carries more weight. It holds more power. And [“Hear My Hope”] is just making it explicit that singing means power to affect the world around you, power to convince something of something they otherwise would not have been convinced by. The power to decide to seek revenge, the power to decide to forgive. The idea that music has power is very straightforward on an emotional level, and it’s very fun to have a property that treats it not just as emotionally powerful, but as something that will affect the physical world.
Hazbin Hotel season 2 is now streaming on Prime Video.