Mother Knows Best (song) songs. While the majority of "Tangled"'s music was inspired by the work of Canadian musician Joni Mitchell, Menken envisioned Gothel's song as "classic" Broadway. Before writing "Mother Knows Best", Menken and Slater researched appropriate moments in the film during which its main characters could potentially perform, ultimately determining that "Mother Knows Best" "flows directly out of the conflict between" Mother Gothel and Rapunzel. Menken observed similarities between Gothel and Claude Frollo, another Disney villain for whom he had written songs while working as a composer on "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" (1996). Menken described Gothel as "a scary piece of
Mother Gothel Howard. However, in the Brothers Grimm's original fairy tale, Gothel is very much depicted as a typical witch-like character, an idea that was modified for the Disney film adaptation in favor of having Gothel's agelessness instead be "derive[d] ... from Rapunzel's hair." Seeking inspiration for Gothel and Rapunzel's "bizarre" relationship, Greno and Howard conducted a series of interviews with several female Disney employees, asking them to list qualities in their mothers that "they found annoying and cloying or restricting", specifically "the things that their ["sic"]" "mothers would do that made them feel trapped or made them feel smothered" in order