Wedding Playlists Part 2: Ceremony Music

Here’s the music we used dur­ing the cer­e­mony. Def­i­nitely some non-traditional choices, but each song was such a per­fect fit for the func­tion it was placed in dur­ing the cer­e­mony that it really didn’t seem to be notice­ably “dif­fer­ent”; it was more like each aspect of the cer­e­mony became notice­ably more inter­est­ing. At least that’s what I felt, but I was the bride…lol.

Pro­ces­sional:

The wed­ding party with finale of dad & bride all entered on the same song, “Don’t Be Shy” by Cat Stevens. My hus­band remixed it a bit by loop­ing together the instru­men­tal intro­duc­tion to add an extra minute of just piano melody to the song, and it was per­fectly timed for my dad and I to walk in on the lyrics that open the sec­ond verse: “Love is bet­ter than a song,/ Love is where all of us belong”.  We included the full lyrics in the pro­gram so that our fam­ily and friends could see yet another rea­son why we picked this song to start the event off with. As if the euphoric, play­ful melody of piano that opens the song wasn’t incred­i­ble enough to walk down any aisle to, the sim­ple pre­sen­ta­tion of the true love lyrics over light gui­tar strums made that moment dur­ing the cer­e­mony seem like it was in slow-motion from another time. Again, that could have just been me.

Songs Per­formed Live Dur­ing The Ceremony:

I’ll have to get the video of those per­for­mances up on the web­site when  I get the video back, but for now you’ll have to believe me when I say “WOW”. Friends from my under­grad­u­ate musi­cal the­atre days were gen­er­ous enough to per­form two live selec­tions dur­ing the short cer­e­mony, and let me tell you, these moments were breath­tak­ing. In both per­for­mances, I could lit­er­ally see the con­fi­dence build­ing, the breath tak­ing foot, the crescendo ris­ing, the joy fill­ing up as the songs drove quickly for­ward into their pin­na­cle moments. The first song per­formed was “I’ll Cover You” from RENT, one of our favorite songs, one of my dad’s favorite songs, and a beau­ti­ful ode to love. My friends Regina and Peter did the har­monies like in the movie sound­track, so that’s the video I’m includ­ing below. They also kept it upbeat and joy­ful, like the song seems to be writ­ten, but turned the tempo down a bit to make the impact of the words more suc­cinct. My incred­i­bly tal­ented friends totally hit their stride at the song’s crescendo (1:36) a.k.a. the bridge of the song, and then peaked again at 2:07 (the dual “yeah yeah yeahs”). It was awe­some. I was in awe. I was also mouthing along the words to my husband-to-be as we stood side-by-side and watched the per­for­mance, no biggie.

Song #2 is from a musi­cal I’ve never seen, Chil­dren Of Eden. I know you’re prob­a­bly think­ing “two musi­cal songs, this seems a lit­tle too the­atri­cal for my tastes”, but since both songs were per­formed at new tem­pos, with non-Broadway sound­ing vocals and with only a piano as accom­pa­ni­ment, they didn’t come off musical-theatre-y at all, which was cer­tainly our intent. Okay, so the sec­ond song is called “In What­ever Time We Have” and it is a zinger! Right into the heart­strings. The video I included below has an intro we didn’t include that relates to the plot of the musi­cal. It also has ridicu­lously Broad­way sound­ing pro­nun­ci­a­tion and vocal­iza­tions and syn­the­sizer. Gross. But when I get the video up from the cer­e­mony, you’ll see that we toned that down a lot. 2:00 has a nice crescendo that might get a tear or two rolling, but the song really hits your face at 2:44 in a way that you really can’t deny if you are a think­ing, feel­ing human being who has ever felt love. So, all your robots out there, ignore this blog!

Reces­sional:

Oh did we dance down that aisle! We chose to recess out­side to the soul­ful vocals of Jackie Wil­son in his clas­sic “Higher & Higher”. This song is joy per­son­i­fied, and brought into the cer­e­mony that gospel ele­ment that I really wanted. Music was the only thing I ever liked about going to church when I was a kiddo, I used to say I was from the Church of Music. And this song is a fine exam­ple of how I felt: this is music hit­ting joy at its core, spread­ing love, show­ing rejoice and exu­ber­ance, and it was the most fit­ting song of any I’ve ever heard in my life to choose to walk together for the first time as hus­band and wife together. All our friends and fam­ily fol­lowed behind as we walked out­side into the sun­light, and it was good. That’s gospel, right there.