Here's an F-bomb-filled anthem about Benjamin Franklin that never made it into Lin-Manuel Miranda's hit musical, Hamilton. It's a humorous tune called "Benjamin Franklin's Song" and it's sung by The Decemberists.
The band shares the song's story:
HAMILTON, as you probably know, is an American musical theater production written by a guy named Lin-Manuel Miranda. Lots of people have seen it, lots of people are continuing to see it, lots of people have raved about it. We saw a production of it in New York last year and we can tell you: it’s very very good. And important. And transformative to our countrys current milieu. Etc.
Well, it happens that Mr. Miranda reached out to our own Colin Meloy to put music to a set of lyrics that had been written for HAMILTON but had never been used: a first-person introduction to one of the US’s founding fathers, Mr. Benjamin Franklin. Lin said that he’d wanted to include Franklin as a character in the show initially, but it just never quite worked something about not wanting to remove the audience more than once from the action taking place in our nascent United States. Funnily enough, he said he’d imagined Franklin singing in a sort of Decemberist-y way, whatever that means.
FAST FORWARD TO 2016: Lin passed on the lyrics to Colin, who was very much up to the task, and a new song was born: BEN FRANKLIN’S SONG, to be exact. We really like it. It’s very swear-y, but there’s a clean version too. And you can listen to it now!
"Benjamin Franklin's Song" is the first out of the gate for a new Hamilton series called Hamildrops. For every month in 2018, the series promises to drop new Hamilton content.
