Download the song for free here (limited time only): http://www.ThePianoGuys.com/justtheway.php

As always our subscribers give us the best song suggestions. we think “Just the Way You Are” is one of those timeless melodies that only comes along every once in a while. The word ‘love’ is tossed around alot today. This arrangement goes out to anyone that feels something so deeply for someone that words can’t even begin to describe. Jon says, “I tried to represent the song lyrics which match how I feel about my wife to a tee. The way I feel about her affected the musical arrangement big time. It shows that ‘amazing’ girl how I feel about her (after 20 plus years of marriage)”. We hope everyone can relate. We hope everyone hears the very deepest side of what they feel for someone when they listen to this song.

Piano arrangement written by Jon Schmidt
Cello arrangement written by Steven Sharp Nelson
Piano recorded at Big Idea Studios
Cello recorded at TPG Studios
Song mixed & mastered at TPG Studios by Al van der Beek
Video filmed, edited, & produced by Paul Anderson & Tel Stewart

Moreover, this is an in-house concert. You’ll listen to Michele’s melody at her living room making it more personal and touching. I haven’t attended any in-house concerts before, however I know that this type of concert allows you to listen directly to the piano (not through any sounds’ device) bringing real experiments.

If you can’t attend the concert? Don’t worry. You can watch it online (LIVE) here thanks to the power of technology. The concert will be LIVE in February 11th at 7:00pm. Don’t miss the schedule.

The songlist is as follows:

1.  Breathing In The Moment

2.  The Beauty Within

3.  Stargazing

4.  Cheryl’s Hope

5.  Sisters

6.  Into The Sunset

7.  The Life Cycle

8.  Finding Balance

9.  The Joy of Childhood

10.  Trilogy

11.  Breaking Free

12.  Nostalgia

13.  Wonderment

14.  The Lunar Effect

15.  Rejoice (Reprise)

Concert tickets are $25 each and there are 30 seats available.  Ticket prices include a signed CD of the new album.  Tickets can be purchased HERE 

Stanton’s unlikely beginnings as a chemist and then a financial planner beg for a fuller understanding of how he came to create six albums as of November 2009. Stanton began piano lessons when he was six years old growing up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He wanted to quit the piano in middle school because of basketball and baseball, but his parents wouldn’t let him. Stanton wrote his first song at age fourteen in Milton, Florida and continued to play and write songs while completing a chemistry degree at Georgia Tech and an MBA at the University of Georgia. Five years into seemingly successful consulting and sales jobs, “career surrender” is the self-described state that found the thirty-year old artist in 1994 struggling to find his purpose. This led to a sense of calling to work as a financial planner, while also intensifying his longing to hear God’s voice.

This desire ultimately became Stanton’s inspiration for his music, which is based on his artistic interpretation of ancient scriptures. The melodies are evidence of the human ability to communicate without words and transport without physical energy. Stanton wrote thirty songs while employed full-time as a financial planner. It is a testament to the essence of his music. We live ordinary lives yet each moment holds extraordinary potential to touch the lives of others. It is this expression that Stanton believes brings the most joy and inspires us to live our lives with passion.

The first three self-produced recordings gave rise to a deeper and more urgent calling to completely let go of the practical direction his career was taking. Oddly, Stanton’s first keyboard purchase did not take place until 2000. His first piano purchase was in 2006. Up until then, he had been playing on a 1950 spinet piano, but his musical genius may have been sharpened by what some might consider an impediment. Walk in the Light,Still Waters and Draw Near were produced between 2001 and 2004 using his keyboard and computer. In 2003 two tracks from Still Waters were played on The Weather Channel’s “Local on the 8s,” leading to CD orders from thirty states and listener testimonies from hospitals, homes and businesses.

Later in 2004, as Stanton began writing the songs for his fourth CD, he stretched himself by sending an email to the legendary Will Ackerman, Grammy Award winning guitarist and Founder of Windham Hill Records, asking him if he would produce the project. Will accepted and brought Stanton to the George Lucas Skywalker Sound Studio in California to record The Voice. This simple exchange of emails began a friendship and professional relationship between these two great artists that has spanned five years and three albums. 2004 marked the beginning of Stanton’s journey to full time artistry in his music writing. 2005 was a year of ‘firsts’ when Stanton’s composing was produced for the first time in a studio with Will Ackerman at the helm. It was the first concert grand piano that had ever played Stanton’s music and the first CD produced with Stanton as a full-time artist and musician. The Voice is signature Lanier and asks each listener to interpret the Voiceand its source. Is it the piano? Is it yours? Is it spiritual?

Unveiled was released in 2008, another collaborative effort between Lanier and Ackerman, which once again combined Lanier’s beautiful melodies with other instruments and vocals performed by an award winning cast of guest artists. Widely acclaimed and recommended, these newer albums expanded the reach of the music across across radio, television and the internet, including Music Choice’s “Soundscapes” cable channel, XM Radio’s “Spa” channel, Lifetime TV’s highest rated show “Army Wives,” NPR, Delilah and Solo Piano Radio.
Stanton’s sixth album December Peace is a holiday album offering listeners its theme during one of the most stressful times of year. It was a new challenge for Stanton to create a unique collection by arranging traditional pieces, interweaving original writing and composing all new melodies. While the songs clearly represent the Christian celebration of the birth of Christ, you do not need to understand, follow or believe Stanton’s faith to lose yourself in this musical invitation.

