Our Song

The #1 question I've been getting from people about the wedding has been: so what did you ultimately pick for your song?

Well.

I'd love to tell you that we talked it over and just magically reached consensus.

That did not happen.

What did happen is that the night before the wedding, I pulled IC out of bed (seriously, at that point he was basically saying "you can have any song you want, just leave me alone") and made him try out our three songs. They were "Dance me to the end of love" by Leonard Cohen (his choice), a remake of "Love Sponge" by my friend Cindy (my choice) and "First Day of My Life" by Bright Eyes (the song we initially had agreed on but then couldn't dance to).

Turned out, wow, we can't dance to anything.

We had taken one dance class figuring we'd just get some moves before the wedding and that was ultimately what was causing our difficulty. While we had always been able to hold and sway with the best of them, we suddenly found ourselves concentrating on some kind of box step with a dip at the end.

We gave up on that and went back to just being us, two people who have danced together a million times over their 11 years of friendship and knew how to do it. No box step necessary, but maybe we'll keep the dip.

In our hotel room, we tried dancing to "Dance me to the end of love". Awful. I love this song, and I'm half-sorry that IC didn't get his way (although in the morning we found out that our close friends, who also had a destination wedding which we both attended and which had been the impetus for us eventually deciding on our destination wedding, had had it as their first song so I'm other-half-not-sorry we didn't choose it). It's just a very grand, majestic song and you can't just rock to it. You need a dance routine or something. We did not have a routine and we were getting married in 16 hours. So finally, finally, IC gave up the ghost and we scratched "Dance me to the end of love" off of our list. We agreed it would be the last song of the night. Too bad for us the DJ decided on a different song (note to future T&C brides, if anyone describes your dj as a "celebrity" dj, run.) But that is a story for another day.

Then we tried "Love Sponge" by Cindy. She made us a beautiful song. She took "our" song, Love Sponge by Buju Banton and de-reggaefied it, made it a slow, beautiful ballad. And while we did dance to it later in the wedding night, we didn't choose it for our first song. It just didn't fit exactly, it wasn't us.

And then we went back to the previously rebuffed Bright Eyes song "First day of my life". And it worked! The lyrics just fit us so beautifully and it felt so right. So we went with it, we chose it, and we loved dancing to it on a beautiful Turks&Caicos night.



(We actually had the DJ cut off the very last line of the song, the only part of the song that IC and I didn't like. We don't get why Conor Oberst has to add a screamy kind of line--"I really think you like meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee" to an otherwise beautiful love song).