Songfacts®:

• Jessica Darrow rose to fame playing the role of Sarah in Robert Tinnell's 2019 film Feast of the Seven Fishes. The Cuban-American actress successfully auditioned for Disney's animated movie Encanto just before the pandemic. The movie is about a Colombian family with magical powers; Darrow plays Luisa, whose gift is superhuman strength. This reggaeton song is her solo piece.
• As the strong member of her family, Luisa has to shoulder physically heavy burdens. Though appearing "as tough as the crust of the earth" on the outside, underneath she feels the pressure of expectation and worries about letting others down.
  
  Pressure like a drip, drip, drip, that'll never stop, woah-oh
  Pressure that'll tip, tip, tip 'til you just go pop, woah-oh-oh-oh
  Give it to your sister, your sister's older
  Give her all the heavy things we can't shoulder
• Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote "Surface Pressure" along with all the other Encanto songs. Miranda is the baby of his family and grew up with a six-year-older sister, Luz. He admits to having it easier than Luz, who had to carry burdens he never did. "I remember my parents woke my sister up to put together a He-Man playset for Christmas before I woke up," he recalled to Variety. "They wanted it to be fully assembled when I woke up on Christmas morning. I put all of that angst and all of those moments into Luisa."
• Jessica Darrow did three total recordings of "Surface Pressure." She told Billboard her first recording of the song was before she'd done much of her dialogue, so "it colored the rest of my performance and creation of Luisa."
  
  When Darrow got to her final recording a month later, Miranda encouraged her to lean into the emotional message behind the song and how it made her feel deep down. He told her, "You don't have to worry about sounding perfect. Just ride these notes on the song and see where it goes."
  
  Darrow took on board Miranda's direction, which tied in with Luisa's journey. "You don't have to be so perfect. Stop being so rigid," she told herself.
• When Miranda wrote "Surface Pressure," in his head he was trying to cross a tough reggaetón song with quiet vocals, something like, "The Love Cats" by The Cure.
  
  "I think we had the song before we cast the role, but the drawing of Luisa existed, so I knew she'd have a deeper voice, and I was like, 'Please, please, please find me an alto,'" he recalled to Billboard. "And Jess Darrow has such a wonderful and distinctive voice. The character never doesn't sound like herself, and I love that about it."