Lin-Manuel Miranda recorded the new cantina song
If you think reading this is the best treat you can have on Star Wars Day, you’d almost be right, but there’s one thing that beats it — Hamilton. Hamilton beats everything.
Two years ago, on Star Wars Day, J.J. Abrams made his Broadway debut outside the Richard Rodgers Theatre with Hamilton writer, composer and star Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Together, accompanied by melodica and strings, Miranda and Abrams performed “Jabba Flow,” the song which can be heard in Maz’s cantina on Takodana.
Abrams and Miranda performed the song for the regular Ham4Ham show, which takes place outside the Hamilton theater as entertainment for the crowds queuing up to enter the ticket lottery.
Abrams explained how the song-writing partnership came into being. He attended a performance of Hamilton (we’re jealous) and met Miranda in the interval. Being a huge Star Wars fan, Miranda joked that if Abrams needed a cantina song, he was ready to step up and write it for him.
As fate would have it, Abrams did need a cantina song. As told by Abrams when he appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, long-time Star Wars composer John Williams said he’d rather not write the music for that scene, so Abrams emailed Miranda to take him up on the offer. They wrote together over email, with Lin not even seeing the scene he had scored until after the movie’s release.
Miranda and Abrams also explained at the Ham4Ham that the song’s lyrics are in Huttese (Jabba the Hutt’s language), and they translate as “No, lover lover: it wasn’t me”, making it the Huttese version of Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me.”
Who knew Hutt music could be so cool?