This is the song I composed for my parents 60th anniversary. It was performed for my parents by a choir made up of my brothers and sisters, their spouses and children.
It hadn’t occurred to me to write a song for them until Thursday night, as I was already gathering the other requested music. I did a quick search using the word “inheritance” and came across the NIV version of Psalm 16. The phrase from verse 6 was the key phrase…
The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
surely I have a delightful inheritance.
I knew that “surely I have a delightful inheritance” would become the refrain. Using that one line, I toyed with several melodic motifs, but was never satisfied. I set it aside thinking it was best left for another time.
At 3:30 am Saturday morning it hit me. I don’t know why, but the theme from Jurassic Park kept running through my brain. I immediately got up and went to the keyboard where I inverted several of the intervals, but used the same rhythmic motif and chord progression as one of the themes from the movie. It worked beautifully for the refrain. From there I was able to write the rest of the chorus and the melody for the verses. I saved it, and at 4:30 am I was back in bed.
When I got up the next morning, I was able to piece together the rest of the lyrics from the the Psalm, sort of mixing and matching to fit the occasion, and write out SATB harmonizations for the chorus. That was about all I had time for in the short time span, but eventually I want to write out a piano accompaniment and better arrangement.
I guess I shouldn’t tell my parents that I was thinking about dinosaurs as I composed a song for them.