Music to Light the World is the non-profit organization Stanton founded in 2004 with a vision to offer “peace to the soul” through scripture inspired piano. This organization brings peace, hope and healing to many who need it most through donating CDs and performances to groups such as cancer patients, families who have lost children to cancer, hospitals and inner city ministries. Get Music, Give Hope is an initiative where, for every album purchased, Music to Light the World donates one album to a cancer center or hospital. Music to Light the World is gaining strength and support from prominent philanthropists in Atlanta and beyond who are equally dedicated to touching lives with a message of hope.

Stanton Lanier lives in Atlanta with his wife and two children. He enjoys time with family and friends, sports, travel and cooking. One of Stanton’s favorite quotes is “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive” (from the book “Wild at Heart” by John Eldredge).

Tim Janis was born in New York City in 1968. The second of three brothers, he grew up in the New York suburb of Greenwich, Connecticut. The budding composer grew up in a musical household; his mother, a social worker, was the organist at the family’s church, and his father played saxophone in his time off from his work as a corporate attorney. Both of Janis’s brothers also went on to careers in music; his older brother, Steve, founded a record label called CLR, and his younger brother, Peter, created a company called Authentic Recording, which has produced some of Janis’s music.

Janis first learned to play music at the age of seven, and in high school he began to compose his own music. High school for Janis was a military academy in Pine Beach, New Jersey. Situated on New Jersey’s Atlantic coast, this was also where Janis fell in love with the ocean that was to inspire his later work.

Working with a simple four-track home recording system, Janis began to record his own music during his sophomore year in high school. While in high school he decided to make composing music his life’s work.

Rejecting the military life for which the military academy was preparing him, Janis attended the University of New Hampshire to study music composition. He also studied sound engineering at the Peabody Conserva-tory of Music.

At the University of New Hampshire, Janis began to find the musical voice for which he was to become known. He experimented with a number of different musical forms, and wrote two musicals, both of which were produced at the university. He also wrote pop songs and composed scores for independent films, and even wrote jazz, country music, and rock.

After college Janis set up a recording studio in an unheated barn in York, Maine, renting the facility out to other musicians to help make ends meet. For a month he lived in his car and worked as a dishwasher so that he could save enough money to hire musicians who would play his music in concerts.

During this time Janis formed the Tim Janis Ensemble, which consisted of piano, flute, and violin. He approached record companies to try and secure a recording contract, but met with no success. He refused to give up, and in 1995 he began to record his own CDs and sell them at his concerts. These concerts took place at small music festivals, shopping malls, and anywhere else he could find to perform. He found that he enjoyed playing in malls and other semi-public places because it brought him into close contact with his audiences, and he continued to play in such venues even after he achieved wide success.

Janis released his first album, Along the Shore of Acadia, in 1996. For inspiration, Janis drew from the seashore and woodlands of Acadia National Park in Maine, visiting the place many times while he composed the album. The album blends violin, oboe, piano, flute, acoustic guitar, bass, cello, percussion, and synthesizers, to evoke in the listener the feelings Janis experienced while in the park. In this, as in all of his work, Janis works to capture and convey a sense of the natural beauty around him, in this case the magnificence of the ocean and forests of Acadia.

Seven years after establishing his studio in York, Janis gave it up and moved to Kennebunk, Maine, where he moved onto a ten-acre working farm with his wife, Michelle, and continued to record his music in a home studio. By that time, several different versions of the Tim Janis Ensemble, up to ten at a time, were playing regularly at the same time in different locations around the United States. And since “a lot of people don’t know what I look like,” Janis told Roger Catlin in the Hartford Courant, most of the audience members did not even realize that the actual Tim Janis was not present at the majority of the concerts. Janis has always felt that his musical compositions are the central attractions of his concerts and CDs. He has said that he wants listeners to feel just as they would watching a glorious sunset or admiring a stretch of the Maine coastline. The titles of Janis’s pieces, too, reflect his focus on nature rather than on himself or his personal life: “White Mountains,” “Blue Hill Bay,” “Water’s Edge,” and “Ocean Heights,” all evoke the scenes that have inspired his music.

In 1999 Janis released December Morning. Like his previous albums, he distributed it without the help of a major record label. Even so, it became one of the 15 top-selling CDs at the Barnes and Noble book and music chain that year, and landed on the Billboard New Age Chart. It was a breakthrough for Janis.

By 2000 Janis had become known as a composer of music that had healing influences. Nursing homes and hospitals, including the famous Mayo Clinic, used his music to calm and relax patients and residents. In one case, nurses caring for a comatose auto accident victim found that when they played Janis’s music, the patient’s breathing calmed, and fluids were less likely to build up in her throat. Partly on the strength of this healing component to his work, Janis’s 2000 release,Water’s Edge, climbed to the number two spot on Billboard ’s Top New Age Album Chart.

