Derailed Lyrics
Derailed
[CLEON]I was on a train that derailed in Dekalb
Just a kid but I remember the sound
Of it all breaking down
As we all went down
First the metal squealed as the car jumped the track
Windows exploded the seams
Then the scene
Filled with screams
Yeah, the scene filled with screams
Back in present day, I see a face in the crowd
There's a gun and he's pulling it out
Just a moment to shout
The world falls down
[CLEON, COCHISE & COWGIRL]
Tim? slips away as the night jumps the track
[CLEON]
When th? murderer turns to me
And he sees what I've seen
Turns to me and he screams
[LUTHER]
It was the Warriors! The Warriors!
The Warriors shot Cyrus
[CLEON]
No, I didn't do this! I'd never do this!
[LUTHER]
Didn't you see them?
[CROPSY]
Yeah
[LUTHER & CROPSY]
I know I seen 'em!
[CLEON, LUTHER & CROPSY]
I don't see a way to escape from (The Warriors!)
The crowd
They shout, I shout (The Warriors shot Cyrus!)
[CLEON & OTHER GANGS]
I stand my ground (Cyrus! Cyrus!)
Look around, I'm surrounded, I
[CLEON & LUTHER, OTHER GANGS]
Drown in the shots and the shouts (Cyrus! Cyrus!)
As the world falls down
[CLEON]
Warriors! Get away from the crowd!
Make your way downtown
[SWAN & GRAMERCY RIFFS]
Gotta find a way (Cyrus goes down)
To escape from the crowd!
[AJAX & SWAN]
Go the other way (Stay down! Stay down!)
Or there's no getting out!
[GRAMERCY RIFFS]
Who will save us now?
[COCHISE & SWAN]
There's a broken gate (Stay down! Stay down!)
[AJAX]
Get out!
[COCHISE]
At the edge of the playground
[AJAX]
Get out!
[COCHISE & COWGIRL]
Everybody stay down
[SWAN & GRAMERCY RIFFS]
Stay down! (Cyrus)
Stay down! (Cyrus)
[COCHISE & COWGIRL]
Everybody stay down
[SWAN & GRAMERCY RIFFS]
Make a little space (Cyrus is gone)
At the break in the gate now
[AJAX]
Yo! Punch your fuckin' way through
The gate 'til it breaks down
[GRAMERCY RIFFS]
Who will save us now?
[SWAN, AJAX & COCHISE]
Gotta make a way
When there's no
Other way out
[CAPTAIN VICTOR & GRAMERCY RIFFS]
Freeze! Police! Alright boys, take 'em out! (Cyrus! Cyrus!)
[FOX & GANG MEMBERS]
Now every move that we make is a bid to survive
(Sirens surround, do you hear that sound?)
Keep us alive
[FOX & REMBRANDT, GANG MEMBERS]
When you woke up today, you didn't think you could die
Neither did I (Sirens, sirens)
[SWAN]
Woodlawn Cemetery way up the hill
[AJAX]
I don't love runnin'
[SWAN & COCHISE]
Run to the cemetery, way up the hill
[AJAX]
I guess we're runnin'
[SWAN & COCHISE]
Run to the cemetery, way up the hill!
Or it's the graveyard
Or it's the graveyard!
[AJAX]
Woah!
[All the WARRIORS save CLEON make it through the hole in the fence and run.]
[LUTHER]
Warriors, come out to play-ay-ay-ay-ay
Warriors, come out to play-ay-ay-ay-ay!
Song Overview
Personal Review
The sixth track on Warriors hits like a subway car taking a corner too fast. “Derailed” lasts just two minutes and twenty-seven seconds , but it packs in a sonic freight of screeching strings, punk-metal guitar shards, and a break-neck hip-hop beat courtesy of producer Mike Elizondo. The lyrics yank Cleon from a childhood trauma into the chaos of Cyrus’s assassination, mirroring that nauseating lurch when present danger collides with buried memory.
