Initially, Miranda said he was working on a concept album inspired by the life of Alexander Hamilton called The Hamilton Mixtape. Hamilton started as a mixtape, not a musical. I kind of need to be ambulatory to write lyrics.” 4. That’s where the notebooks come in, sort of write what comes to me, bring it back to the piano. “I’d make a loop of it and put it in my headphones and then walk around until I had the lyrics. “For Hamilton what I’d do is write at the piano until I had something I liked,” he said. When he needed to come up with lyrics, he told Smithsonian, he walked. Miranda wrote Hamilton’s lyrics on the move. “That’s how seriously I was taking it.” 3. It took Miranda another year to craft Hamilton’s anthem, “My Shot.” “Every couplet needed to be the best couplet I ever wrote,” Miranda told 60 Minutes.

“From what I hear,” Questlove, who produced the cast album, told Billboard, “the president won't cease to let you know that: ‘The White House is where it began.’” He performed the song, “Alexander Hamilton,” at the White House in 2009 (you can watch the video above). It took Miranda a year to write Hamilton’s first song-and another year to write the second song. Miranda recalled to Vogue that “I Googled ‘Alexander Hamilton hip-hop musical’ and totally expected to see that someone had already written it. “This is a guy who wrote at 14, ‘I wish there was a war.’ It doesn’t get more hip-hop than that.”

“That is part and parcel with the hip-hop narrative: writing your way out of your circumstances, writing the future you want to see for yourself,” Miranda told The New York Times. And he writes a poem about the carnage and this poem gets him off the island.”

“I got to the part where a hurricane destroys St. It could have been Truman,” he told 60 Minutes. “I was just browsing the biography section. Before he left, he picked up a biography called Alexander Hamilton. Not long after his show In the Heights won four Tony Awards in 2008, Lin-Manuel Miranda went on vacation. Hamilton was inspired by Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton. A movie version of the show, recorded with the original cast and titled Hamilton: An American Musical, hit Disney Plus on July 3 here are a few things you might not have known about Miranda’s take on the life and times of the first Secretary of the Treasury. No one could have predicted that a hip-hop-infused musical based on the life of Alexander Hamilton would become Broadway’s hottest ticket, but that’s exactly what happened when Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton debuted in July 2015.

Writings by Alexander Hamilton