About two months ago, back in May, a friend of mine got married. She asked me to create a piano track for her congratulatory song, which was Phil Wickham’s song, Song in My Soul.

Then, I got COVID and things sort of went awry and in the end, I wasn’t able to complete the track.

Well, here’s how far I got, which was a rough skeleton but still something that I put some work into.

So, for reference, I ended up using the House Sessions version of this song as a base. I actually like this version much more than the original. It sounds cozier and less polished; the piano background sounds more fun and in vibes with the song.

I really like the piano in this song. Keys in praise songs tend to be on the simpler side or have very strict/narrow parameters on how much they can be adventurous in a song so that they don’t overpower other instruments. What I like about the keys in this song is that because there is only the piano and the guitar, there is enough freedom to let the keys do whatever it wants to do. You could tell in the song that whoever is on keys is feeling the song as much as the singer and the choir.

Regretfully, if I had more time, I would try to figure out more of the syncopated rhythms going on in this song, particularly at ~2:45 to ~3:30 or the bridge part of “Let my life be to You a symphony” where the piano in the background becomes a little more adventurous and ends up doing its own little background cadenza.

As evident by the wires, I try to record my songs in time with the singer by playing with the actual song. During the parts where I sound more hesitant, those were the times where I was trying to really listen/figure out what was going on with the piano track. For the most part, figuring out the chordal skeleton was pretty easy to do but one interesting part of this song was its switch between on-beat and syncopated rhythms, which posed a bit of a challenge for me, since I actually have to figure out when to switch rhythms during the song.

One little thing that I enjoyed playing around with was at the bridge part at ~3:20 or “All my days, every single breath I breathe” where I added a walking chromatic progression from D-D#-E, which changes up the bridge chord progression a little bit as well as hits my personal musical serotonin glands.

Overall, I wish I had the chance to spend more time dissecting this song because I think it would have been a fun challenge to reverse engineer this song and figure out its keys. I also appreciate that it was another non-conventional choice for a wedding song, a departure from the usual “In Christ Alone.” I regret that I wasn’t able to finish this track in time for my friend. She deserves better than that.

Maybe I’ll come back and refine this song one day to give it the proper attention it deserves.