There are few pop culture hills worth dying on – but the admission by Lin-Manuel Miranda that he believes he wrote the best songs for the character of Aaron Burr encourages me to make this particular stand: Burr’s searing inner monologue, Wait For It, is the best song in the musical phenomenon Hamilton, and yes, I will die on that hill.1
It is so significant that when Hrishikesh Hirway’s SongExploder briefly made the jump to Netflix for a (too) limited-run series, Wait For It was the track grabbed out of the zeitgeist to go under the microscope.2
In the musical’s libretto, it’s perhaps one of only a couple of glimpses into Burr’s otherwise stonewall persona: a moment when the facade drops, and the man’s motivations are exposed.
Whilst a particular line –
Death doesn’t discriminate
Between the sinners and the saints
It takes and it takes and it takes
…might be read as exposing a type of fatalism, I have often chosen to read it instead as a tenet of faith – death, which none of us can escape, is not only the great leveller but also a reminder that so many things in this plane of existence, which may seem vital at the time, are just dust.
- Allow me to shoehorn in here an honourable mention for the cover, by Ben Folds and Regina Spektor, of Burr’s other moment of vulnerability: Dear Theodosia. ↩︎
- The podcast SongExploder is brilliant, and will feature again – the Netflix series can be found here. ↩︎