Did you know you can purchase a custom written wedding song by writers who have won Grammy’s and Emmy’s? I have no idea if their songs are any good—as I don’t have the patience to actually listen to it—but oh! Imagine how fun (and special) it would be to have a wedding song written just for you.

Music and stationery are probably my two biggest wedding obsessions. Most brides seem to get hung up on things like dresses and the perfect ceremony location, but oh no, not me. Give me a custom designed letterpress invite and some rockin tunes and I will probably call my wedding day a success despite any other calamities that might blight my “special day”.

Most wedding advice columns, manuals, magazines etc. all say the same thing about invitations—they set the tone for the wedding and let the guests know what to expect. So if I send you a cream colored engraved invitation from Crane with a swirly font and request “the honor of your presence” you know I am having a pretty formal (and most likely stuffy) traditional wedding.

If I send you something like this

(insert image of an irreverant wedding invitation here. I couldn’t get my photos to upload today. Sorry.)

 You know to expect a different kind of wedding – a little less traditional, perhaps a lot more fun, and definitely super fancy (Custom Ceci invitations like the ones I planned on posting here start around $2200 with the average cost around $4000— a girl can dream, right?).

Wedding music also sets the tone, although in a slightly different way.  If I hire the string quartet, pay someone to sing Ava Maria, and hike up and down the aisle to the Wedding March (processional? recessional? When is this played in the wedding?) I set an expectation of the same old, same old, traditional wedding. If I bebop down the aisle to… hmmm… I don’t know, the Jackson 5? I make a completely different impression (perhaps not a good one).

And just like my ongoing struggle to determine a favorite song, I struggle to figure out what kind of music I want played at my wedding. For my big walk down the aisle, I am considering one of the promenade movements from Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”. For the rest, I am completely befuddled. My fiancé is into old school punk, maybe we should play Fugazi’s Turkish Disco, or some other such nonsense?

With the bee theme, I am leaning towards music with bee/honey/tree motifs. I started a list of these songs once, but now all I can remember is “Tupelo Honey” by Van Morrison. A wedding soundtrack, one song does not make.

Damn.

At least I can always get the girls at Wedding Music Central to lay down some funky beats if I get desperate.