While there were many things we spent days and weeks meticulously planning and curating for our wedding, the soundtrack to the day may have been where we both invested the most time and thought. It felt an almost impossible task as we’re both so passionate about music! We’ve bonded over many, many songs and albums over the course of our relationship, and though we luckily have many favorite artists and albums in common, we both went in with hundreds of songs each and had to pare down again and again to the most meaningful several hours’ worth of tunes. We think each playlist ended up just perfect and we still turn to them when we’re not sure what we feel like listening to, throw them on during gatherings, and fire them up when we’re feeling nostalgic.
Many of our guests commented on our song choices on wedding day and after, and a couple have even asked for us to share our playlists since then. So, I thought I’d compile them all here in case you’re interested!
The Cocktail Hour Playlist
The day started with our pre-ceremony cocktail hour playlist. This consisted of a couple hours of instrumental music (many being covers of our favorite songs) that set the scene for the ceremony about to take place. Easy for people to talk over and ease into. We were going for a vibe that felt classy yet casual, with plenty of recognizable indie, pop, and classic rock songs, and even some scores from our favorite movies and TV shows mixed in! I frequently revisit this playlist now when I need music to zone out to or to help me focus when I’m writing or working.
The Ceremony Playlist
For our ceremony, we played the Bridgerton version of Taylor Swift’s “Wildest Dreams” as guests were getting seated. While Jeremy isn’t a Taylor fan through and through like me, we both agree that 1989 is a near-flawless album and played it on a loop for a year after it came out. Then, our families and Jeremy walked out to one of our favorite Bon Iver songs, “Beth/Rest.” Bon Iver is far and away the most meaningful band in terms of our relationship—one we connected over in our first months of dating and have seen several times live. I walked out to “Hoppípolla,” one of our favorites from Sigur Rós, a post-rock Icelandic band we spent a lot of time listening to when we first started dating, and who we saw live with some friends in 2013. Once we were married, we walked back down the aisle to “Handle with Care” by The Traveling Wilburys (a supergroup composed of some of our all-time favorite artists, including Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison, and Jeff Lynne).
The First Dance Song
We shared our first dance to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Our House,” a song we often play or sing for fun together and one that was both incredibly meaningful to us and short enough that it wouldn’t feel like it drug on too uncomfortably long (for us or for our guests)!
The Reception Playlist
Our reception playlist was the one we put the most effort into. Over the course of several months, we both added songs as we thought of them, then considered how long we thought the reception may be, tacked on a couple hours for safety, and then painstakingly narrowed it down. We included songs that were significant to our relationship, some in honor of loved ones who had passed and couldn’t be there, a few related to memories or inside jokes with friends and family, and some just for fun. Once we had it cut down to a more manageable amount of songs, I went through and sorted every song individually in an order that I thought would be fitting for the night. Upbeat, celebratory songs to play right after the ceremony until we came in for our first dance, slower, quieter songs to play while guests conversed and enjoyed dinner, and then a mix of upbeat and chill songs, gradually changing pace and genre every few tracks in as smooth of transitions as possible, for the rest of the evening.
Side note: this playlist originally included lot of Neil Young, but he’s since removed his catalogue from Spotify.
Ironically, our reception playlist ended up accidentally being played on shuffle! Fortunately, Spotify kind of magically transitioned from song to song in a non-jarring way and we ended up getting so many comments throughout the night and in the weeks after the wedding that people loved the music and many who said they wish they’d made their own playlists and not just gone with what was popular at the time, left it up to their DJ, or played music solely to please their guests. And perhaps it playing out of order was for the better, because there were so many key moments of the night when the songs that were playing perfectly aligned with the situation and are etched in our memories forever!
A fun aside: we went to one of Fort Wayne’s biggest festivals at Headwaters Park last summer and as we were waiting in line for some drinks, “Rosie” by Tom Waits came on. This is a song I’ve never heard on the radio or in a public setting, ever. It’s kind of become our “family” song as we sing it to Rosie all the time. So I tugged at Jeremy’s shirt and asked if he heard it and commented how weird it was to hear it in the wild. Then, “Have Love, Will Travel, a rare Tom Petty song, followed it. At that point, I froze. I asked Jeremy if I was dreaming because I recalled putting those songs together, in that exact order, on our reception playlist and asked what the odds are that they’d be playing at all, let alone back to back. We sat down and seconds later, our wedding DJ came running over and excitedly told us that we’d unknowingly saved the day—he was running sound for the festival and didn’t have Wifi to access the playlist he’d built for it. He had downloaded our wedding reception playlist, still had it at the ready, and decided to play it all weekend! Apparently, he had several people comment how much they were loving the songs each day. We loved hearing that and knowing that the mix of songs that meant so much to us, the soundtrack to our day, was being enjoyed by thousands of people in a totally different capacity.
So, there you have it! This is what our wedding day sounded like. We hope you enjoy listening to these playlists as much as we enjoyed putting them together!
—Aly