![]() It was sad,” to which he responded, “You’re a robot!”). He says one barometer of the song’s effectiveness is if it doesn’t fail to move his wife (“who’s not an easy cry,” he says, spilling that when he showed her “It’s a Wonderful Life,” her cool assessment was, “It was good. There’s good stuff on the other side of the painful part.’” In a lot of ways, I am the narrator,” he says, laughing at himself, “looking at myself at age 19 like, ‘Buddy, it’s OK. We were starting to lead different lives. We were both nice people, so we probably stayed in that relationship a couple years longer than we should have, even though the world was pulling us apart. I was with my high school sweetheart for 4 ½ years. “I think of my first serious relationship. Something better is on the other side of this thing that hurts.’ It’s not, ‘I’m holding on to you so tight, but something is changing’ it’s this wiser narrator who’s looking at these poor caterpillars: ‘Guys, it’s going to be OK. The narrator isn’t one of the caterpillars. “I love that there’s an omniscient narrator in it. “First and foremost, it’s a love song,” says Miranda of the folk tune Abuela and her husband would have known. It’s also a song that foreshadows central messages of the film, with its metaphor addressing both Abuela’s need to allow those she loves to grow and change, and the hopeful, external view that beyond that pain, there is beautiful life. It’s happening to them.’ He gave me that note and I swapped it out for ‘ para el viento,’ which is ‘They’re in the way of the wind.’ ” ![]() “It’s these sentence fragments, right? ‘Dos oruguitas / Para el viento.’ I think my original word was ‘Contra el viento,’ which in English I have as ‘ Against the weather.’ He was like, ‘“ Contra el viento” is like you’re fighting the wind. “I sent it to my dad as the grammar police,” he says. Then because it’s so contained, it explodes on the bridge.”Īdding to the complexity of Miranda’s “simple” task was writing it in Spanish, a first for him. “Well, it’s pretty beautiful to be able to go up there, right? It’s all in here,” his fingers poke at the keys without his hand moving, “I mean, four notes. ![]() “Very simply, it’s a descending bass line with a surprising lift in the middle. “Yes, it would definitely be in a different key if I’d written it on guitar,” he says, laughing, as he picks through the bones of the song on a piano over a Zoom call. With its story of two caterpillars in love and facing winds of change, the song almost passes that test. “It has to pass the test that one person who knows three chords can play the song.” In his songs for “ Encanto,” for instance, his familiar verbal gymnastics grace “ Surface Pressure” and layers of character and disparate Latin-influenced musical styles inform the breakout hit “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.” (All eight songs he wrote for the film recently charted - simultaneously).īut this year, he received his second Oscar nomination for perhaps the simplest song in the collection: “ Dos Oruguitas,” his attempt at a “Colombian folk song that feels like it’s always existed,” as he previously told The Times. When describing the work of Lin-Manuel Miranda, “simple” doesn’t rush to mind.
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