Satisfied Lyrics – Hamilton

Song Overview

Personal Review

I first caught “Satisfied” at the Public Theater in early 2015, squeezed between two NYU students who mouthed lyrics syllable long before the cast album existed. The beat snapped backward and lights flickering, bodies moon-walking in reverse. I’d spent years chronicling Broadway show-stoppers, yet this one felt like hip-hop’s answer to Sondheim’s “Getting Married Today” shot through a strobe. The rush is visceral: Angelica raps at 144 words per minute, violins saw sixteenth-notes, and the turntable spins the company like a vinyl sample gone rogue. By the final “be satisfied,” the audience isn’t cheering so much as gasping, as if Miranda reached into their chests and hit rewind on their regrets.

Song Meaning and Annotations

Lin-Manuel Miranda lifts the song’s title from an 18th-century letter where Angelica Schuyler tells Hamilton she “cannot be so easily satisfied.” The lyric becomes a thesis on hunger: political, romantic, existential. Structure mirrors content: we begin at Eliza’s wedding toast, then rewind to re-stage the previous number, “Helpless,” from her vantage. The gimmick isn’t mere stagecraft; it’s a musical essay on point-of-view, showing how identical events mutate under new narration.

Harmonically, the piece halves the fiery i-III-iv-vi-V progression of “My Shot,” dragging ambition into slow-motion introspection 808-kicks ground the track in modern R&B, while string ostinatos keep one foot in golden-age Broadway. Alex Lacamoire’s orchestration weaves harp glissandi beneath rapid-fire triplets —angelic and razor-edged at once.

Angelica’s flow pivots between witty banter and Busta-level tongue twisters. Three truths—class constraint, social strategy, sisterly loyalty, snap together like puzzle pieces. Each “Number one! … Number two! … Number three!” lands on the downbeat, underlined by brass stabs, as if fate itself is ticking off bullet points.

“He’s penniless, he’s flying by the seat of his pants…
Nice going, Angelica, he was right—
You will never be satisfied.”

The language blurs 18th-century diction with downtown swagger. “Peach fuzz” collides with “penniless,” mixing school-yard tease and socio-economic readout. The metaphor of rewinding time crystallizes heartache: Angelica can revisit the moment forever, but she can’t rewrite the outcome.

Miranda also bends history for thematic punch; real-life Angelica was already married, yet the show reframes her sacrifice to heighten dramatic stakes. That choice ignites debate about historical fidelity versus emotional truth, proving the musical’s core argument: who lives, who dies, who tells your story.

Verse Highlights

Verse 1

Begins with Laurens’ toast, establishing celebratory tempo before the record scratches. Sparse horns hint at the tension Angelica masks behind a smile.

Chorus / Rewind

The DJ-style backspin whooshes us into Angelica’s memory. Synth sub-bass drops out, leaving hand-claps and pizzicato strings—time stripped to bare mechanics.

Rap Monologue

Sixteen bars without breath. Rhymes chain (“catch / stance / chance / askance”) like gears accelerating a clock motor, underscoring Angelica’s analytical mind.

Tags: Hip-Hop, R&B, Broadway, Storytelling, Feminist-Perspective

Annotations

The Hamilton show-stopper “Satisfied” rotates the stage—and the narrative—until perspective itself pirouettes. Sung by Renée Elise Goldsberry as Angelica Schuyler, the piece rewinds the giddy wedding number “Helpless,” then lets us witness the same December 1780 celebration through the quicksilver mind of the maid-of-honor who secretly sacrifices her own desire. With its verbal cartwheels, hip-hop citations, and historical Easter eggs, this song captures an urgent truth: history, like a turntable, depends on who drops the needle. Below, the original Broadway cast’s whirlwind is unpacked and humanized for readers hungry to savor every line of the “Satisfied” Lyrics.

Overview

Alright, alright. That’s what I’m talkin’ about!

John Laurens—Hamilton’s best man on stage, though historically stuck on British parole in Pennsylvania—opens the toast with Anthony Ramos’s signature catchphrase. In real letters, the real Hamilton wrote, he teased Laurens with “consummation” jokes that danced perilously close to ménage-à-trois territory. Laurens never made the ceremony, but the show keeps him in the room where it happens, seasoning facts with theatrical flair.

Maid of honor Angelica Schuyler

A neat anachronism: by the winter of 1780 the real Angelica was already Mrs. John Barker Church with two children. Yet the musical opts for dramatic economy, letting her appear single so that “maid of honor” can roll off the tongue and the gossip columns of New York City can bristle. Eighteenth-century etiquette would have called her “Mrs. Church,” but she keeps her maiden name here —and her options, briefly, open.

