About “You’ll Be Back”

This song, framed as a letter from King George to the colonists, is a kind of extended double entendre. It addresses the grievances of the colonists and asserts George’s authority, but in form and wording it echos any number of other songs which have a similarly creepy “you want to leave me, but you can’t really” vibe.

“You’ll Be Back” and subsequent King George songs are dramatically different in style from the rest of Hamilton. Where most of Hamilton tends towards the conventions of hip-hop/rap and R&B, King George’s music pays homage to British Invasion pop, particularly The Beatles. It creates a tonal separation between the old school, white monarchy in Britain and the young revolutionaries in the colonies (most of whom are played by actors of color).

(Also, British Invasion… geddit?)

King George almost exclusively employs simple rhyme (only rhyming the last syllable of each line) and only uses homophones or straight-up repetition to create internal rhyme (for instance, in the first verse, price is rhymed internally with itself, while tea is paired with sea and see—hilariously, homophone rhyme is sometimes called rich rhyme). This contrasts intensely with the revolutionaries' use of complex and internal rhyme nearly constantly (for instance, all over “Aaron Burr, sir”). George also fills his lyrics with “da da da” rather than the intricate background rapping we see in “Guns and Ships” or “My Shot,” indicating a more simplistic approach to language than the Americans.

This was the first song that Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote for the musical:

When my wife and I got married in 2010, we went on our honeymoon and — again — I have the idea for Hamilton, and I wrote the King George song on our honeymoon without a piano around, and then when I got back from our honeymoon our producers were like, the show [In The Heights]’s closing.

The tone and much of the language for this song appears to come from an actual address King George III made to Parliament on October 27, 1775. In the address, as in the song, George uses the words “loyal” and “subject” several times, followed by a proclamation that he will use force to put a speedy end to the revolt in America. From the address: