Burn (from Hamilton)

Host writer/composer David Rackoff explains why "Burn" from Lin-Manuel Miranda's "Hamilton" is actually a happy song. (What?!) We break down the music, lyrics, and performance of what is the "end of Act I" of Act II of "Hamilton" song. We look at how simple building blocks can create a powerful, cathartic, gorgeous theatrical piece.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Nothing Like Broadway podcast. I am your host, writer, composer David Rackoff of the upcoming Off Broadway musical called Nothing Like Broadway. But on this podcast, what we do is every week we pick a song from musical theatre and then we pick it apart to find out how it works in the context of the show, how it helps tell the story and how the music works and how the lyrics work and how it all works together. So today we are doing Burn from Hamilton. I'm searching and standing for answers in every line for some kind of sign and when you were mine. 
So this song comes about like halfway through act two. I was trying to think when I was sort of going over my material for this podcast today, and it always is like a good sort of like, you know, crying cathartic moment, but you really feel better as an audience member after this song. And so I was trying to think about like what it's actually doing in the context of this show. And I have a hot take here, which is in the context of the work that a song does to help the show tell its story. This is a very happy song. And let me explain that, 'cause that sounds sort of like I'm a terrible person or something, but its function in the show is basically, it is a catharsis. It's a catharsis for her. It's a catharsis for us. Acts 2 of Hamilton is pretty rough on the audience and on the characters in it, and this helps us process some of our unresolved feelings about the show and about how the show thinks about its characters. We need, like, a little reset because if you know the show, you know, it's about to get a lot worse. 

{ 00:02:02 }
He's being accused of embezzling money from the treasury, which would be, you know, treasonous, basically. And so the reality is that he has been paying off the husband of this woman who he has been having an affair with to defend himself against charges of treason and being corrupt. He says, no, no, I was being blackmailed by the husband of this woman I had an affair with. And he publishes a paper explaining that to everyone. It makes it public. And so he saves his legacy in a way, by sort of screwing over his wife and his family. And so this song is his wife alone on stage processing this information. What he's done by going public is making her confront it. Really seeing, OK, this is who you married. And also, everybody knows it. Her family knows it. Her friends know it. Like, she's never gonna walk down the street and not have everybody know what her husband did to her, which is, you know, in addition to being just personally hurtful, is humiliating. And it's not going to go away. Like everyone is going to know this information forever and ever. So why am I calling this a happy song? And I'm calling it a happy song because this song gives Eliza agency, which accomplishes several things for the show. It sets up the end of the show where Eliza is going to be doing a whole bunch of active things to preserve Hamilton's legacy, but also just for herself and for the good of the world. And so by having the song show that she is not a long-suffering, passive victim, she's making her claim for her own personhood and her own agency. And so those things that she does later are not like, oh God, after this guy screwed you over so much, you're now still just going to spend the next 50 years of your life that you live beyond when he lived trying to make him look good. It's like, no, no, she's doing these things of her own volition for her own reasons. And this is when she says I'm taking control of the narrative. And so when she continues to control it at the end, like one of the themes of toward the end of the show is, you know, who lives, who dies, who gets to tell your story. This is where she is actively making the choice to not tell her story, to deprive the world of her story for this part, so that later on when she decides to tell his story, it's like she's making an active choice with her eyes wide open, not because she is weak, but because she is strong. 

{ 00:04:15 }
There's also one of the sort of fun tensions in the show from when we first meet Eliza and Angelica, who are the two sisters. Angelica is the older, sort of smart, witty, sassy one, and Eliza is the younger, sweeter one who is more of a romantic who falls in love with Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton. And so there's always a little bit of like, are Angelica and Hamilton gonna, like, have an affair? That's sort of on the table pretty early on, especially in Satisfied, which basically really sets up that like, oh, God, these two are like intellectual soul mates, Angelica and Hamilton. Like, there's a pit in your stomach that is like, oh, no, are they going to have an affair at some point? Like, this is going to be real hard to get back on board with Hamilton and also with Angelica if they have an affair and they have these sort of intellectually flirty things happening. And like me personally, I identify more with Angelica than I do with Eliza, just as sort of like the word Smithy and obsessing over commas than I do with Eliza. And so it's always a concern when you're watching the show. It's like watching a horror movie where you're worried, like, the guy with a knife is going to jump out of a closet on a jump scare. You're kind of always worried that there's going to be a jump scare of Angelica and Hamilton, an affair. And so this song is where it's like, no, that is not going to happen. Angelica is not going to let that happen. I think even Hamilton wouldn't let that happen. Angelica has come home to see her sister once this news broke and all she was dealing with all this trauma and Hamilton is like, hey, I'm so glad you came. And she's like, fuck you. I didn't come for you. I came for my sister, asshole. And this song lets us get fully on board the Eliza train, right? Like, we're not worried about her being the sort of long-suffering, weak wife who's like sweet but kind of doormat. It's like, you know, she's really taking control. So now we are completely on board with Eliza as a human being, which is really important for the rest of the show and especially for the ending of the show. So I was looking structurally at Hamilton. This is the end of Act one of Act 2 song. And what I mean by that is if you were to look at Hamilton as Act one its own thing and Act 2 its own thing, if you're just looking at Act 2, you know, it's like the end of Act one of a musical is usually like a really important turning point. 

