There is a moment at every wedding where the room goes quiet and two people walk out onto a floor by themselves. Everybody watches. Somebody's aunt cries. It is, structurally, the most attention those two will ever have at once.
And then a song plays that was written about somebody else entirely, usually by a man in Nashville who has never met them.
I am not being sniffy about it. Those songs are good, which is why they get used. But it has always struck me as strange that the single most personal ceremony most people ever hold is soundtracked by something anonymous.
Why it was always like that
Because commissioning music was, until very recently, the preserve of people with real money. A composer, a session band, a vocalist, a studio day and an engineer. Five to fifteen thousand dollars for one song, six weeks of back and forth, and a genuine risk you would hate it and be too embarrassed to say so.
So people did the sensible thing and picked a track they both liked. There was no third option.
What changed
Production got cheap. That is the whole story, and it is worth being precise about which part got cheap, because a lot of marketing is currently being vague about it.
Recording a song, arranging it, and getting a competent vocal onto it used to cost thousands and now costs very little. Writing a song that is actually about two specific people did not get cheaper at all. It still takes somebody reading your story and finding the line in it.
What makes one of these work
I have written a lot of these now, and the ones that land have almost nothing in common musically. What they share is that they contain something only about eleven people in the room could possibly know.
A nickname with a story behind it. The bus stop where it started. The thing he says every single morning. The year she nearly moved to Canada. One of those, placed properly, does more than an entire verse of adjectives about love.
The test I use: if a line could be moved into a different couple's song without anybody noticing, it should not be in this one.
The occasions people actually use them for
- The first dance, which is the obvious one
- The entrance, where a song built for the moment beats a fade-out of something else
- A sangeet or mehndi, where the whole evening is already built around music
- An anniversary, which is where I see the most repeat orders
- A proposal, with the song ready before the question is asked
- A gift for parents, usually a story the couple's children only half know
What it costs now
Somewhere between fifty and four hundred dollars, depending on whether you want just the song or the song cut into a film using your own photographs. Delivered inside a day.
That is not a small amount of money. It is roughly what a wedding spends on flowers that are in a bin by Monday, for something the couple will still have in thirty years.
The flowers die on Monday. The song is still there when your children ask how you met.
One honest caveat
If your relationship genuinely has a song already, one that was playing in a specific car on a specific night, use that. No commissioned piece will beat a song you already cry at.
This is for everybody else. Which, in my experience of asking, is most people.