Vermont Musicians Share the Stories Behind Their Wedding Songs

Published: February 08, 2017
Getting married involves the biggest decision of your life. No, we don't mean choosing a spouse. We're talking about choosing the song that will introduce you and your partner as a single entity to the world: the wedding song. Unlike roughly half of all marriages, your first song is forever. So, the pressure is on to get it right. Right? Seven Days recently polled some musical couples who are either married or about to be. We wanted to find out how and why they chose their first-dance songs, and maybe to pass along advice for anxious couples grappling with these same questions: Classic or obscure? Earnest or whimsical? Elegant jazz or ear-splitting metal? Here's what they told us. Anaïs Mitchell and Noah Hahn "Hearts on Fire," Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris When they first fell in love, folk songwriter Anaïs Mitchell and Noah Hahn shared a mutual love for Gram Parsons. So much so that a lyric from "Hearts on Fire," his duet with Emmylou Harris, became part of their coupley lexicon. "At some point, we started saying to each other, 'Hearts on fire, babe' / 'Hearts on fire,'" says Mitchell. "Not sure why, but it was like an alternative for 'I love you' / 'I love you, too.'" Eventually, Mitchell got a tattoo of a flaming heart with Hahn's name on it. "This was before we were married," she explains. "My mom was like, 'Whoa, you're serious about him.'" She was. Hahn and Mitchell married in 2006. As in Mitchell's own music, an undercurrent of melancholy runs beneath the sweetness of Parsons' tune. "The weird thing about it is that the lyrics of that song are super dark: 'My love for you brought only misery,'" says Mitchell. "But we sort of felt like, Fuck it, it's a great song. And it was meaningful to us," she continues. "And we're still married 10 years later, so it didn't seem to curse our union." Mitchell advises soon-to-be-wed couples to choose a song that's genuinely meaningful to them, rather than what "might feel cool or clever or sentimental" to others. "Let's face it, much of the wedding is about pleasing other people," she says. "So it's nice to get three-and-a-half minutes of real, epic intimacy you can dance away in." Colleen and Alex Budney "Wild Horses," the Rolling Stones Colleen and Alex Budney subscribe to Mitchell's advice. While on vacation…
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