{ 00:06:24 }
That's the case in this. It's just that it's happening because the show's so long at the end of the first half of Acts 2. And that is what this song does, is it resets the table. And because we're about to get into, like, their child dying, like a whole bunch of terrible stuff is gonna happen. This lets Eliza establish herself as a formidable person, as somebody who is not a pushover. And so that the choices she makes later like to forgive her husband, to carry on with his legacy. It's coming from a place of strength, not a place of weakness. And so if we had any reservations about, there are a lot of movies and plays and musicals about like special men and the long-suffering wives who put up with a lot of shit. And it's Lin Manuel Miranda kind of being like, no, no, Eliza is not anyone's doormat. She's not just the wife. In fact, there's some theorizing that the show is called Hamilton not meaning Alexander Hamilton, but meaning either both Alexander Hamilton and Eliza Hamilton or even some people are theorizing that it is really Eliza Hamilton's story and that's why it's called Hamilton and not Alexander Hamilton. I don't know about that, but I do think it is important that she is a fully rounded, important character and this song is where she comes into her own. What's happening during the song is she's walking through her feelings about how Alexander was very public about letting the world know about this affair so that he could save himself professionally and ego wise. Really, it's really about him saving his ego at the expense of their marriage and her public self esteem. And So what she is doing then is taking letters that they wrote each other and literally burning them as a way of taking back her privacy and as a way of purging this information. Like she is controlling the narrative of what history will know. And it reminds me, remember I had friends. Each of the girls had an item from a past bad boyfriend and then they burned them. That's kind of what this song is. This is kind of like, it's like, you know, you could have like Phoebe and Rachel and Monica there all burning some stuff and Eliza is there burning the letters. The other thing this accomplishes in the category of making Eliza a really awesome character who the audience can get behind is we're watching this scene of her purging the record and hitting the delete key on all of the historical documents about how she felt. 

{ 00:08:37 }
The world has no right to my heart. The world will get into the lyrics, but this is her erasing all of that while explaining it to the audience. And so all of a sudden now, as a member of the audience, you're now in this elite group who knows what she is feeling and thinking in real time. And no one else is going to ever be able to discover it. Like, that's the feeling of it watching it, right? This is something that is only happening right now. It's a secret. And she burns the letters. And so no one else is ever really gonna know the truth about it except for us, those 1300 people sitting there in the dark watching her, which just is so cool theatrically and just creates this real sense of intimacy between us and Eliza. So musically, first, let's talk about the time signature. It's in 6-8, which is not the most common time signature, and it goes 123456123456123456. I always think of 6/8 as like a very sort of conversational, a little bit folky. It's actually my sort of favorite time signature to write in. Like even before I wrote music, when I was just writing lyrics and I wasn't really thinking about time signatures, I was just writing. And then I would hand it to a composer. One of the composers I work with was like, she's like, well, you're always writing stuff in 6-8. Like that's like your, like you have your favorite sweater Lyricists and composers often will have their favorite time signature or favorite mode or whatever. 6-8 as a lyricist is just where my like heart goes when I'm not thinking about it. And I, I personally feel like it is the most natural speech pattern to me. It's more complex than 4/4, which is like one and two and three and 4:00 and 1:00 and 2:00 and 3:00 and 4:00 and right. It's 123456123456. If you come see the musical nothing Like Broadway, you will notice that many of the songs are in 6-8 and the first thing that you notice when you're hearing the song is and that basically keeps on going throughout the song. 