A toast to the groom! … To the bride! … To the union!

The chorus pivots from matrimony to revolution in a single breath. “Union” operates as a double entendre: the union of Hamilton and Eliza, and the fledgling Union of thirteen fractious states. Angelica’s toast foreshadows Act II tensions, when Hamilton’s loyalty to family collides with his devotion to the nation.

May you always… be satisfied.

The phrase lands as blessing, plea, and prophecy. Angelica knows her brother-in-law will outgrow every triumph. The line also borrows dueling vocabulary, seeking “satisfaction”, shadowing the bullet-strewn horizon.

Musical & Staging Techniques

Rewind, Rewind… I remember that night, I just might…

DJ scratches, chopped samples from “Helpless,” and the counter-clockwise turntable fling the audience back in time. The sound design nods to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s improv troupe, Freestyle Love Supreme, where performers literally shouted “rewind” to replay a scene with new twists. Here, the effect mirrors her own mental stuck-groove: she has replayed that first meeting with Hamilton so often that the memory warps like vinyl.

Goldsberry’s rapid-fire rap borrows the cadences of Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass,” while the background chant “revolution” echoes Rent’s “La Vie Boheme.” Musically, the song slows the harmonic engine of “My Shot” to half-time minor-mode churn—ambition seen through candle-flame instead of flint-spark.

Character Dynamics

You strike me as a woman who has never been satisfied.

Is Hamilton flirting or diagnosing? Angelica’s ice-cool “You forget yourself” blurs the answer. The dialogue quotes an authentic 1790 letter in which she claims, “cannot be so easily satisfied.” The musical repurposes her words as a verbal tennis match of intellect and attraction.

So, so, so—
So this is what it feels like to match wits…
It’s Ben Franklin with a key and a kite! You see it, right?

Angelica’s mind fires “at a million miles an hour,” doubling words, splicing rhymes inside rhymes, and lighting lanterns on cue. The Franklin image flickers overhead as only one lantern actually ignites, visual shorthand for instantaneous chemistry. Within two minutes, maybe three minutes—internal rhyme turns “three minutes / agreement it’s / dream and it’s” into giddy syncopation—she has fully parsed Hamilton’s ambition, poverty, and peach-fuzz youth.

Unimportant. There’s a million things I haven’t done, but just you wait…

High society judges lineage; Hamilton deflects. Angelica notices the fidget, the askance glance, tells mittens off his poker face. Their melodies intertwine: he sings his self-introducing motif; she matches, then embellishes. Eliza, by contrast, will later beatbox rather than rap, content to furnish rhythm for others; She prefers verbal pyrotechnics.

The Three Fundamental Truths

Number one! I’m a girl in a world in which my only job is to marry rich…

Truth one: duty. Philip Schuyler has no sons; Angelica must climb the ladder for everyone. In real life, she had already eloped with the dueling Briton John Church, but the show telescopes timelines to heighten stakes.

Number two! He’s after me ’cause I’m a Schuyler sister…
Maybe that is why I introduce him to Eliza—now that’s his bride.

Truth two: strategy. Angelica sees Hamilton’s social calculus—and chooses to redirect the equation toward her younger sister, whose marital prospects carry less geopolitical weight.

Number three! I know my sister like I know my own mind…

Truth three: love. Eliza’s trusting heart would silently resign if Angelica spoke her feelings. Better, then, to become the perpetual third wheel and keep “Alexander’s eyes” in her life at any cost. The “Rule of Three” grants rhetorical punch—and triple heartbreak.

Historical & Cultural References

Angelica’s diction ricochets from Shakespearean repetition (dreamlike candlelight / like a dream) to Destiny’s Child’s modern “soldier boy,” from senry? haiku form (

If it takes fighting a war for us to meet,
it will have been worth it.

Laurens’s opening leer, the wartime toast “to the revolution,” and Angelica’s Civil War-tinged “Union” echo show how every private moment sits inside larger national convulsions. Satisfaction is both bedroom and battleground vocabulary: soldiers duel for it, newlyweds pray for it, founders die still craving it.

Return to the Toast

To the groom! To the bride!
From your sister — who is always by your side…

The da-capo reprise lands with new heft; what seemed celebratory now reads as self-authored epitaph. Angelica’s vocal line leaps an octave, “smiling through her tears.” She toasts their union while mourning her own exile to the margins of the story—and soon, to London’s salons. Yet loyalty anchors her: she will defend Eliza in “Take a Break,” scorch Hamilton in “The Reynolds Pamphlet,” and console them both in “It’s Quiet Uptown.” Even in death she keeps vigil: all three rest today in Trinity Churchyard.

He will never be satisfied. I will never be satisfied.