Song Meaning and Annotations
The first eight bars slam us into Cleon’s past: a Dekalb Avenue crash rendered in metallic squeals and glassy synth pads. That sonic texture, Mike Elizondo says, is looped around Francisco Miranda’s twenty-second scream, which Lin-Manuel recorded on his phone and ran through reverb until it became a high-pitched feedback drone. An innocent sound, twisted into catastrophe—just like a routine late-night ride warped into tragedy.
Suddenly the scene jumps forward; the bass drops out, snare drums punch like panicked heartbeats, and Luther’s voice (Kim Dracula) tears through the mix with arcade-villain bravado. The production nods to ’70s New York punk, a deliberate risk that Miranda and Davis took to keep the album from leaning too far into Broadway polish.
This left-turn into thrash matters thematically: as the music derails, so does the fragile truce Cyrus was brokering. “Time slips away as the night jumps the track,” Cleon half-sings, half-gasps, her meter staggers against the drums. The line isn’t just literal; it’s structural, telling us the linear narrative has shattered.
Sound design keeps echoing that fracture. Snippets of police sirens swirl in one channel, a whispered “run” (Lin-Manuel’s older son, Sebastian) drifts in the other, and then the whole mix funnels back into a tight funk groove when Swan rallies the gang. The music finds a lane even as the plot spins out.
But pay attention to the recurring question, “Who will save us now?” It’s chanted by the Gramercy Riffs and answered only by a hole in a playground fence. The song’s moral is blunt: institutions freeze, communities improvise.
Verse Highlights
Verse 1 (Flashback)
“First the metal squealed as the car jumped the track / Windows exploded the seams”
A rare pure-rhythm couplet from Miranda: six stressed syllables slamming against six, like wheels hammering rail joints.
Bridge (Luther’s Accusation)
“It was the Warriors! The Warriors!”
Kim Dracula revels in vowel distortion; his elongated “War-ri-ORRRs” feels ripped from CBGB circa ’79.
Codetta (Playground Gate)
“Yo! Punch your **** way through / The gate ’til it breaks down”
Ajax’s line shoves the groove into half-time while the bass drops an octave—musical slow-motion so the listener feels each fist hit.
Song Credits
- Featured Vocalists: Gizel Jiménez (Cleon), Aneesa Folds, Kenita Miller, Sasha Hutchings, Kim Dracula, Alex Boniello, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Amber Gray, David Patrick Kelly, Phillipa Soo
- Producers: Mike Elizondo, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Eisa Davis
- Composers / Lyricists: Lin-Manuel Miranda, Eisa Davis
- Release Date: October 18, 2024
- Genre: Hip-hop / punk-salsa hybrid
- Length: 2 min 27 sec
- Label: Atlantic Records
- Notable Sample: Francisco Miranda’s scream (age 6)
- Instrumentation: distorted Stratocaster, trap kit, congas, analog synth, crowd foley
- Mood: Panic ? defiance
- Poetic Meter: Mixed trochaic trimeter & rap syncopation
Songs Exploring Similar Themes
While Derailed chronicles chaos, it shares bloodlines with other “flight under fire” anthems.
“Run Run Run” – Beyoncé (2022). Bey’s electro-funk cut echoes the same breathless urgency; her layered harmonies mirror the Warriors’ shouted ensemble, though her escape is more psychic than physical.
“Everybody Knows” – Dessa (2018). Another rapper-poet who paints systemic collapse in nightclub colors; the whispered hook “everybody knows” parallels Cleon’s terrified realisation that no one in the park believes her.
“The Rumbling” – SiM (2022). Like Miranda, the Japanese rock-metal outfit fuses brutal riffs with orchestral sweeps, matching city-wide dread to personal survival stakes.