{ 00:10:42 }
It's called an ostinato, which I think means like stubborn in Italian. And it's just basically this like figure that just keeps on happening, keeps on happening. And it really shows you that like things are just like rolling along and they're not going to stop. 6-8 is a very like sort of relentless, but in a not too pushy way, kind of a time signature. And the ostinato, in addition to being really pretty, it really sets up that things are progressing. Things are not going to stay the same. She's not going to be in the same place. And it just like it's like, you know, when you're like in a really tough situation and you have to make a decision and it just feels like there's like a weight on your back pushing you forward. That's what this ostinato is doing. So chord progression wise, it's really interesting. It's, it's written in a minor key and in a minor key, normally the 5th degree of the scale, the chord that that's built on would be a minor chord. Here though, it's a major chord. So on the line, do you know what Angelica said when we saw your first letter arrive? Do you know what Angelica said when we saw your first letter arrive? In that phrase, the Angelica said is all of a sudden in the major chord instead of the minor chord. And it has like a little lift, which is really cool. And it happens a couple times when Angelica is mentioned, which is just like it like lifts your spirits up. 
But it's really like a lovely in this sort of downer of a song that's in a minor key, having this occasional surprise bit of up lets us fall, fall again. Basically it's like in a in a movie, like when it's this, you know, you want to have like darkness and that you want to show that it's a really dark room. You need to have some sort of beam of light or something somewhere so that you have contrast so that, you know, oh, OK. There's a little beam of light coming in through the window in this very dark room. Otherwise it would just be a black screen and you wouldn't know what you were looking at. Same thing here. Having this extra little lift occasionally lets us fall a little bit further. 

{ 00:12:43 }
The next time it's the sadness happens. Yeah. Here's another example of that. Do you know what Angelica said when she read what you'd done? She said you have married an Icarus. He has blown too close to the sun. So the same thing when Angelica is mentioned. Do you know what Angelica said? Do you know what Angelica said when she read what you'd done? All of a sudden it's the major chord instead of the minor chord that we would be expecting to have happen there, which is just, again, it's just really moving that she and Angelica are going to be cool because you know it would be. It would be a real rough show if Angelica and Hamilton had had an affair. That would have just been like, fuck you, Alexander Hamilton. I can't forgive that. The main featured note, like the star of the show of this song, note wise, is the 7th degree of the scale that it's in, which is kind of unusual to have the main note be the 7th degree of the scale. Leave. I'll play you several instances of when it just sits on that note and it even ends on that note. 
And so having the seven three of the scale, which is a leading tone, it makes you want to go up to the actual note. That's the root of the key that it's in. It just makes this whole song feel like we're like on the precipice or something. It's not sitting and wallowing. It's just like we're almost there. We're almost there, we're almost there. And it's a very exciting, dramatic sort of way of writing a song that is not as satisfying musically as having the song resolved to like. If this were the last phrase of the song, I'll play it on. 
Right. Like that's resolved. That sounds nice, but this is not resolved. This is the end of Act one of Act 2. I hope that's a useful phrase. That's where that note is in relation to the key that it's in. 

{ 00:14:43 }
But then they put it in a key that puts the vocal for this really in whoever is playing Eliza's sweet spot. Because in the show, basically she is the sort of lighter soprano and Angelica is more of the rapper Belter. And you know, in a Broadway show, generally when you have a belt mixer and a soprano, it's pretty hard not to fall in love with the belt mixer just cause Broadway is kind of about belt mixing in a lot of ways more than, you know, like head voicy stuff. And this song is written in the song is placed in a really interesting place in the actress who's playing Eliza's voice. It never gets high in, you know, operatic or anything. It's just in this very easy conversational place in her head voice. And then a couple of times she gets a little bit of toward the end of the song. It's high enough that she can show off a little bit of her belt mixing, but just a tiny little bit. Like Eliza spends maybe 30 seconds of the show in like a sort of heavy belt mix, whereas Angelica, you know, lives there most of the show. And then the song ends on a belt, but it's on a pretty low it's on like we've talked about this before. It's it's the Epinene A I call it, you know, in one day more. I was like, but he never saw me there. And it's like it's on that note and a natural in a lot of women's voices. It's just like a sweet spot. It's not too hard. It's not like to find gravity. We're having to sing crazy high notes. It's just in a nice open warm. You have it every time sounds great. It's high enough that it's exciting to hear, but it's not so high that you are really having to struggle with it. And so placing this song in this conversational place that gives her a little bit of belt mixing opportunity and then a little bit of easy but still nice sounding powerful belt is just really like saying isn't in musical theatre terms, kind of soft singing is sort of a softer person. Harder singing is a harder person. This lets a little bit of her grit and her power come through without it turning into like a American Idol riff off. It is an actor's role with somebody who's using her voice in the way that helps to tell the story rather than showing off. 

