My Wedding on a Budget: 23 Days to Go!

Party in the BLUEGRASS
Picking out music might be my favorite and least favorite thing...
Reasons to love it:
1.) I love music....simple as that.
2.) It expresses so much not just lyrically but in its sound. Being a lover of movie scores, piano music and all things instrumental, I'd go as far as to say that the sounds means 10x more to me than words.

Reasons to hate it:
1.) There's so much of it and I only have so much time to play it during my day! It basically breaks down to three chunks: Church/ceremony, early reception and party/dancing reception.
2.) Going through it and picking and choosing can be a HUGE time suck!

Tonight I tried to work strictly on the opening reception music. The good news is Jon and I have pretty much accomplished half of the battle and narrowed it down to what style of music we want it to be. The bad news it's not traditional wedding music. Most people stick with the Norah Jones and Frank Sinatra mix that any DJ who's worked a wedding probably already has a standard play list for. Not us. For some reason "Come Fly Away" doesn't seem as suiting in our setting. So we want to go with folk/bluegrass mix. You know...lots of fiddle and banjo music. Maybe it's just me but fall colors, cool weather and a field just scream some good fiddle tunes. On top of that I'd say it's probably Jon's favorite kind of music. I remember in my early months of going to his apartment to fix and eat dinner he'd put the TV on the bluegrass station and just let the music play. It was comforting even then.

Jon has several bluegrass cds so I've been going through them picking out the instrumental songs so I can provide Ben with as much as possible. From those CDs I've gotten a decent collection: Sam Bush, Alison Krauss & Union Station, Bill Monroe, Bela Fleck. Ben may have some but I'm guessing (as said previously) it's not his #1 request. I've put together almost 2 hours of music but that's from all that I could find and I'm not sure I want all of it used (some is slower or very similar...Need a little variety.) I'd like to find more.

I'm 99% sure the song Jon and I will be using for our first dance is off of a Sam Bush album he purchased in the past year: "Circles Around Me." I love the sound and the words about life, love, friends, family...all that really matters in life. Jon and I have never really had a song (unless you count Meatloaf, "Anything for Love", but we'll save that performance for later in the evening...) so I wanted him to pick out what we'd dance to. He mentioned this one and I want to run with it mainly because so much about it screams Jon Harris. It's slow enough to be sweet and heartfelt, but got enough pick up in it for him to spin me a time or two on the dance floor (and spinning is important!)I hear it...and I think of him. That's how it should be.

He's off to Dale Hollow for a bachelor party weekend. Won't be back til Sunday so it will be me and the animals holding down the fort!