How to Choose Wedding Songs

Talking to many other brides-to-be, one thing that continually comes up is the song choice. For me, music was pretty darn important, in the top 3 of priorities. However, I struggled with our wedding music. Instantly pulling out old cd's from when we first dated searching for 'the one', I crawled through love dedication cd's at JB HiFi, YouTube and blogs.

Short of a poet or songwriter, I needed to rely on amazing musicians out there to have written a song that completely understood Ray and I, it also needed to have the right beat, not too tacky. That should've been easy, right?

It was months before we landed on a selection of music.

For the brides who are currently up wedding alley with no song to dance to, here is how we discovered beautiful music, that still strike the hairs on my body to upright position faster than a dog to a schmacko!

• Watch a few of your favourite movies, ones that make you feel swoonish, listen to the music.
• Trawl through your old music collection, who knows there might be a goldie oldie, plus it is WAY too much fun reminiscing.
• Search for acoustic bands, you would be surprised at how a dance song can sound as a loved up acoustic version. (Think Justin Timberlake - My Love)
• It doesn't need to be a love song, it just needs to be meaningful to you two.
• Listen to 'like a version' on Triple J - there are some GREAT covers.
• BBC Live Lounge (mostly British Bands) but chilled out music.
• Think of some songs that fill you up with joy or emotion, if you don't like the words, have a band play the music and leave the lyrics out.

We didn't use any songs that were pre-determined and claimed as 'ours', we loved the memory they already represented and didn't want to overwrite them. Instead, we found songs, which gave meaning to that exact moment of that day, we felt they were our style and would provide us those goosebump emotions later on too.

Plus it was so exciting while planning to throw the songs on and just visualise that moment. Butterflies much?!

So what did we use?

Isle Song: Forever, Ben Harper

Signing Register: Better Together, Jack Johnson

Announcement of Marriage: Times Like These, Foo Fighters

Cutting the Cake: Violet, Birds of Tokyo

First Dance: Bella, Angus & Julia Stone

Second Dance: (oldie friendly) Wonderful World - Louis Armstrong - oh and how cute is he in this clip!

I'll never forget EVERYONE came on the dancefloor (Including very close friends of ours who have dated for nearly 10 years and never danced together), it was one of the best moments of our wedding. 

Leaving: From now on, The Features

We then gave all our guests a homemade and designed CD to take home which featured all of our wedding songs! - which I posted about here.

What songs did you use? I would love to hear! There are SO SO many beautiful songs in the world, maybe your partner even wrote a song?! I watched a friend's son do that recently, I welled up just watching the video!

Xx