Potion Commotion is controlled chaos, the sound of a spell being brewed and then going completely off the rails. Bubbling cauldrons, glowing flasks, spectral hues, tremolo strings, and the giddy rush of magic in the air. It builds and accelerates, quiet and suspenseful one moment, a full bubbling crescendo the next.
The best moment is the bridge, where the recipe goes wrong in real time, and it is a great example of building a laugh into the structure of a song. It starts as a tidy little ingredient chant. Newt’s eye, moth wing, thistle, thorn. Then two panicked spoken interruptions break the rhythm completely. Wait, that wasn’t in the book. Somebody get another look. And then everyone piles in for the accelerating countdown as the potion changes color and gets away from them. Green to purple, purple to gray, run before it gets away. And yes, run is shouted, not sung.
I will let you in on how that bridge came to be, because it is my favorite kind of revision story. In the earlier draft, that whole section was just describing a xylophone. Nothing was happening. When we did our polish pass, we asked the simple question we ask of every song. What is the funniest or most exciting thing that could happen right here? The answer was obvious the second we said it out loud. The spell should blow up in everyone’s faces. So we threw out the description and wrote the disaster, the panic, and the countdown. That moment was sitting there unused the whole time. Almost every song on this album got a fix like that.
This is also just a joyful, chaotic, kid-pleasing kind of song that Halloween does not have enough of. A brewing-gone-wrong singalong with a shouted RUN in the middle is the sort of thing a room full of kids will demand on repeat. That is what fresh Halloween music can do. It can be built, from the ground up, around the exact moments that make kids light up.
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Coming next: my Christmas album, A Folklore Christmas. Pre-save it on Spotify and it drops straight into your library on release day.