Name That Tune

There are websites that seem to exist purely to suggest songs that you might wish to use whilst you are cutting the cake at your wedding. I am slightly disturbed by this. The fact that I now know there are such websites also slightly disturbs me. Basically because in a harebrained moment I actually went looking for them. But they say weddings are enough to make you crazy. Don’t they?

On my little to-do list, which kind of seems like a Mary Poppins list right about now, ie. it looks perfectly reasonable until you realise just how much information and effort is required of you, it says we are to contact the DJ about 5 weeks prior to the wedding. Purely by luck, I managed to remember that I should probably start thinking about music about 5 weeks out and therefore was able to give the DJ a call. He in turn then emailed me a whole stack of paperwork which is yet more stuff that we now have to do. Included, there was a questionnaire on what type of music is to be played at the reception. Or rather, there are places where I suppose we are to write out song titles or artists depending on how open we are to the DJ’s discretion in selecting tracks. There is an area to cover the music during the canapés and dinner portion of the evening as well as the dancing end of the night where hopefully our event turns into a rocking party. Since we happen to be that way inclined. There is also that very important section where we can state what is not to be played at the reception which I have to say is a far easier part to fill out. I think my first thought off the mark was that if that pant-less pop tart Lady Gaga even makes it out of a CD case, I’m going to be pretty darned pissed. Sorry, not a fan.

Anyway, the other form we had to fill out was for the ‘occasion’ songs. The DJ wanted to know what song to use for when the bridal party enters the room, when the bride and groom enter the room, when we do the first dance, when we are joined on the dance floor by either parents or the bridal party (or both), when I am tossing the bouquet, when The Boy is tossing the garter, when we are cutting the cake, when we are saying goodbye to all our guests and when we actually depart the reception itself! I took one look at that list and my first thought was sheesh, thats a bit of overkill. There is fairly obviously a need to select the song for the bridal waltz and I can concede that there is an amusement factor in tossing the bouquet to the Weather Girls’ Its Raining Men or throwing the garter to Queen’s Another One Bites The Dust but really, I’d be hard pressed to remember what music was playing at any of my friends’ weddings for the other parts of the evening. Especially when they were cutting the cake! Cause my second thought when I looked at that part of the list was why would you even care?!?

So I decided to have a look around to see if there was some whole movement that I had so far been unaware of or whether there was a stunning song choice that would truly epitomise...well...something. And I have to say there wasn’t really. It seems that this is like the spill over section from the other musical moments at your reception such as the bridal waltz or entrance where you get to use a song that didn’t quite make the cut anywhere else. Either that or in deference to fact that your cake probably has more sugar in it than a box of Fruit Loops you can go for the Archies’ Sugar Sugar, U2’s The Sweetest Thing, the Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) or for the rockers out there, Def Leppard’s Pour Some Sugar On Me. That is unless you want to go for the songs about ‘cutting’ and play Average White Band’s Cut The Cake (which I had never even heard of before today) or Bryan Adams’ Cuts Like A Knife. I tried to think of other cutting songs that might be applicable but all I came up with was The First Cut Is The Deepest by Cat Stevens and that was about a failed relationship so its really not appropriate for a wedding celebration at all.

There were also the suggestions that were just cute however. You know, like Thats Amore by Dean Martin or What A Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong. Songs that have stood the test of time because they are truly great but that as a result have actually been done to death. On the whole though, there didn’t seem to be anything really fitting for either us as a couple or the purpose for which we would use it. We may as well just choose any random song we both like or leave it up to the DJ on the night. It actually crossed my mind that maybe I’d be able to find something fun out of a musical or a movie that just didn’t make it into mainstream lists but I kinda bombed out there too. I did decide that if I was going to bother being specific about what songs were playing as we first enter the room then He’s A Tramp from The Lady And The Tramp, Seasons Of Love from Rent or I Wanna Grow Old With You from The Wedding Singer should be on the list but the getting in to the reception was really about as far as I actually got. I still don’t care what song is playing when I cut the cake. I’m far more excited by the fact that we intend to cut the cake with a (small) sword!