The American Cancer Society learned about Janis’s work, and decided to collaborate on producing a fund-raising CD on Janis’s record label. The album, called Music of Hope, features Janis playing with Paul McCartney, Billy Joel, Andre Previn, Ray Charles, the New York Philharmonic, and the London Symphony Orchestra. The American Cancer Society was a natural choice for such a collaboration for Janis, because his aunt had died of cancer in 2000. All profits from the album were earmarked for the American Cancer Society. Released in 2001, Music of Hope hit the top of the Billboard Classical Chart in May of 2001.

Janis produced another benefit album in 2002. This was A Thousand Summers, and the proceeds of its sales were donated to AIDS research and outreach programs. To make the album, Janis traveled to South Africa, an epicenter for the worldwide AIDS epidemic, and recorded music with a choir whose members have AIDS.

In November of 2001, Connecticut Public Television aired a program called Tim Janis: An American Composer in Concert. The program had been produced earlier that year, and was recorded at Lincoln Center in New York City. The special featured Janis conducting the American Symphony Orchestra playing his compositions, accompanied by images of America’s national parklands.

Although Janis has appeared on both the classical and new age charts, he resists being defined as either a classical or new age artist. He prefers to think of his work as simply “instrumental music,” as he explained to Roger Catlin in the Hartford Courant. And the biggest mark of his success, Janis has described, is not the number of albums he sells, but the effect of his music on its listeners. As he told Catlin, “When people come up with tears in their eyes and say what it meant to them—it doesn’t get better than that.”

First of all, thank Richard for letting me have the opportunity to introduce about his latest album – Issa Music. Richard is a talented person, he also wrote a novel called The Swords of Faith. I will listen to the whole album and give you detailed reviews soon. Meanwhile, you can read his introduction to Issa Music below

During the late 1980s, while visiting my brother Bill in New Mexico with my soon-to-be-wife Carrie, she and I were browsing in a bookstore in Santa Fe. Carrie picked up a book about the “lost years” of Jesus, the years the Christian bible makes nearly no comment about, from Jesus’s teen years, to his thirties, when he emerges with his fully-formed spirituality and his mission that would change humanity, both spiritually and historically. Carrie toyed with buying the book, but put it back on the shelf. As we walked around the bookstore, I realized that I wanted that book—the “lost years” of Jesus sounded fascinating.

The book I bought turned out to be a fringe book, written by the wife of a recently deceased leader of a small, unconventional loosely Christian sect. But the book introduced me to the legend of St. Issa, a man who around the time of Jesus, traveled from the Middle East to Tibet and India, who learned Hinduism and Buddhism, and then brought them back to his homeland where he was executed by local authorities for some perceived transgression. This story fascinated me. If this St. Issa was Jesus, then Christianity links East and West. With Islam’s link to Christianity, this story implies links among much of humanity’s spiritual traditions. I saw a possible novel, based on this legend. I dove into research, eventually buying over a hundred books on related subjects.

I have now read over fifty of those books, and this is still project I intend to complete one day. But I discovered that the topic of Jesus’s “lost years,” and of the true historical events of Jesus’s life, is an intensely complex subject. I have read everything from books by scholars who argue there was no historical Jesus to those who argue for total accuracy of the Christian New Testament. (These two extremes both seem difficult to maintain. There is too much peripheral evidence of Jesus, some of it embarrassing reality, to argue seriously that Jesus was a total invention. An invented myth would not contain some of the details that are not consistent with a mythological figure. But the biblical accounts cannot be entirely accurate for the simple fact that the four Gospels contain utterly contradictory versions of the same events.)

How does all this get to the music? I started reading and outlining for a novel on this subject—working title, “St. Issa.” I love to listen to music while I work. I looked for music that would bring me to the mood I wanted. I couldn’t find any music I was happy with. So, I decided to create it myself, a fusion of West and East. The first idea was to create jam sessions using eastern and western sounds and modes. “Eastern Jam” was the first piece. The first few pieces that followed“Eastern Jam” maintained this concept. But this very quickly evolved to the concept of taking a theme, then placing it in all sorts of tonal and improvisational settings. The Roland D-50 synthesizer had all sorts of exotic lead sounds. The Yamaha TX modules had great metallic and percussive sounds. I was able to bathe these pieces in exotic pitched drum sounds and great metallic sounds, including exploding gongs. The Ensoniq EPS sampler gave me nice brass, string and flute samples (as well as other exotic sounds). I had a basic bass machine (Professional Midi-Bass) and drum machine (Korg DD1) to anchor the pieces. I could bring all this together using the “Mesa” software from Roland for composition. This allowed me to render complex musical ideas, like the ⅞, 3 ½-4 rhythms/time signatures in “Seventh Hell.” So, over a period of about 16 months, I recorded three sets of these pieces. I certainly used quantization technology to correct rhythm tracks.But all solo/improvisational sections were played in real time. I did punch in and out of those improvisational sections, but I never slowed down the tempo of the basic tracks, nor did I use any corrective quantization on the solos. That would have made the music sound too artificial.

Buy this album at: CDBaby | iTunes