Wrote My Way Out

This song features Nas trading lyrics with his protégée Dave East, California based R&B singer Aloe Blacc and Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, on the power of the written word.

The track was recorded for The Hamilton Mixtape and takes its title, along with samples of the underlying piano, from "Hurricane," a tune from the original Hamilton Broadway production. "Hurricane" details Alexander Hamilton looking back at his early days on the island of St. Croix, when his hometown was hit by a hurricane. The founding father's open and honest essay on the devastation of the hurricane funded his move to New York. Miranda explained to iHeartRadio: "The song is based on the lyric in a song called 'Hurricane,' where Hamilton is sort of at a personal and professional crossroads, and he's sort of thinking about his life and how he wrote his way out of his circumstances. To me, that's the key to Hamilton is at every stage of his life, writing either saves him or ruins him, and so that to me is what makes him a proto-hip-hop artist."

Lin-Manuel Miranda also played the part of Alexander Hamilton in the original Hamilton production. He told Entertainment Weekly, that he wasn't originally wasn't going to let any of the original cast perform on the mixtape. Miranda added, "I heard that beat, and I heard Nas' verse, and I had some s--t to say, and I broke my own rule. I felt like, if I'm going to put my two cents anywhere, that would be the place to do it."