One of the highlights of everyone discovering the Netflix fantasy series “The Witcher” back in December 2019 was their subsequent obsession with the song “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher,” which became an immediate earworm upon Jaskier’s (Joey Batey) first performance of it in the show’s first season. So when it came to “The Witcher” Season 2, Jaskier needed a new song – but as far as Batey was concerned, he didn’t feel any pressure to try and top the popularity of “Toss a Coin.”
“I didn’t, if I’m completely honest. I didn’t feel any pressure,” Batey told TheWrap during a recent interview about the second season. “The one priority that Joe Trapanese and myself had, our composer on Season 2, was to distance ourselves from the poppier end of Jaskier’s discography and enjoy new musical styles and a genre shift perhaps, and to take his canon forward in an emotionally raw way, and a character-ful way.”
The actor went on to explain that they purposefully set out to distance the new song in Season 2, titled “Burn, Witcher, Burn,” from “Toss a Coin” sonically and lyrically. “I think we all set out to not do ‘Toss a Coin’ again. He might come back to that sort of song further down the line, but I think in order for this character to grow he needed to write what he wanted to write and I think that meant that I had so much more ownership over the song by the time we got to shoot it.”
Indeed, “Burn, Witcher, Burn” is the flip side of the coin to “Toss a Coin,” so to speak, as instead of praising Geralt’s (Henry Cavill) exploits, Jaskier condemns Geralt for turning his back on him. In essence, the new song is a breakup ballad a la Taylor Swift, with lyrics like, “All those lonely nights, as I burn all the memories of you” and “After everything we did, we saw, you turned your back on me.”
Jaskier and Geralt do, in fact, find their way back to one another late in “The Witcher” Season 2 but we’ll have to wait until Season 3 to see Geralt’s reaction to Jaskier’s new song.
“The Witcher” Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.
