songs
“Play my motherf&%in' song” - J lo
“What songs do you play?”
“Can we see a list of your songs and choose the ones we want?”
“Will you learn songs that we want?”
What songs do we play
If you have seen us play, you’ll notice that we usually play about 70 songs in a night. Seriously. That’s because if you have 200 people at your event, there’s probably 200 opinions about what the band should be playing and we try to cast a wide net by playing a ton of songs. People are passionate about THEIR music and we get it. That said, and especially at a wedding, our clients want to make sure that THEIR night has THEIR preferences in mind too. Couple this with what we know will work from our experience by reading a crowd, this is often a very delicate balance. I’ve written a blog post HERE about this delicate balance including some songs that supringsly don’t work.
The first step is we ask all of our clients to make us a HUGE list of requests about a month before their event and to be clear, this is a list from scratch. They are not choosing from a list of songs that we give them. This serves 2 purposes:
We get an unprompted sense of your tastes and style. We want to include this as much as we think will work in our custom setlist that we bring to your event although, we may need to abandon this plan if your crowd is responding to something else.
Your requests go into a bigger database that we keep on requests we get and we look to see if there's any songs that "spike". Over the years, we've seen the sudden resurgence of certain older songs due to a TV show or movie (I Wanna Dance With Somebody - Whitney Houston, Mr Brightside - The Killers, Come and Get Your Love - Redbone, Dancing in the Moonlight - King Harvest, You Make My Dreams Come True - Hall & Oates, September - EWF, Wonderwall - Oasis, etc.) or songs that are new on the charts and maybe worth learning for us.
And to be clear, we’re perfectly fine letting clients skip making us a list and just simply having us “do our thing”. Often this approach translates into the best parties. We keep data on every event that we do, including recordings, videos, and detailed reports that we breakdown after each event and try to codify how a crowd is responding to particular songs.
I will also say that we are able to play and often do play many songs that other bands don’t or more precisely can’t. Very often people think about getting a DJ thinking there’s a ton of material that a band couldn’t pull off but are totally caught off guard when we get into things like hip hop, top 40, and EDM and are grateful that they didn’t go the DJ route and still get to hear music from those worlds from the live band.
Can we see a list of your songs and choose the ones we want?
And the answer is no. HA! We don’t share our playlist with clients and the reasons are these: What we plan to play and what we end up playing are sometimes two different things depending on the vibe of the crowd. Also, we also have worked out careful transitions from one song to the next to the next to keep the energy and flow going as well as eliminate dead space and allowing clients to simply erase songs out of those medleys may make for awkward and unrehearsed transitions. We’d rather get your requests (and “no plays” too) in advance and craft a personalized setlist that still negotiate our transitions without a lot dead air stopping. Lastly, If we allow clients to program our sets, frankly they generally are not very good at knowing what “works”. They don’t have the experience or know how to rock a party and it usually ends up with their one person using their personal tastes to dictate what they think the crowd will like at their event, which is in our experience usually disastrous. Trust us. We do this 275 times a year and we have the reviews and awards to go along with it. You will NOT be disappointed. :)
Will you learn songs that we want?
Yes! Every event, the dance band is happy to learn one song that we don’t know (we know a lot though) for no extra cost (usually this is a first dance song, if your event is a wedding) and for wedding ceremonies, up to 4 songs are included in the price. If you would like us to learn more than that, fees are incurred depending on the song and size of band.