Songfacts®:

• This song features Nas trading lyrics with his protégée Dave East, California based R&B singer Aloe Blacc and Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, on the power of the written word.
• The track was recorded for The Hamilton Mixtape and takes its title, along with samples of the underlying piano, from "Hurricane," a tune from the original Hamilton Broadway production.
  
  "Hurricane" details Alexander Hamilton looking back at his early days on the island of St. Croix, when his hometown was hit by a hurricane. The founding father's open and honest essay on the devastation of the hurricane funded his move to New York.
  
  Miranda explained to iHeartRadio:
  
  "The song is based on the lyric in a song called 'Hurricane,' where Hamilton is sort of at a personal and professional crossroads, and he's sort of thinking about his life and how he wrote his way out of his circumstances. To me, that's the key to Hamilton is at every stage of his life, writing either saves him or ruins him, and so that to me is what makes him a proto-hip-hop artist."
• Lin-Manuel Miranda also played the part of Alexander Hamilton in the original Hamilton production. He told Entertainment Weekly, that he wasn't originally wasn't going to let any of the original cast perform on the mixtape. Miranda added, "I heard that beat, and I heard Nas' verse, and I had some s--t to say, and I broke my own rule. I felt like, if I'm going to put my two cents anywhere, that would be the place to do it."
• Miranda's verse apparently made his mom cry: "I'm talking about stuff that happened when I was very young," he said. "It really hit her hard."
• Nas ties this song during his verse to his second album,1996's It Was Written. Miranda discussed Nas' contribution with iHeartRadio:
  
  "I think my favorite hip-hop artists write about their circumstances and their world so well that they make is universal and they transcend it. No one embodies this more than Nas. Illmatic is a document, it's a time capsule of Queensbridge, it's a time capsule of New York in the '80s and '90s, and the inner-city, and the projects, and it's so beautiful that anyone in the world can relate to it. To have Nas bless us with that verse, and really talk about that, when he says, 'The very definition of what it was written means.' Referencing his own It Was Written, that's incredible... it's chill-inducing."
• Aloe Blacc croons the hook and the bridge. He previously appeared on the same song as Nas when he and the Illmatic rapper both featured on Fashawn's "Something to Believe in." Blacc told Billboard magazine:
  
  "I got a different feel for the song, 'Wrote My Way Out.' So when the A&R, Riggs at Atlantic, wanted me to do the song, I took it to my studio and recorded a few different ideas around it. Lin had weighed in on the ideas he thought were best.
  
  And just a few weeks ago, actually, I recorded the final version in New York. It went through a few different iterations. There was talk of different rappers who would be on it. But I'm really happy with the final line-up; I'm so glad to be on another song with Nas."