How To Pick Your Wedding Playlist

When we started planning our wedding, one of the first decisions my husband and I made was to handle the music ourselves via our trusty iPods. Music is integral to both of our identities, something we’ve always shared—we were writing, exchanging mixes, and going to concerts together long before we realized we were something more than friends—and we wanted to extend that to our wedding. The key word that we both seized on when describing the music for this important night was “personal”; the unspoken expectation was that the right combination of the right songs, through some kind of alchemy of sentiment and aesthetic, would converge into a perfect expression of ourselves and our relationship, infusing each moment with meaning, like the best movie soundtrack of all time.

We assumed that the playlist project would be one of “the fun parts” of wedding planning, something we could do to relax in between all the horrible, stressful bits we’d been told to expect. As it turned out, our strong feelings about music made the whole process surprisingly fraught—in fact, the playlist was the only aspect of wedding planning that actually ended up causing stress and friction for us. As much as we thought it should all have come together easily, magically, we kept finding ourselves baffled by each other’s choices and increasingly defensive about our own.

What helped, finally, was sitting down and actually talking through what we were trying to accomplish. We realized that we had been approaching this project with two very different definitions of what “personal” meant to us: I was racking my brains for songs with lyrics that best represented my hopes for how our wedding and our marriage would feel, while he was focused on songs he associated with memories of moments in our history. With this context, we were able to understand each other’s choices and agree on a few strategies that would work for us both.

Start early. For all but the most decisive (or most laid-back—if you put your playlist on Shuffle and called it a day, please teach me your ways!), it will be incredibly difficult to narrow down your choices and get them into an order that flows the way you want it to. One of our overarching principles for wedding planning in general was that we didn’t want to be doing anything in the last few weeks unless it absolutely couldn’t be done beforehand. Starting the playlist four or five months out was about right for us—it let us tinker with it sporadically, coming back with fresh ears after leaving it alone for a while, and gave us the space to scrap and start over without worrying that we would be up at 3am the night before our wedding arguing over how many slow songs is too many.

Start with what you know. We agreed immediately on a few songs that we couldn’t imagine not including. There was only one possible first dance for us, and we also knew very early on what song we wanted playing as we walked back up the aisle. Having these and various other must-haves picked out gave us a skeleton to build on; we could plan out where these songs would fall and think of what should lead into and follow them. Filling in the gaps felt a lot less daunting than “Five hours of music, GO!”

Start with your existing music collection. In my determination to find All The Perfect Songs, I had initially spent most of my time googling recommendations, thinking that I could just cull the best of the best. Simple! Except, the best is a lot more subjective than I wanted it to be. I kept catching myself wrinkling my nose partway through every “mood-setting dinner music” or “romantic slow dances” list. We ended up just scrolling through our iTunes, pulling every song that appealed to us. We reasoned that, although we obviously don’t own every song in the world—or even every good song in the world—the music we had already collected was what spoke to us the most.

Break it up. Although we continued to refer to The Playlist as a single unit, we were really working on several lists; realizing this freed us to approach each one with a different goal in mind. For us, this looked like:

  • Pre-ceremony: This was a short set of songs to play while guests entered and took their seats. We wanted this list to feel very “us,” and also to set the tone for the evening, so we filled it with favorites that weren’t necessarily familiar to our families but would sound simple and sweet.
  • The aisle: For logistical reasons covered excellently in previous articles, this song was a playlist on its own. We had a terrible time choosing it, but thankfully it didn’t really have to fit in seamlessly with the rest of the evening’s music since it’s so tied to the particular moment.
  • Cocktail hour: Our ceremony and reception were held in a single space, so the recessional led straight into cocktails and socializing. Taking the tone from our recessional (and from our expectations of how we’d be feeling at the time), we chose fast, upbeat, celebratory songs—ones that made us want to throw our hands in the air but wouldn’t quite work on the dance floor.
  • Dinner: All the milder stuff went here. We wanted a more relaxing feel while everyone ate and talked, and didn’t want the transition to our (slow) first dance song to feel jarring.
  • Dance party: This was definitely the hardest part. This playlist required some stretching of our “personal” principle because, as mentioned on APW before, one of the most effective ways to get people dancing is to play what they know, and I surprised myself by realizing partway along that I really, really wanted people to dance at my wedding.

Ask for suggestions, but don’t be afraid to ignore them. Like many couples, we did some crowdsourcing: we included a line on our RSVP cards that read, “I promise to dance if you play…” and fully intended to work in every request we received. These good intentions went out the window after “November Rain” and “Pop That” showed up in our mailbox. We ended up including quite a few songs that we might not have chosen ourselves, or found challenging to fit into a coherent whole, and it was so rewarding to see people exclaim “This is my song!” throughout the night as a result. But y’all, there is a line somewhere, and songs over eight minutes long or containing the immortal lyric “On my Proactiv shit, pop that pussy like a zit” were where we drew it for our wedding.

