la musique et les memories

The most memorable and significant compliment that someone had said about me was "This girl must know everything there is to know about music". I'll always remember sitting at Maxwell's Plum when my friend Adam proclaimed that and how I bubbled up inside with happiness.

I've been sifting through my music collection over the past few days, trying to determine what songs we can play during certain parts of the ceremony. As far from traditional our wedding may be, there are few items that I'm adamant on preserving: one being our first dance together and the other, the dance with my Dad.

Choosing a song to dance to with my father was simple. He was singlehandedly responsible for instilling the suave style of The Band in me; Bob Dylan, Harry Chapin and Matt Minglewood soon followed. What has been more difficult is choosing a song for the first dance as well as the 'walking down the aisle' tune. As much as Mike and I would enjoy blasting 'Bohemian Like You' by the Dandy Warhols as I fumble my way to the main attraction, something a bit more subtle will have to do. Plus, we've already used that track in the making of our little video below:

Quality work no? Hand modeling is in my future.

Music has always been the force responsible for keeping my chin up, pushing me that extra kilometer, and keeping the beat in the bedroom. Some people have a knack for associating smells with memories but for me, it's the music that will bring back to a moment in time where time completely stopped. I remember tears streaming down my face at my second Radiohead concert when Paranoid Android slowed down for Thom Yorke to begin the 'From a great height' sequence. Or at HPE2004 when the Wrens performed for a handful of people and took our request to play 'She Sends Kisses' (look that song up; the lyrics are, by far, the most honest and gut-wrenching words you could imagine). And our long drives to Merritt and back, with Matt Mays playing over and over so that we could sing the Buck 65 portion of 'When the Angels Make Contact' and commit it to memory.

Now it is time to choose a song, that one song, which you will always remember as 'your song'. We have so many 'songs' that it is appearing impossible to choose just one. But it will come to me and we will play it and have our dance, although I'm pretty sure that as we clumsily sway back and forth, the music will fall into the background with the moment taking precedence.