{ 00:16:50 }
Let's talk about the lyrics for Burn. So first of all, not very rhymey, especially in Hamilton, which is, you know, can have, you know, 10 rhymes in 20 seconds. This is not, this is an emotional song. It's very much like a thought process song. And it's about breaking patterns. So there's a lot of repeated patterns of lyrics that get broken. So even though the very beginning of the song, I saved every letter you wrote me, from the moment I read them, I knew you were mine. You said you were mine. I thought you were mine. So already, like, just great. Like, this is her thought process. I knew you were mine. You said you were mine. I thought you were mine. So like, she's kind of already picking apart that, like, OK, wait a minute. The version of Alexander who she'd idealized in her mind, she's now just working through her thoughts of like, OK, wait a minute. He is not everything he said he was. And also, there's something brilliant about a lyric that is basically the same thing except for one word is changing in all three of those lines. I knew you were mine. You said you were mine. I thought you were mine. Like, that's just good writing. And so it's a lot of talk about the letters. Like, a lot of this is being looked at through, you know, there's a million ways she could have talked about what Alexander did. And her feelings are she's using specifically the letters because then that gives her something physically to do later on in the song. Do you know what Angelica said when we saw your first letter arrive? She said be careful with that one love. He will do what it takes to survive. So a little bit of a rhyme there, but it's mainly told through the story of her letters with Hamilton because that is a lot of the way that their love unfolded. And that's the lens that the song is choosing to look at them through. So Angelica is already being very cerebral and being like, hey, you got stars in your eyes, but you know, keep a level head about you. And then the next verse is you. And your words flooded my senses. Your sentences left me defenseless. You built me palaces out of paragraphs. You built cathedrals. Like, so that is just a beautiful piece of poetry. The euphony of all the different repeated sounds like it's not exactly rhyming, but it's just, it's just it's poetry. 

{ 00:18:56 }
And what's exciting about this is that it's her saying it. Because this whole show, everyone's talking about what a great writer Alexander Hamilton is. And no one's ever talked about what a great writer Eliza is. And this is her showing, not telling that she's no dumb, dumb. She's describing what he did, the beauty of his writing with beauty of her writing or, or thought process in its own right. And so that's kind of exciting. That's also like, hey, guys, remember, Eliza is a formidable person, not just the fangirl of our main character. And that says when you remind the world seemed to burn. And so this is the first of several different meanings of the word burn. So here she's using it as meaning. It was passionate. You know, it was fiery in a good way. And then Speaking of letters, you publish the letter she wrote you. You told the whole world how you brought this girl into our bed and in clearing your name, you've ruined our lives. So that's basically the the premise of the plot point that's happening right now just stated really clearly. This next paragraph sort of irked me when I first heard it. Do you know what Angelica said when she read what you'd done? She said you've married an Icarus. He has flown too close to the sun. And it's like a little bit like. It's kind of cold, cerebral advice. Like when your sister's world has been, you know, rocked upside down, She's like, well, I kind of warned you. And also that's just who he is. And also, I'm going to use this Greek mythology reference. It's Greek mythology, right? I think so. But it also brings us back to Angelica is the cerebral one. Eliza is the emotional one, and Angelica is on her side. It reminds us that Angelica, you know, rejected Hamilton's attempts to be like, hey, I'm so glad you're here. This is upsetting for all of us. And she's like, no, no, I'm here for my sister, asshole. And so this is even in Angelica's way, that is truthful to her character, which is, you know, leading with her head. She is comforting in her own way, Eliza, even if it's not, you know, exactly what you would like to be comforted by. It still is. Angelica is on Team Eliza, not Team Alexander, which is something that we need to hear. 

{ 00:20:57 }
And then the most exciting part of the song for me is the climax of it, which is how they perceived you, you, you, you. And it's like basically a crescendo on the same note. And the actress, every time that I've seen it, uses that same note. Those 4U's crescendoing as each of them is like a little monologue, almost like it's like she's realizing, oh it has been about you this whole time. You, you, you fucking selfish asshole. 
So you, you you is her diagnosing what the problem is. And then at that moment is when she decides to burn all of the letters. The physical stage action that she's taking is to burn the letters, which symbolically and also just practically speaking, deprives the world forever and ever and ever of knowing what she thought, except for us who are sitting in the audience, who are hearing in the world of the show what she thought. And then we get to the part that is also really thrilling. The world has no right to my heart. The world has no place in our bed. They don't get to know what I thought. I'm burning the memories, burning the letters that might have redeemed you. Her melody modulates up. You forfeit all right to my heart. You forfeit the place in our bed. You'll sleep in your office instead with only the memories of when you were mine, which is just like the part where you're just like, you just want to stand up and cheer like when she finally gets to this place. And also it gives her vocally, this is her like gritty belt mixy place. But also it's just she's a filled with such righteous indignation and anger and it's expressing it finally. And we are just so on her side. Like we you really do literally just want to stand up and be like, yeah, yeah, yeah. This little intense part ends up when you were mine, which is a big open but still not that high. It's an A note and then a new meaning of I hope that you burn, meaning I hope that you burn in hell, which is, you know, maybe maybe one step too far. 

