Songfacts®:

• "Waiting On A Miracle" is a Colombian waltz sung by Stephanie Beatriz, who played Rosa Diaz on the TV series Brooklyn Nine-Nine, for the Disney Movie Encanto. Beatriz plays Mirabel Madrigal, a Colombian teenager raised in a household where everybody else has a special supernatural gift. Because Mirabel is the only member of her family with no magical powers, she feels like an outsider.
  
  At first, Mirabel pretends she's fine just supporting the rest of her family, but as the song proceeds, she longs for a magical gift of her own. "'Waiting on a Miracle' is Mirabel's yearning to belong," Beatriz explained in a Behind the Lyrics Featurette. "There's something that clicks inside her where she realizes the wheels are in motion for her to chase down her destiny. I like these heroine songs so much. You go on this major journey with a character and suddenly you know her better from the inside."
• Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote "Waiting On A Miracle," along with all the other Encanto songs. He found it one of the most difficult tunes to write for the movie. "The 'I want' song is always hard," he told Variety. "You have to make the whole movie to understand the journey that Mirabel's got to go on and what the question is going to be, so you have to go at it backwards."
  
• Back in 2018, Miranda accompanied scriptwriters Jared Bush and Byron Howard on a research trip to Colombia. What finally cracked "Waiting on a Miracle" was going back to listening to the music they recorded while visiting the South American country. "There were so many Colombian waltzes that were in three-quarter time," he said. "In my head, I had to write a big Disney pop anthem. But once I committed to the three-quarter time, the song wrote itself."
• Stephanie Beatriz was waiting for her own personal little miracle when she recorded her vocals for his hopeful ballad. The actress was in labor as she laid down "Waiting on a Miracle."
  
  "I didn't want to tell anybody at Disney because I didn't want anyone to freak out," she told Variety, "but I was already having some contractions when we were scheduled to record that day. I was like, 'Well, fingers crossed I finish the song before [the baby] comes!'"
  
  Beatriz gave birth the very next day to daughter Rosaline.