Weddingbee Blog

When Mr. French Fries and I throw dinner parties… I mean, er… when Mr. French Fries and I have friends over for drinks and apps while we decide where we should go out for dinner, we don’t put on smooth jazz, Kenny G instrumentals, or Rat Pack classics for background music. Typically, I put on one of the OnDemand music channels we get with our digital cable (that is if I can set my wine glass down long enough to grab the remote and turn something on).

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When thinking about our cocktail and dinner music, I knew that going with the standard “Dinner Hour” selections that most DJs provide wouldn’t be exactly what we had in mind.

Luckily, we’re working with an open-minded DJ who has told us that we can customize our cocktail and dinner music to our hearts’ content. I think the exact words out of his mouth were, “Basically, you can pick whatever you want. If we don’t have it in our files, we’ll get it by the time your wedding rolls around.” Jackpot. Since we’re allowed to customize every aspect of our wedding playlist as we go, anytime we hear a song and think, ‘man… I need to dance to this at our wedding!’ or conversely, ‘there is no way I want this shizz played at our wedding,’ we can go onto our handy-dandy personalized website and mark the song appropriately.

Mr. French Fries and I have lots of songs that we love, but aren’t exactly dance floor-worthy. It’s kind of hard to shake your groove thang to Damien Rice or The Postal Service. So, we’re considering doing somewhat alternative music for cocktail/dinner hour, to include these songs. They’re potentially perfect for cocktail and dinner hour, except… well, except that people expect to hear Rat Pack classics while chewing on their filet. Kenny G wafting through the cocktail hour, his saxophone crooning over everyone’s conversation. They don’t expect to hear Death Cab for Cutie or Radiohead or even John Mayer or Coldplay. Would our guests recognize this music? And even if they didn’t recognize it, would they even enjoy listening to it?

It might be a gamble, and we’ll probably mix in some of the “traditional” songs just for safety’s sake, but I know that in the end, this is the right choice for us. It’s what we’d put on for background music if we were having everyone over to our house, and really, that’s the feeling that we’re going for anyway. It’s what reflects us as a couple, and that’s what this is all about, right?

Did you give thought to not only the dance music but also the cocktail hour and dinner hour music? How did you pick songs that were liked or at least tolerated by everyone?