Don’t be afraid to break your own rules, either. We included my in-laws’ request, “Hey Jude,” in our dance playlist, and yep, it cleared the dance floor. But seeing them swaying blissfully, alone and completely oblivious to the world around them, is a memory we’ll both treasure forever.

Nobody cares about the playlist as much as you do. As important as music is to us, thinking back to the weddings we’ve been to over the years we remember very few of the specific songs that were played—even for iconic moments like first dances. The songs that do stick in our minds don’t tend to be the coolest, the most gushingly romantic, or even the ones we like the best; they’re the songs that were playing when we looked over and realized the bride’s dad had happy tears streaming down his face, or when the newlyweds started shouting along, bouncing in each other’s arms, murdering all the lyrics and laughing so hard. Choosing the playlist for your wedding can be an incredibly personal expression of self—of history, meaning, aesthetic—but in the end it’s really just background music. It’s the wedding that infuses the soundtrack with meaning, not the other way around.

An Episcopalian Church Wedding

Hayley, Student & Tim, Organist AND Choirmaster

Photographer: Holly Clarke Gardner

One sentence sum-up of the wedding vibe: Our wedding was a celebration of ancient traditions and music, delicious food, drink, and an amazing community of generous and beautiful friends.

Soundtrack for reading: “This Marriage” by Eric Whitacre

Other Cool Stuff we should know about

From the very beginning we had three goals…

First, we wanted to bask in our faith tradition. The Episcopal Church is known and respected for its support of gender and marriage equality and its work for social justice, and we were proud of that. Its also home to a profoundly beautiful and ancient ceremonial and musical tradition, and we wanted that tradition to be the focus of the day, not us. We had a full nuptial mass, complete with incense. Tim’s choir sang, his friends and colleagues played brass, strings, and organ. We celebrated open communion, and as our first act of hospitality as man and wife we served the chalice to our guests. It was a full-throated celebration of everything it means to be an Episcopalian, in all its inclusive chaotic beautiful joy, and it could not have been more perfect.

Second, we wanted to jettison just about every other modern wedding tradition. For us, they just felt like a script that everyone expected us to follow, but to us… it just didn’t feel right. So we didn’t do it. I had no engagement ring. I didn’t wear bridal or carry a bouquet or wear a veil. Cue the genteel Southern gasp—I wore black! We had no bridesmaids or groomsmen, no showers or bachelor’s parties. Tim conducted his own choir. We walked up the aisle together as equals, no big bridal “reveal.” We instituted a “no gifts” rule, except for donations to charity. There wasn’t a fancy car, or a guestbook, or a photo booth. We DID have wedding cake(s), and we did cut our cake and serve each other… because at the end of the day, I’ll make an exception for the traditions where everyone eats!

Third, we wanted the sort of wedding where we could invite everyone—all these amazing artists, musicians and friends in our lives—and not have to worry too much about the size of the guest list or the bill. We wanted it to feel like a big family Christmas dinner… so that’s what we did. We had a formal-but-potluck dinner reception in our own parish hall. How does that work? Planning. Lots of communication, and planning. Hiring a professional waitstaff doesn’t hurt either. But I can tell you, it was all worth it, because the food was AMAZING. We ordered honey baked hams and roasted our own turkeys, and then invited everyone to bring their favorite holiday dish. We had the church kitchen manned all afternoon so guests could drop off their dishes, which were re-plated on the church’s serveware. By the time the guests came back in their finery, the buffet overflowed with the most amazing food. I collected the recipes beforehand and bound them together in a book with the name of each giver and the dish’s backstory. Our wedding recipe book was both our guest book and guest gift. I love the idea that years from now, I—and our guests—will still be able to get it out and make those dishes and remember.

We had three goals, and thanks to our church and our friends we were able to accomplish them. In a lot of ways, our wedding was “crowdsourced.” We wanted it that way. No polished professional perfection for us. A friend stepped in to be my day-of coordinator. Friends set up the reception hall, and cleaned up the mess when it was over. A friend baked not one, but TWO amazing cakes. A friend helped me with my makeup; a friend made my prayer book cover. A friend coordinated the potluck and ran the kitchen, keeping the amazing waitstaff running smoothly. A friend and his band played the reception. It was really a celebration of friends.

In the Episcopal wedding service, there’s a moment where the priest asks the assembly if they will do all in their power to support the couple; at our wedding the “We Will” thundered off the limestone walls, but they didn’t need to shout. They had already shown their support by coming together to make the day possible. I can really honestly say it wasn’t our wedding—it was theirs, a celebration of a whole family of friends, and we wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Favorite thing about the wedding

Watching my groom conducting his choir for the offertory anthem, wreathed in clouds of incense, with everyone bonded together and lost hopelessly in the moment and the music.