Annotations
The track opens in two places at once. Cleon stands in the Bronx night while a ghost train screeches through her skull:
I was on a train that derailed in Dekalb… metal squealed, windows explodedThe memory is half real, half metaphor. Historically, a 1961 freight train jumped the tracks in DeKalb, Illinois—six refrigerator cars, no passenger casualties, yet the child-sized trauma lingers. Miranda keeps the lowercase “k,” anchoring the lyric to that flat Midwestern town rather than the Brooklyn station, letting geography echo fate.
In the breath between a gunshot and its echo, time folds like a switchblade.
- The technique mirrors Hamilton’s bullet-time monologue—an eternity crammed into a heartbeat—while the past-tense retelling nods to Satisfied’s rewind. Cleon narrates from inside the moment, the way Angelica narrated Eliza’s wedding.
There’s a gun and he’s pulling it outIt’s Fox—Phillipa Soo channeling Eliza’s protective fire—who actually spots Luther’s pistol in the film. Here, that image detonates in Cleon’s mind, collapsing past derailment and present betrayal into one long scream.
Cyrus falls; the world falls down. The phrase is a deliberate echo of “The world turned upside down,” trading victory for chaos.
Who will save us now?The Gramercy Riffs’ cry isn’t just panic—it’s lament for a lost messiah. Cyrus promised a five-borough Canaan of unity and safety; her death leaves them exiled in their own city.
Listen for the sirens bleeding under Fox’s plea:
Every move is a bid to survive… Neither did IThe melody will return in Reunion Square, where Fox and a cop trade the same notes in a raw duet of desperation. Same tune, different pronouns—we becomes I, survival shrinks to a single body.
Ajax snarls “I don’t love runnin’,” setting up the inevitable fatigue that will soon make him Sick of Running.
Finally, the taunt floats over the fence like a bottle on the tide:
Warriors, come out to play-ay-ay-ay-ayThe line is legend—David Patrick Kelly’s sing-song menace preserved intact, a siren call that even non-fans can recite. Here it lands like a verdict: the night has derailed, and there’s no track back home.
Questions and Answers
- Was “Derailed” released as a single?
- Yes, the lyric video went live on YouTube the same day as the album, functioning as the project’s second promo drop.
- Why does a child’s scream anchor the beat?
- Miranda wanted the track to evoke “unfiltered fight-or-flight” feelings; his son’s raw scream provided the perfect visceral texture.
- How many streams has the song accumulated?
- By July 2025 it has logged roughly 1.37 million Spotify plays.
- Is there a planned stage version featuring this number?
- Producers confirmed early workshops for a Broadway transfer in late 2025; “Derailed” will form the Act I climax, complete with live Foley.
- What’s Kim Dracula’s contribution?
- The Tasmanian metal artist voices Luther and adds guttural ad-libs that bleed into feedback trails, heightening the song’s menace.
Awards and Chart Positions
While Derailed itself never charted independently, its parent album debuted at #1 on Billboard’s Compilation Albums list and cracked the UK compilation top 40.
How to Sing?
Range: Mezzo-soprano G3 – E-flat5 for Cleon; high-tenor A2 – B4 for Luther.
Pacing: 122 BPM, but the bridge drops to 112 BPM; rehearse with a click that drops, then surges back.
Breath Control: Verse lines stack internal rhymes; grab micro-breaths on rests, not at bar lines. Let the final “Warriors!” land on a supported shout, not a strained belt.
Fan and Media Reactions
“That scream loop haunting the chorus? Pure nightmare fuel—in a good way.”—Vulture review
“We heard ‘run’ in surround sound, felt like the cops were in my headphones.”—Reddit user u/BronxMetaphor
“Davis and Miranda finally gave punk its Broadway close-up.”—Los Angeles Times
“My five-year-old now yells ‘Warriors!’ on playgrounds. Thanks a lot, Lin.”—TikTok comment on the lyric video
“Kim Dracula steals the number—instant cult-classic vocal.”—Metal site The PRP