Please Don’t Send Me Your Spotify History
I love getting music from couples before a wedding. Honestly. It's one of the most useful parts of the whole process, because a handful of songs can tell me quite a lot about somebody. Give me ten or twenty tracks that you absolutely love, a few things that remind you of particular people, perhaps some music you definitely don't want, and I'm already beginning to get an idea of what sort of party this might be. What I don't particularly need is a Spotify playlist containing 287 songs you've enjoyed at various points over the last eighteen months. I realise Spotify makes this incredibly easy, and there is a certain satisfaction in handing over what appears to be a comprehensive musical autobiography, but somewhere around track 34 I am no longer learning very much about you. I'm mostly learning that you quite like music.
The problem is that music you enjoy and music that belongs at your wedding are not quite the same thing. I have hundreds of records I love dearly that I wouldn't dream of playing at most weddings, just as there are records I almost never listen to at home that are absolutely magnificent when 120 slightly drunk people are in a room together. Context changes music enormously. So does timing. So does the particular collection of people standing in front of you. A song can be objectively perfect for you and completely wrong for the room at that moment, while something you'd never think to put on one of your own playlists can suddenly have your university friends, your mum and a your second cousin's latest boyfriend all behaving as though they've been waiting their entire lives to hear it.
This is also why I'd exercise a little restraint with the No Play List. If you genuinely cannot stand a song, artist or genre, tell me. It's your wedding and I have absolutely no desire to ambush you with something you hate because Uncle Brian has asked for it. But there's an important difference between I really don't want this played and I'm not especially into this. ABBA are a good example. You might never voluntarily listen to ABBA. That's fine. You may even regard them with mild suspicion. Also fine. But if Dancing Queen happens to be exactly the record that a particular room wants at a particular moment, do you really want it prohibited because six months ago you were filling out a questionnaire and thought, “Nah, not really an ABBA person”? Your wedding isn't an exam in which every song played has to accurately represent your musical identity.
What I'm really trying to understand before a wedding is your taste, rather than obtain a complete inventory of approved music. Those are very different things. A relatively small number of carefully chosen songs tells me where the edges are: perhaps you love disco but aren't keen on obvious wedding disco; maybe you're into indie but there's a particular patch of 2000s indie that really means something to you; perhaps your family goes berserk for soul, or your friends have a longstanding and inexplicable relationship with a song you'd be embarrassed to explain to anybody else. That's useful information because I can do something with it. I can join the dots, explore around it and, crucially, respond to what actually happens on the night.
I suppose that's the bit that's easily forgotten when Spotify gives us the ability to carry several million songs around in our pockets. A DJ doesn't really need help finding enough good music to fill five hours. The difficult bit is deciding which song belongs now, when to abandon an idea, when to indulge somebody's ridiculous request and when to politely ignore it, when the room is ready for something unexpected and when it very clearly wants ABBA. Give me enough music to understand you, tell me about anything you genuinely can't bear, and then leave some space for the party to become whatever it's going to become. That's where the fun is.
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