A chorus repeats “Be satisfied” as though willing it into existence, but Angelica’s foresight rings truer. Hamilton’s restless honor will chase duels; her own heart will replay one impossible night on infinite loop. In the world of Satisfied Lyrics, satisfaction is horizon, mirage, and—like the spin of a Broadway turntable—always just out of reach.

Song Credits

• Featured: Renée Elise Goldsberry (Angelica Schuyler)
• Producers: Bill Sherman, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Questlove, Black Thought, Alex Lacamoire
• Composer/Lyricist: Lin-Manuel Miranda
• Release Date: September 25, 2015
• Genre: Show-Tune / Hip-Hop Ballad
• Instruments: Strings, brass, drum kit, Rhodes, harp, electric bass, turntable FX
• Label: Atlantic Records
• Mood: Urgent, Bittersweet
• Length: 5 min 29 sec
• Track #: 11
• Language: English
• Album: Hamilton: An American Musical (Original Broadway Cast Recording)
• Music Style: Rap-Sung Soliloquy with rewind motif
• Poetic Meter: Mixed iambic-trochaic with rap syncopation
• Copyright: © 2015 5000 Broadway Music / Atlantic Recording Corp.

Songs Exploring Themes of Ambition & Regret

“Helpless” (Hamilton) walks hand-in-hand with “Satisfied” like a cinematic split screen. Eliza sings head-over-heels pop-soul, all major chords and giddy hooks, while Angelica’s flip side breaks the rosy glass to examine the cost. Together they form a diptych on romantic ambition—one naive, one clear-eyed.

“I’m Not That Girl” (Wicked) echoes Angelica’s self-denial. Elphaba’s soft-rock lullaby drifts in 3/4, lacking the Hamilton track’s kinetic rap, yet both women choose withdrawal for a sister-figure. Different century, same ache.

“On My Own” (Les Misérables) raises the solitude dial. Éponine’s folk-tinged ballad dwells entirely in fantasy, whereas Angelica’s intellect dissects reality in real time. Still, each heroine turns longing into narrative power, reminding us that unfulfilled desire can drive a story as hard as triumph.

Questions and Answers

Is the rap speed really faster than the rest of the show?

Yes. Angelica peaks at roughly 5.3 syllables per second, the quickest sustained flow in the cast album.

Why does the stage “rewind” instead of simply flashing back?

Director Thomas Kail wanted the audience to feel Angelica’s mental spin; Andy Blankenbuehler’s choreography literalizes it with reverse motion on the dual turntables.

Has “Satisfied” been officially certified?

The track went 2× Platinum with the RIAA on January 10, 2020, and earned a Silver award from the BPI in 2021.

Are there notable covers?

Yes—Sia, Miguel & Queen Latifah’s 2016 Hamilton Mixtape cut hit #35 on Canada’s Digital Songs chart, and Goldsberry released a stripped-back guitar version in 2025.

Was Goldsberry’s Tony win tied to this number?

Absolutely. Critics cited “Satisfied” as the showstopper that sealed her 2016 Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Musical.

Awards and Chart Positions

Though never released as a stand-alone single, “Satisfied” rides the Hamilton wave of accolades: Renée Elise Goldsberry’s Tony in 2016, the cast album’s Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album the same year, and the show’s 11 Tony wins. The track itself achieved 2× Platinum status in the U.S. and Silver in the U.K.. The Sia/Miguel/Queen Latifah remix reached #35 on the Canadian Digital Songs chart in 2016. In 2023, the cast recording was certified Diamond, making “Satisfied” part of the first Broadway album to cross 10 million units.

How to Sing?

The studio key sits in A-flat minor, shifting to B-major for the chorus refrains. Range spans E-3 to B4—comfortable for a mezzo with nimble diction. Warm up with rapid triplet scales; you’ll need crisp consonants without jaw tension. Anchor the breath before each “Number one!” and sustain the final “be satisfied” in head-mix, letting vibrato bloom after the beat. Tempo clocks around 146 BPM; internalize subdivisions so the rap stays locked even as the music half-times beneath you.

Fan and Media Reactions

“The rewind sequence melted my brain—felt like Beyoncé spliced into Les Miz.” Twitter user @bwaynerd, July 2020

“Goldsberry’s breath control on Disney+ should be studied in med school.” Vulture review

“Sia’s version hits different—sounds like Angelica left the ballroom and walked into a neon club.” Time magazine playlist

“Ten years on, the Tony reunion proved the rap still shreds—you could feel Radio City leaning forward.” People interview with Goldsberry

“I tried the karaoke track—lasted 28 seconds before the words outran my lungs.” YouTube comment on cover video