wedding wednesday – music
Welcome to another Wedding Wednesday (and happy Thanksgiving Eve!) Today I’m going to change things up a bit and, instead of showing you one million photos, I want to talk about one of the most important details of our wedding – the music. (Including complete Spotify playlists of all the music we played!) Last week I talked about how important music used to be to me. So when we were planning our wedding, the music was really important to us.
We are lucky that one of our friends, Chad, gifted us his dj skills for our wedding. He has been roped into doing the music for the last few weddings of our friends and he does the best job ever. For one, he is great at announcing all the necessary dj-ish things such as the bridal party introductions. He personalized our intros and made them fantastic. And having some you know do the intros helps to ensure that everyone’s names will be pronounced right too which is a plus. As for the music aspect, our venue had some available speakers but Chad rented some extra speakers too. Then I made 2 separate Spotify playlists (one for cocktail hour/dinner and another for dancing) and he hooked up his laptop to play the wedding music. Our venue had a great place for him to setup and he could still enjoy the wedding since he was also a guest.
Another plus to having your friend be your dj is that I told him to absolutely not play songs I hated. And then I told him if any guests bugged him with dumb requests, to just blame it on me. Done and done. Since our wedding was smaller and I love dancing, the wedding music was super important to us. For weeks before the wedding, Jarrod and I discussed songs that we loved and songs that would be great to dance to. We wanted a good party atmosphere so we just chose a few slow songs. We mostly played newer upbeat dance songs but we made sure to throw in some classics so there would be music that everyone loved. Oh and we also wanted to play some fun but suuuuuper inappropriate songs so we saved those for later so as to not immediately alienate everyone. Songs that would fall into this category include “Anaconda” by Nicki Minaj and “I’m on a Boat” by The Lonely Island. I felt bad for possibly offending the old people but then I decided “I’m 32, this is my wedding and I’m going to do what I want.” No one freaked out so it’s fine. (Oh and the song the bridal party walked out to was “Let’s Dance” by David Bowie, who our sweetie Bowie was named after.)
For our first dance, Jarrod and I danced to “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” by Elvis Presley. We don’t have “a song” so it took awhile to decide on something. Some songs that were meaningful to me weren’t so much for him and vice versa. We both like newer indie rock bands and threw around some ideas from those bands, but we ultimately decided that a classic song was the way to go. I told him that I wanted a song that we could randomly hear anywhere and be like “awww it’s our wedding song!” so this one fit the bill. (And it was played at a wedding we went to last week so it has totally happened already!) I danced to “Forever Young” by Rod Stewart with my dad. My mom and sister were huge Rod Stewart fans around the time I was born and my family tells me that they were going to name me Rod Stewart if I had been a boy. Yikes. But having a love for Rod in the family, this was a perfect choice. Plus my dad likes to tease me that I’m like Peter Pan because I don’t want to grow up, so it worked great. Jarrod and his mom danced to “In My Life” by the Beatles because he remembered always listening to the Beatles with her when he was younger.
For cocktail hour and dinner, I had a vision of playing my favorite songs from musicals, older songs that weren’t really “dance-able,” and random things like music from Dirty Dancing. My goal was for people to be like “aw I love this song!” to one song and then go “what the hell is this?” to the next one. A fellow musical lover friend said he walked into cocktail hour and heard a song from Wicked playing and was like “yeah, this is Jackie’s wedding.” Luckily Jarrod let me go wild with some weird choices. Thanks honey.
And the last extra special music thing we had at our wedding was that we had a personal accordion player. Need more info? Some weddings do the traditional bridal dance where guests dance with the bride and gift a dollar (or more) to the couple. I’ve been to lots of weddings where this happens and I don’t know if it’s a regional tradition or what. Where Jarrod is from (which is only like 1.5 hours away from where I grew up), it’s a Polish tradition for the bridal dance to be done to polka music. I had never heard of this tradition before but went to a few of his family’s weddings where they did this. It’s a little random but the music is really upbeat and fun. Jarrod’s mom’s close friend’s husband was kind enough to play live polka music for us on the accordion and it.was.AWESOME. I kinda hate being the center of attention so I was a little nervous to do the dance but it was super fun (and tiring!) You only dance with each person for a few seconds so it goes pretty quick and it’s a nice way to say “hi!” and “thanks for coming!” again to guests. Oh and it’s tradition to give the people a shot of something light like Peach Schnapps at the end. Which one of my bridesmaids did, until the bar ran out and gave her shots of whiskey instead. But she kept telling people it was schnapps. Ha oops.
So this is the longest post ever and it’s a holiday week and no one probably read this far. How did you choose your wedding music? Did you love/hate your dj? Any unique wedding traditions that you did? And have a Happy Thanksgiving!!
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