How the “Toss a coin to your witcher” song was written

“Toss a coin to your Witcher! Oh valley of plenty, oh valley of plenty, oh-oh-ohhh.”

Have I just gotten that one song from The Witcher stuck in your head again, months after Netflix’s fantasy hit burst onto the scene back in December? Apologies. But it is, as fans know well, quite an infectious medieval-tinged earworm.

On the show, the song is written and performed by the bard Jaskier (Joey Batey), who pens it as a way to build up the reputation of Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill), a professional monster hunter who does good work but too often goes unrewarded for it. Jenny Klein, who wrote the episode where the song debuts — “Two Marks” — talked to Entertainment Weekly about how she thought about where the tune fit into the story:

"At the end of his adventure with Geralt, [Jaskier] was going to be continuing on with the Witcher through the series but with him being so talkative, the question became, why does Geralt bring this guy along with him? Because he obviously wears on his patience. I wanted him to earn his stripes and possibly create a PR campaign for the Witcher because he doesn’t have a great rap."

And indeed, it works! Jaskier’s song goes viral around the Continent, and Geralt’s reputation is improved. “Our intentions for Jaskier was to make [Jaskier] become the kind of Freddie Mercury of the continent, a rock star,” said Sonya Belousova, one of the composer’s who set Klein’s words to music. “So whenever one of our characters are in a tavern, Jaskier is a popular bard so why not have other musicians, other bards, covering his song? So whenever any of our characters are in a tavern in any place, what you hear in the background is actually different covers of different Jaskier songs.”

In that way, life imitated art, because plenty of real-world fans created covers of the song, too. “We had so much fun creating other covers ourselves so seeing all the fans creating fantastic covers ranging from rock to folk choirs is so much fun,” said Giona Ostinelli, another of the show’s composers. “They’re embracing the same fun we had in making it.”

Klein, too, knew something special was happened when people started sending her covers. “I was like, ‘What is happening?’ My parents called me and I was like, ‘I don’t know what’s happening, this thing is catching on!'”

But let’s go back to the beginning, when Klein was putting the song together, starting with the overall theme. “I was like, could Jaskier write a song that could thread together the re-envisioning of the elf history in that episode and also emotionally threading together Geralt and Yennefer?” she remembered. “Even though they weren’t together in that episode, this song could be a way to tie together these two extremely extraordinary outsiders who have to move among regular people. Like, ‘Don’t worry, I’m a friend of humanity!’ Which is the last line of the song, Jaskier is referring to Geralt but it plays over the final image of Yennefer smiling.”

"I was not nervous. I was excited. I enjoy writing in any form. I originally wanted to be a poet and lyrics are a form of poetry that become shaped musically. I knew it was a challenge and I was up for the challenge. I knew worst [case] was we don’t use the song — that’s not a bad worst-case scenario, and that’s how I don’t get scared."

As for the lyrics themselves, Klein came up with the opening line while in her car, the cradle of inspiration. “Often the Witcher doesn’t get paid for his work. That sucks!” she said. “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.’ 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.”

After that, the lyrics spilled out in about 10 minutes. The “valley of plenty” bit comes from the name of the place where Jaskier and Geralt spent most of the episode, which translates from elvish to Valley of Flowers or Valley of Plenty. “So I was like, to not even get paid in the Valley of Plenty? Come on! Toss a coin to your Witcher! I got excited about this being a way to draw empathy for the character. So that’s how I ended up coining ‘Toss a Coin to Your Witcher.'”

And let’s not forget the reference to the goat-man — or Sylvan — that Geralt encountered earlier in the hour. “There’s a very silly pun in there, ‘Cried the Witcher, he can’t be bleat,’ referring to the goat man that they fight in the episode. I continue to be surprised that people got the joke and don’t hate me for it. It’s a song about an underpaid outsider and I feel like we can all bond over that and want to sing about it.”

After the lyrics were written, it was time to set them to music. Enter Belousova and Ostinelli, who worked with Klein to “perfect [the lyrics] into more of a song form.”

“We wrote the music back in October 2018 and it was one of the first pieces of music we wrote for the show,” Belousova said. “We wanted to write several versions of the song that ranged from medieval and historically accurate to something very contemporary in order to find the right sound balance and the right tone for the show and for the character. We settled on this version and as soon as we wrote this one, we knew that was the one. When we wrote the song, I remember going to a yoga class and instead of being in savasana, I had it in my head.”

We experimented a lot throughout this process. We self-performed and recorded 64 instruments in the studio because the continent of The Witcher is so diverse and vast and we wanted to make sure that we represented that diversity in the score. We had instruments that came from all over the world, from China, Malaysia, Russia, Hungary, Portugal. We wanted to utilize all the instruments in creating this song to show the diversity of the continent in the sound.

Apparently the hurdy-gurdy is used prominently throughout the song, if you want to listen for that.

And finally came the recording. “Fun fact: Joey was actually sick during the recording of the song,” Belousova said. “But he was a super trooper. We recorded the song in London and he showed up to the studio and had to drink a lot of tea with honey and lemon, more tea, and even more tea. But he was wonderful and he was able to give us perfect takes, a lot of material, a lot of versatility in every take. Then the final production was completed here in Los Angeles.”

And the rest is history.

“I definitely did not expect this,” Klein said of the song’s success. “I’m a TV writer, a screenwriter, and I didn’t know that I would write lyrics into a script and go to bed a writer and wake up with a song that people were rapidly listening to!” Now let’s see if the team can top itself for season 2, which is due out next year!

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