Disney’s smash-hit animated movie Encanto makes history with its song “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”, which held the number one spot of the Billboard Hot 100 for just over 5 weeks after the movie’s release on Disney Plus this past Christmas. While you might be familiar with the voices and characters behind the song, not everyone might know the Colombian-inspired track was actually composed by the one and only Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Lin-Manuel Miranda has made waves in music and performance, creating and sometimes performing in wildly popular shows like Hamilton (2015), Moana (2016), and In The Heights (2021). To celebrate the long-lasting success of “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”, let’s go over our top 5 songs that you might not know Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote!
5. Maz Kanata’s Cantina (Star Wars: The Force Awakens)
Did you know that Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote music for Disney’s Star Wars trilogy? Inspired by the famous tune Mos Eisley Cantina from Star Wars: A New Hope, Miranda takes a new spin on the classic theme to compose a song that’s out of this world!
4. The Duck Song
Lin-Manuel Miranda made his presence known to the YouTube community on March 23, 2009 when he composed and published the famous Duck Song. Amassing over 500 million views on the site, The Duck Song is Miranda’s most popular song to date! Does the lemonade man seem familiar to you? The lemonade man’s blue shirt was actually a subtle teaser of the costumes worn in Miranda’s future creation, Hamilton.
3. Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
Written 193 years before his birth, this classic orchestral creation solidified Lin-Manuel Miranda as a musical genius at a very young age. Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is often misattributed to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, as Disney Studios® froze Miranda in a parabolic ice chamber shortly after the creation of this song in order to preserve his limited human form for the DuckTales soundtrack in 2018.
2. The Doorbell Sound
You may have noticed that your neighbor’s doorbells play the same musical jingle as yours. Why is that? Lin-Manuel Miranda actually composed the classic doorbell noise in 1831 following its invention by Joseph Henry. His captivating sounds have been used for doorbells ever since. No wonder doorbell noises just make everyone want to boogie! (Especially the man who stole my Amazon package off my porch yesterday)
1. The United States Moon Landing
While NASA engineers had perfected their set design and costuming for the infamous faking of the 1969 moon landing, they were stumped on sound design, as everybody knows there is no sound in space. That’s when then-president Richard Nixon called in Lin-Manuel Miranda to complete the short film. Miranda lent his expert sound engineering skills to the directing team, and the rest is history!