I think every writer's had the experience of having a really good idea, waiting to write it, and then once you write it, you're like, "Oh I kind of got past the sell by date on this." I'm not connected to the initial spark that was the idea. A lot of that's about staying open.

The distance between where I am and where I want to be seems impossibly large.

I want as many people to see the show [Hamilton] in its musical theater form as possible before it's translated, and whether it's a good act of translation or a bad act of translation, it's a leap, and very few stage shows manage the leap successfully.

I think, there are a couple of songs. I'm really proud of How far I'll Go. I literally locked myself up in my childhood bedroom at my parents' house to write those lyrics. I wanted to get to my angstiest possible place. So I went method on that.

People who don't like musicals like, 'why are they singing? Why aren't they just talking? If you make the lyric feel really conversational, it's much easier for them to bridge that gap.

[Opetaia Foa'i] brought in the melody and the lyrics, but the lyrics were in Tokelauan, and so, we talked about what it could mean and whether this could be the ancestor song. So, I started writing English lyrics to sort of the same melody.

I grew up in the time just when cassettes were waning and CDs were growing. And so mix tapes - and not mix CDs - mix tapes were an important part of the friendship and mating rituals of New York adolescents. If you were a girl and I wanted you - to show you I like you, I would make you a 90-minute cassette wherein I would show off my tastes. I would play you a musical theater song next to a hip-hop song next to an oldie next to some pop song you maybe never heard, also subliminally telling you how much I like you with all these songs.