{ 00:22:57 }
Like it gives her a place to come back from because she has slightly, you know, said this thing. You know, if if you were, you know, a Christian who really literally believes in the afterlife and everything, I don't think that she wants him to literally be tortured for eternity. But that is, you know, very much a human thing that you would say as I hope that you burn. And it's also from sweet Eliza. Having her get to a place where she can just express this venom toward him is very exciting to see. And then it also again, gives us a place to come back from after the song because things are about to get worse. Or the characters in the show, Eliza in particular. So there's something in musical theatre, lyric writing and song conception, but it's really lyric writing mostly where it gets expressed that I call the Maria problem. So in West Side Story, Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics. Leonard Bernstein wrote the music. When they handed over the song to Jerome Robbins, the director and choreographer. Maria, the sorry, the song we're talking about is Maria. Jerome Robbins is like, well, what's going to happen during the song? And they're like, I don't know, you're the director. Like I these are the words. This is the music. It's a great song. Here you go. And he's like, but what, what's the actor going to be doing? And sometimes, like, you know, he's like running through the streets of, you know, New York. And Drew Robins is like, what? How are we having someone run through the streets of New York for 5 minutes on a stage? You know, like, and so, you know, obviously they worked it out and, you know, Maria has a great song, but that was something that Sondheim talked about a lot that he took to heart, that like, OK, you need to have people have things to do to ring a song. And so he built in physical business. Even if it's not always what ends up happening, at least the fact that he is leaving space for physical business to happen makes it, you know, makes it a better song so that you don't just have people standing there singing ballads for 5 minutes, which lesser writers do. Lin Manuel Miranda is not a lesser writer, obviously. And so he built in the burning of the paper of her letters and his letters into this song, which is really exciting. He built it in by the title, calling it burn, having burn being used in several different ways throughout the song, getting her script wise to a point where she was going to burn the letters and then letting her burn the letters. 

{ 00:25:07 }
And so it's really exciting to have something. And also it's like a real thing. It's not like pretend burning. She's actually burning letters on stage during this intimate, emotional song. It really is a great understanding of what an actor needs to perform, what a singer needs to perform and what an audience wants. Like, this song is such a great piece of musical theatre. And it makes me like wonder if because when he was writing the show, I think he wasn't sure if he's going to play Hamilton or Burr, but he wanted to play one of them, probably Hamilton. But also, you know, he was writing the show called Hamilton that presumably is about Alexander Hamilton, that he didn't want the woman playing opposite him or whoever was playing Hamilton to just be the sort of afterthought of a long-suffering wife. So he really gives this song as like a gift to the actress, and that's like paying tribute to the human being Eliza Hamilton. And it makes sure that we know that she's a formidable person and that she is really respected by the author of the show, which is how we as an audience should feel. And we should really respect her, which is really lovely. This song was originally done by Philippa Sue as the original Eliza. Would you go you can watch, right? Everybody can watch that. I was like, don't watch bootlegs, but watch bootlegs. But no, you don't have to watch bootlegs. It's on Disney Plus. So if you I mean, if you haven't, I don't think there are a lot of people listening to this podcast who have not watched Hamilton on Disney plus. But if you haven't, you know, just go do that right now. This is a song that every time I see the show, it is really moving. It's cathartic and it really gets you in an emotional place to be able to handle what happens next in the show. And it also really just gives the actress who is playing Eliza and they have gotten a murderers row of amazing actresses to play Eliza first and foremost. Obviously Philippa Sue who originated it. It just really let's you see inside of their souls and how much spine and how much dignity they are able to claim. And without the song, the whole backbone of the show would not be nearly as strong and the ending would not be nearly as powerful. 

{ 00:27:09 }
So that was burned from Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda. And this has been the Nothing Like Broadway podcast. Please follow us on Instagram at Nothing Like Broadway. Please, you know, rate this podcast, give us five stars and give us a good review really helps us out on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you're listening to it. And let's go out listening to a little bit of Philippa Sue singing Burn from the original cast album of Hamilton. Didn't you? You forfeit all rights to my heart. You forfeit the place in our bed. You'll sleep in your office and stay without me. The memories of when you were.