Jon Cheney walks through his piano arrangement of "My Heavenly Father Loves Me" from his album A Sunday Afternoon. The transcribed piece includes a tricky passage with rapid 64th-note figures in measures 28-37 that players can improvise or play exactly as written. He's releasing four piano books this year covering Christmas, church, and popular songs.
Okay, this next song is one of my favorites, and I think it's in about 3 arrangements that I've written. I'm coming out with a new piano book in a couple months. I know I'm coming out with this one today. I'm coming out with another. I'm gonna do maybe 4 piano books this year. This is gonna be one of my biggest years, pulling together lots of music, stuff I've written in the past, stuff I'm writing right now, Christmas music, church music, popular music, whatever, all kinds of stuff. I'm being ambitious this year. The bottom line is this song, "My Heavenly Father Loves Me," from the new album, of the new piano book from the album A Sunday Afternoon is called My Heavenly Father Loves Me. And it's a song that whenever I hear the song of a bird, right? It's a primary song from the children's songbook. And it's just such a pretty message and a pretty melody. And it fits nicely into a lot of different melodies or medleys, I guess. And so this is one of those songs that was transcribed from me playing it. It wasn't written down by me playing it, and so there's a little spot in here, verses or measures 28 to 37, so about 10 measures in there that are a little bit crazy. It might not be exact. I'll play them, you'll hear it, it'll be fine. They look crazy difficult. They're not supposed to be, but maybe they are. Just try to work through it and see what you can figure out. So I'll play through here. So that's the part that's really difficult, um, and just kind of weird. Just kind of do your best to play through it and make it up if you want. You can kind of see the chord— you can see the chords are— they're written down here, right? You can do that. You can make up your own stuff in here if you want, or you can try to read through exactly what was played. This is really weird, some 30, 36, 64th notes, 64th notes there, um, to get up there. So good luck playing through that. So this, yeah, anyway, pretty straightforward song. I have another arrangement that's on— if you listen to my music on Spotify or Apple Music or YouTube Music, wherever you are, you'll find another one, My Heavenly Father Loves Me. And it's a much newer arrangement, much more— call it mature arrangement, in my opinion. Again, I wrote this 10 years— I played this 10 years ago, and this one I literally just sat down, opened up a book, and played. And so sometimes I do that and it works great, and sometimes I do it and it's just okay. Anyway, so enjoy playing through this one and trying to figure out some of those hard notes. But that is My Heavenly Father Loves Me, and I hope you enjoy playing it. Next song.
