Here’s a long and overdue post that I should’ve posted back in July. In addition to helping out with the opening song, I also had a congratulatory song to do for my friend’s wedding. She chose an oldie but a goodie–Chris Tomlin’s Unfailing Love. That song can be found here. She told me that this was a very nostalgic song for her.

I have never heard this song before but it feels dated, old-school. I did appreciate that it was not another round of “In Christ Alone” by Brian Littrell again. She chose something different.

At first, it took a while for this song to grow on me because it was slow-paced and repetitive. There was a lack of a climatic buildup to this song in the instrumental part. I think a lot of the buildup actually rested on the main and background vocals. Usually, my method for figuring a song out was to play it on repeat until I figure it out. I felt very tired after hearing this song a few times. On the flip side, the structure of this song was very easy to figure out where if I figure out 25% of the song, I pretty much figured out the remaining 75%.

By the time I knew this song well enough, I had the chorus echoing in my ears for the rest of the week:

And everything you hold in your hand, still you make time for me. I can’t understand. Praise You, God of earth and sky. How beautiful is your unfailing love, unfailing love.

A lot of repetition and emphasis on “unfailing love.”

I tried searching for other piano covers on Youtube but that returned surprisingly sparse results. So I just went ahead and made my own arrangement. Because it was a long song, I cut the song down and went with the following scan:

Intro-V1-C1-V2-C2-C3-Instrumental

Which ended up sounding like this:

The original key of this piece was in Ab Major. I decided to start off with a soft beginning to introduce the little music motif at a slow pace before kicking off that song. The rest of the song came together pretty easily. To add a bit more variation, I added an ascending scale flourish in between C2 and C3 at ~2:15…which doesn’t show in the practice recording but I did make a point to do so on the actual wedding day performance.

I should start recording my wedding day performances.

To differentiate between verses and choruses, I just jumped around between octaves for the RH. I started low then went to higher octaves with each pass of the verse or chorus.

I had a brief dry run with a friend who was the singer and ended up transposing the key to F, instead of Ab, for an easier time of singing. That transition between C2 and C3 ended up being the most complex part of the song to nail the timing just right. Overall, I think we did a decent job with this song.