Wow, it has been about a month since I’ve updated this blog.

This is probably not the first time I started a post with this sentence. As a quick catchup, here is a list of some stuff that went down for me over this past month since my last post:

• Grandmama taught me how to make sushi.
• Friend moved down to SD. Good riddance, she was competition in winning over an older sister’s heart and we can’t have that.
• Painted a ministry house in Monterey a new shade of not-white
• Said goodbye to my intern
• Met up with my cousins from Jakarta whom I haven’t seen for at least ten years.

So, it’s quite a bit. Anyway, this song is a bit old and one of two songs that I performed for another friend’s wedding. This was the song that she selected to be her opening song, which is basically a mashup of “Goodness of God” and “King of my Heart” by Caleb and Kelsey.

I heard of Caleb and Kelsey before. Another friend, who got married last year, also used one of their songs as an opening song, which was a mashup of “What a Beautiful Name” and “10,000 Reasons”.

My unsolicited opinion is that “10,000 Reasons” is one of my least favorite praise songs. There’s a part of me that gets irrationally annoyed when I hear that song being included in the praise set. Needless to say, I did not like that mashup. Maybe because I didn’t like one of the songs.

So, I was a bit skeptical when faced with another one of their songs, based on my first impression of them. I found this mashup much more tolerable than the previous one I’ve first heard of.

Getting straight to work, I met up with two friends who were assigned to be the singers for the song. Luckily, “Goodness of God” is one of the most popular songs to be played at a wedding so I played it numerous times. However, this song was burned into my muscle memory so well that figuring out to pivot between this song and “King of my Heart” was tricky. This was also a problem that the singers had to figure out as well too.

Here is a recording of a practice I had with the singers:

The sounds you hear in the background is the air-conditioner working and some people putting together our coffee table.

The song is in A flat Major. The chords were relatively easy to figure out but I did spend a bit of time nailing down the parts where “King of my Heart” to make sure it was as closest to the original as it could be.

At around 1:07 mark, when the first verse from “King of my Heart” kicks in, I had to wait for the singer to cue me in so that took a few tries to get down. Then the left hand started to move from octave to octave. While not depicted in this recording specifically, I did tried alternating the range of my left hand to match with the “You are good, you’re good”, going up or low in octave when it appeared.

The switch between the two songs sounded less awkward than I expected as I listen to it. Within the hour, the singers and I were able to get the song down.

Of course, on the day of the wedding, that didn’t matter where one of the singers contracted COVID and had to be switched out last minute.

Still panned out alright.