Alex Lacamoire Talks Mixing HAMILTON Album with References to The Beatles and More

While most HAMILTON fans can sing just about every word of the show, they may not know that they have Alex Lacamoire to thank for the orchestrations and final sound of the album itself.

Besides serving as music director, orchestrating the score and co-arranging the show with songwriter and star Lin-Manuel Miranda, music Lacamoire conducts and plays keyboard for seven performances a week. He recently sat down to discuss his process and what influenced his orchestrations, beginning with his friendship with Miranda.

"Once I met Lin, he opened my mind because here was a dude who was loving on 'Defying Gravity' just as much as he was loving on Eminem's 'Lose Yourself,'" Lacamoire says. "I had always heard the music and always listened to it, a little bit passively, but because of Lin, I started to actively listen to what hip-hop was doing."

Lacamoire says that after finalizing the music for the show every night, they got to enhance it even more for the album, which was released in September. "What's wonderful about the cast recording is we were able to get really detailed about things. You're always going to be able to hear something on a cast album in a different way because it's meant to be digested in your ears." He adds that using headphones adds to the experience as well, "I love listening to things on headphones because you really can pick out the details of things so we really have ear candy all over the record. We were really able to highlight certain things that you might not be able to notice in the theater."

He also says there are certain effects they chose not to use in the live show that might detract from the action, but that they added in for the album. "If you listen to "My Shot," there's a ton of cool effects on people's voices," Lacamoire says. "There's a moment where one of the guys goes 'Wooo!' and you hear it echo, panning back and forth. In 'Wait for It,' the vocals really pan left and right. It really echoes in different parts of the chamber, if you will. Those are things that you can really only do on a record because if you do too much cool stuff onstage, you start losing focus on the story and it distracts you, so the record was a chance for us to do things that you might not be able to experience in the theater."

As for "easter eggs," Lacamoire says that yes, the score is infused with them.

"There's a moment in "My Shot" where Lin quotes a Mobb Deep song, so as you hear the lyric "I'm only 19 but my mind is older;" there's a rising line from "Shook Ones Part II" that we wound up putting on the strings as an homage. So the violins do this little smeary thing under that lyric. "You'll Be Back" has a bunch of Beatles references in the orchestration, with nods to "Mr. Kite," "Getting Better," and "Penny Lane.""

Lacamoire adds that collaboration with Questlove was essential to the way the final HAMILTON album turned out, "It was so great. The Roots for me were super instrumental in pushing us to go further with the album. Their big things were one, turn up the drums because that's where the hip-hop lies, and number two was to really capitalize on the use of the effects. Whenever we had a record scratch, Questlove was like, "Turn that up." If you listen to "My Shot," when you hear Lin with some distortion on his voice when he goes "Enter me (He says in parentheses)" that was Questlovle's idea. Those are things that you don't normally find on cast albums, meaning they're really like ornaments. And hip-hop records are full of cool ear candy moments."

Check out the original interview here.

From the creative team behind the Tony Award-winning In The Heights comes a wildly inventive new musical about the scrappy young immigrant who forever changed America: Alexander Hamilton. Tony and Grammy Award winner Lin-Manuel Miranda wields his pen and takes the stage as the unlikely founding father determined to make his mark on a new nation as hungry and ambitious as he is.

From bastard orphan to Washington's right hand man, rebel to war hero, loving husband caught in the country's first sex scandal to Treasury head who made an untrusting world believe in the American economy, Hamilton is an exploration of a political mastermind. George Washington,Thomas Jefferson, Eliza Hamilton, and lifelong Hamilton friend and foe, Aaron Burr, all attend this revolutionary tale of America's fiery past told through the sounds of the ever-changing nation we've become. Tony Award nominee Thomas Kail directs this new musical about taking your shot, speaking your mind, and turning the world upside down.