Wedding Blog

Mr. Bear Cub and I have been busying ourselves with quite a lot of wedding tasks recently—one of which is dance lessons! We’re making some headway on our fancy footwork, but I’ll save the details for another post. Right now, our lovely dance instructor is helping us choreograph our first dance. You need a song to be able to choreograph, so we’ve been pondering the “first dance” song pretty heavily!

Last weekend when while Mr. Cubbie and I were on a 10-mile run (marathon training full steam ahead!), one of my favorite songs played in my iPod.

The song, Somebody Loved, is by The Weepies. Even though their name is a bit of a downer, they play some of the happiest, upbeat music ever! It’s great running music! This song is one of their slower ones, but I think it’s so beautiful. If you have a minute, you should read the lyrics along with the song (linked here).

The thing we’re grappling with however, is how do you dance to a song like this? It’s beautiful, the lyrics describe us, but the tune is a little hard to actually choreograph. Our dance instructor started us with a whole bunch of lyrical moves, but that is not us. We don’t really feel comfortable dancing for show, but we definitely want to do a much more technical dance than the 8th-grade sway.

Maybe we need to change our song to a more up-tempo one.

Take It From Me is very sweet, and a little more up-tempo…

and Jolene sounds like it could be very fun to dance to! I don’t know if the lyrics are very fitting for a “first dance”, though.

The other end of the stick is that we have our band! I’m really excited to have them play our wedding - they’re a local Oregon folk/bluegrass band, with a bit of an Irish sentiment to their style. We’ve asked them to play our first song, but this raises another issue - they don’t have a female singer. Normally not a biggie (I like guys’ singing voices all the same), but “Somebody Loved” is sung by a girl. Seeing as how the major melody for the song is in her voice, I don’t know how well it will translate into a cover by 3 guys, a mandolin, bass, and violin. Their style is a bit more “Jolene”, if you know what I mean.

Should we keep looking for a first dance song? Mr. Bear Cub and I both love folk music - Hem, Ray LaMontagne, Nickel Creek, Mark Kozelek, Laura Veirs, Josh Ritter, Joan Baez, Iron & Wine, Dick Gaughan, Damien Rice, Charlie Cutten, Billie Bragg, Beth Orton, The Be Good Tanyas, … Actually, we like a lot of music.

Or should we stay with our song, and try to learn some dance moves that won’t leave us feeling like awkward 13-year-olds? Do you know of a good dance style that would go with our song? Do you have an even better suggestion for a song?