Harding told me the popularity of “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher” actually illustrates a larger point about pop culture - which is that what we think of as “pop music” is in fact much, much larger than just what’s topping Billboard at any given moment. And that sound has become the sound of any sort of video game music.” “The backing tracks of those games are all pseudo-medieval but are also very much contemporary music. “I think it’s drawing on people who love video game scores and anybody that’s played like Diablo or World of Warcraft: Kings,” he told me. Harding explains that these discordant elements are part of “Toss a Coin’s” basic appeal. With a more hybrid-genre show like Witcher, that milieu doesn’t quite exist.
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So between the band and the show itself, there was an established milieu for how to “hear” the song. The official soundtrack version of “Rains of Castamere” was also recorded by the well-known indie rock band the National, whose gritty folk influences naturally complement Game of Thrones’ aesthetic. He pointed out that Batey also uses a style of singing that’s closer to musical theater than to a folk/troubadour sound, which further creates a sense of disconnect between the song’s many different elements.Ĭompare all this to a song like Game of Thrones’ “ The Rains of Castamere,” which keeps to a clear folk aesthetic, both lyrically and musically: It’s simple, using few instruments, with a naturalistic singer and a song that feels very balladic. “There’s something almost like uncanny valley in the way that borrows so fluidly between different styles that we expect to exist in very different media, like video games, musical pop, Renaissance music, all blurred together,” Harding said. Not only that, but the lyrics are deliberately tongue-in-cheek, with lines like “he can’t be bleat” (a goat-related pun) and “he thrust every elf far back on the shelf,” a meta-joke that completely breaks the fourth wall. It’s the kind of thing you might expect to hear in a fantasy game soundtrack right when the fighting gets good - but that isn’t exactly what you might expect to hear from a song set within that game universe’s story.
And in keeping with the scores of video games, where big, synthesized drum sections are a common feature, it also has a percussion-heavy backing track. Its presentation is deeply earnest and straightforward, with actor Joey Batey singing along to an orchestral accompaniment that gets more and more sweepingly dramatic.īut it’s also replete with syncopation: Its words land on the off-beats, and it uses rhythms that didn’t really exist in the historical medieval culture it’s attempting to channel. The hybrid elements of “Toss a Coin” are crucial to its successĪt a glance, “Toss a Coin” is trying to have its cake and eat it: that is, it wants to be both an earnest song that fits diegetically within its weird fictional universe and a catchy meta-pop song. And through our discussion, I realized that the parts of the song I was most baffled by actually were the key to its appeal. So I decided to talk it over with Charlie Harding, a musicologist and co-host of Vox’s Switched on Pop podcast, to get a sense of why so many people were so infatuated with this strange tune.
In fact, I was jarred by the song’s many discordant elements. I confess that upon first hearing “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher,” I really, really didn’t understand the appeal.
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The show is based on a popular book series that later inspired a hit fantasy video game series, so it’s got a distinctive, game-influenced aesthetic - but it’s also channeling everything from the epic feel of Game of Thrones to the tongue-in-cheek musical parody Galavant. One reason for this jumble of influences is that the song’s composers, Sonya Belousova and Giona Ostinelli, wanted to reflect the fusion of genres and aesthetic influences that comprise The Witcher itself. But it’s also replete with pop movement and rhythm, and even has a dollop of musical theater stylization. The song has aspects of medieval instrumentation and classical song structure, as you might expect for a song appearing in a medieval fantasy show. If you’ve heard “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher,” you’ll know that it’s something of a many-headed hydra. On YouTube, where all current uploads of the soundtrack are unofficial, the four most-watched versions of the song have a combined view count of more than 40 million.
In the month since it premiered, in fact, no fewer than four versions of it - three different “metal” covers of the song, as well as the original soundtrack version - have all charted in the UK. Even though it’s mostly a piece of lyrical nonsense based on the events of the show’s second episode, “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher” has amassed legions of fans.
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