Q&A: Sam Haft Finds Friendship and Musical Identity in ‘Hazbin Hotel,’ The Living Tombstone and Upcoming Musical ‘The Con’

MusicQ&A

Jul 13

INTERVIEW

SAM HAFT IS CRAFTING THE CON—for its 2027 premiere at the Palladium Theatre in Times Square alongside his longtime musical partner Andrew Underberg and award-winning comedy writer Jenny Jaffe.

The LA-based recording artist is best known as the songwriter, composer and producer for the hit Amazon Prime original animated series Helluva Boss and its A24 musical comedy spin-off Hazbin Hotel, both of which have amassed enormous online followings since their YouTube debuts in 2019 from creator and animator Vivienne “VivziePop” Medrano.

In addition to his television success, Haft also makes up half of the electronic rock band The Living Tombstone alongside composer Yoav Landau. The pair are preparing to go on tour this summer, playing shows in nearly 30 states and countries across North America and Europe.

In the weeks leading up to The Living Tombstone’s 2026 Multiplayer Tour, Luna sat down with Haft to discuss his myriad of artistic endeavors—from navigating audience expectations while working on Helluva Boss and Hazbin Hotel to finding friendship and a musical identity while writing The Con.

Read Luna’s conversation with Haft below.

*Left to right: Jenny Jaffe, Sam Haft, Andrew Underberg*

LUNA: Congratulations on the upcoming premiere of your original musical The Con at Palladium Times Square in 2027! For readers who are unfamiliar with your work, could you briefly introduce yourself?

HAFT: Hi, I’m a songwriter and recording artist. I’m best known for one of two things; either for being part of a band called The Living Tombstone—which arose out of what I would describe as the nerdcore music scene (which is music built around the fandoms of gaming, cartoons, anime, that sort of Comic-Con world) and the other thing being a cartoon called Hazbin Hotel, which is an adult cartoon [musical] produced by A24 and on Amazon for which I co-write the music. A couple big professional highlights for me is that I’m a platinum-selling artist through The Living Tombstone, and the soundtrack to Hazbin Hotel is the fifth-best charting television soundtrack of all time, two things I’m incredibly proud of. I’ve lost a couple American Music Awards and a Billboard Award and I look forward to losing more prestigious awards in the future! (laughs)

LUNA: Thank you for that introduction! As you mentioned, you’re currently the composer, songwriter and producer for the hit animated series Helluva Boss and its musical comedy spin-off Hazbin Hotel. What has this experience been like so far and how has it influenced your creative process over the years?

HAFT: It's really interesting because I think it's actually a struggle to try to not let it influence your process as much as you can. Because I think audience feedback has a lot to teach you, but at the same time, it shouldn't teach you how to do your job. That’s constantly an evolving idea of being aware of the audience and its expectations and its desires without letting it.

It's more of a challenge with The Living Tombstone because the buck stops with us really when it comes to our output. Whereas with Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss, it's very easy to keep the audience to the side because, to us during the creative process, we already have an audience who we're thinking about and that audience is Vivienne [Medrano, the creator] herself. So for our process, we are thinking about an audience, but it's not the audience of the show. It's the creative team.

With film scoring, you never hear Ludwig Göransson or Hans Zimmer say, “Oh, I was just thinking about what the audience that goes to see this movie is going to think.” No, they're like, “Well, when I wanted to present this to Christopher Nolan, here's the way I did it.” It's always the thought about pleasing and completing the vision of a filmmaker. I think one thing that makes Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss really gratifying to write for is that it’s a very filmmaker-driven, auteur-driven process, which is rare to find in animation because, if you think film takes a village, animation takes a city. So, it tends to be a very studio-driven process, and I just feel like we're very lucky at how much creative latitude Vivienne has with the show and the fact that it's really allowed to be a project that serves her vision that she's had in her head for decades.

LUNA: You’re collaborating on The Con with your longtime musical partner Andrew Underberg and award-winning comedy writer Jenny Jaffe. How did you three form a creative trio, and what has it been like working together so far?

HAFT: The origin of Andrew and I goes back a very long time—21 years. I was an incoming freshman in high school and he was an incoming senior. Andrew was my school-assigned big brother. At the time, he was getting into digital music production, so I got to experience that passion of his by osmosis. In so many ways, that relationship shaped my desire to do this professionally. It really was an incredible full circle moment when I was working on Helluva Boss and I brought Andrew into that process to start writing songs with me—all of a sudden, I was writing music with the guy who's largely responsible for the fact that I write music. That has been an incredibly gratifying thing. Andrew and I were friends in high school, but he's become one of my best friends in the process of us working together. I see him more than I see almost any of my other friends, barring maybe Yoav [Landau], who's my music partner in The Living Tombstone. We are just so professionally inseparable that we have become also socially inseparable in the same way.

With Jenny Jaffe, I actually met her through Erica Henningsen, the star of Hazbin Hotel. Jenny, as a screenwriter and TV writer, had written for Erica's husband, Kyle, on a couple projects. Kyle said to her, “Oh my god, you need to meet my wife, you're going to adore each other,” and introduced her to Erica. Lo and behold, they did adore each other. We made plans, Erica and I and Jenny, to go see a play that a cast member, Joel Perez, was in called Stir at the Old Globe in San Diego. Erica canceled and said, “Well, how about the two of you drive down to go see it?” We started talking about musical theater and, from that point on, it was game over. We immediately had the best rapport ever. There are those moments where you enter a conversation with someone and you learn about each other and instantly you are great friends and that happened over the course of a three-hour trip down and a three-hour trip back. Since then, Jenny has become an incredibly close friend.

I got to be that friend introducer for her with Andrew. Now we've all spent so much time together that we're all friends. It's become this really fun social unit where we're making each other laugh and entertaining each other in a way that, because we trust each other's taste, it gets to a point where you go, “Oh, well, that's a great idea. Let's put that in the show. Oh, you laughed at this. I know that, if it works in the room, it's going to work on a stage.” Collaboration really is—in the same way it's the backbone of my work on the Hellaverse shows—the backbone of our work on The Con.

LUNA: The Con has sold numerous tickets without a script, a single song or even a cast. How did this highly anticipated upcoming project manifest and what can you tell us about its sound and style?

HAFT: Jenny and I went to New York for a week last month and we locked ourselves in a room surrounded by cameras with a keyboard and a computer and set ourselves the task of starting to write the music for this show, starting to help the story come together, figure out an outline for the beats, all that. I really am so pleased with what we came out of that week with. We came into that week not knowing if we were even going to make The Con because, at that point, it was this…loosely evolving outline. Then, we got in a room and all of a sudden something clicked and The Con existed. I’m so excited to start showing off what we did that week and the various ways in which we experienced profound delirium and mental illness working 13 hours a day for five days straight. It felt like summer camp because everyone was just eating sour gummies and no one was showering enough. I mean, it was an adventure!

The Con is starting to gain a musical identity that’s somewhere between a traditional contemporary Broadway show with your standard small orchestra performance and a more rock band-driven sound as well. That’s totally new for me because, for The Living Tombstone, so much of what we do is largely built electronically. For Hazbin Hotel, so much is done digitally. That has been one of the really interesting new limitations for us to inform what our soundtrack sounds like—What are our instruments? What do we get to choose from? How can we build this show using that?

There's this weird chaos factor to everything we're doing that’s so fun. Especially because traditionally [in] a Broadway show, there's 10 years of development. In so many ways, we're breaking all the rules and having a great time doing it. We're trying to combine two totally distinct models. One is the internet-facing show development as a concept album, where…it's almost a show as a recording artist, something like [The Unofficial] Bridgerton [Musical], The Unauthorized Musical [Parody] or EPIC: The Musical where the show exists in the theater of the mind. There are so many think pieces, especially now, about, “How do we save Broadway? What do we do to get people interested and get people to show up?” But the people over here, the Bridgertons and the EPICs, they figured that out. By making [people] feel like they have this investment in this fantasy piece of art that’s growing into something, it really brings people along for the ride in a way that the traditional model [doesn’t]. How do we take the best parts of Model A and the best parts of Model B and hopefully reshape what doesn't work by being just a little bit more internet fandom literate?

There are a couple great examples of this working on Broadway by accident, which, unfortunately, 90 percent come from basically piracy—people taking their phones out and filming certain moments [and] those moments blowing up. The two examples that I can think of are Beetlejuice [The Musical] and Death Becomes Her, both of which had these really fun viral TikTok moments that came from these great moments in the show. That’s something that we know does work for a Broadway show—it just hasn't worked on purpose yet. Hopefully, we are the intentional version of that.

LUNA: As you touched on, you’re a member of the electronic duo The Living Tombstone and are going on tour this summer. What are you most looking forward to as you prepare for the 2026 Multiplayer Tour?

HAFT: Number one is always food. I'm a treat-motivated dog. I’m just excited to go to a new place and try a local cuisine I’ve not tried before. A real highlight of the last time that we toured Europe was Prague, which I hadn't been to before. And the food there was unbelievably good. I'm excited to eat my way through Europe. The other thing is I love learning a tiny piece of a language I didn't know before, even if it's just, “Hello, do you speak English? I would like a restaurant reservation.” There's something that feels really mentally gratifying about being able to maneuver in a place that you've never been that's culturally alien to you. Um, I, I'm very excited about that.

I’m dreading being away from good ol’ American air conditioning for the summer. That is going to be very tough. But one of the wonderful things about going on tour is that even the hard parts that you struggle through, you're doing [so] in community. You're struggling with your friends and your peers. I'm going to a bunch of countries that I've never been to before, even though we have toured Europe and I've been to Europe. I've never been to Austria. I've never been to Scandinavia at all. We're doing Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Lithuania, Luxembourg. We're playing Luxembourg! I never thought I'd go to Luxembourg. We are truly so fortunate that we have fan bases in these places. It's so incredibly cool that we can go to Poland or Peru and we'll be able to fill a room just the same as we can fill a room in Detroit.

LUNA: Finally, what are some pieces of media (music, film, literature, etc.) you’ve been drawing inspiration from recently?

HAFT: Of course, Clue, the film with Tim Curry. I'm obsessed with that movie. I think it’s one of Tim Curry's all-time best performances. Madeline Kahn is just at her absolute best. Everyone is so fantastic in it. There is a musical that I turned to quite a lot for inspiration because it’s one of my favorite pieces of all time—it's called Bat Boy: The Musical, which has never been on Broadway. Oh, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, another great musical. I’ve been jamming out to Slayyyter's album that everyone has been listening to—Slayyyter's crushing it. Oh, and you know what? I loved the new Minions movie.