How to Make a Bilingual Wedding Playlist
I’m an American living in Belgium and marrying a French guy. Our wedding will have people from all over, but mostly the US, France, and Belgium. Planning a bilingual, multi-cultural wedding can be fun and exciting, but it can also be endless stress vortex.
Here’s a helpful guide for creating a Franco-Belgo-American wedding playlist for anyone else who happens to be in the same situation (all 4 of you).
Start by Googling “french and american wedding playlist” and sigh when the top results are just romantic French songs. Google “playlist mariage français et américain” and sigh again when you still find no pre-made, plug-n-play bilingual French-English wedding reception playlists.
Search for the same terms on YouTube and come up with more or less the same results. Start worrying a bit.
Comb Reddit for suggestions about French party songs.
Watch every “Top French songs of the 2000s” video you can find on YouTube. Then do it again for the 1990s, the 1980s, and the 2010s because you realized that you will have Gen X all the way up to Gen Alpha at this wedding.
Add Shut Up and Dance to your playlist.
Remember that your wedding is in Belgium and that you’ve invited a great deal of francophone Belgians. Wonder if all the Belgians still like the same party songs as the French.
Start researching top songs in Belgium in the 80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s and quickly remember that half this country speaks Flemish. Frantically wonder if the francophone Belgians you invited will expect you to also play Flemish hits??
Remove Shut Up and Dance from your playlist.
Listen to way too much popular Flemish music and save a few songs to your personal playlist for later. Feel a bit uneasy about it, though, because you don’t understand any of the Flemish lyrics and you don’t want to bop along to a really heinous song without realizing it.
Give up on including Flemish songs on your playlist.
Reluctantly add Les Lacs du Connemara to your playlist and make a note to tell the DJ not to play it until the end, but not the very very end, the sort-of end, when people are happy-drunk rather than tired-drunk.
Add Shut Up and Dance to your playlist.
Spend too much time deciding which Lady Gaga song to add: initially put Telephone because everyone loves Beyoncé. Second-guess this choice because maybe the theme of this song isn’t appropriate for a wedding, which is supposed to be about love? Add Just Dance instead. I mean, you want people to dance, right? It’s right there in the title: Just Dance.
Start Marie Kondo-ing the whole thing and only add the songs that bring you joy. It’s your wedding!
Remember that you won’t spend the whole night dancing anyway and anticipate the shame and sense of personal failure you’ll feel if there’s a single moment during this wedding when nobody’s on the dance floor.
Remove Shut Up and Dance from your playlist.
Resume extensive Reddit and YouTube research of French and Francophone-Belgian party songs.
Notice that popular songs in Belgium and France include songs from other European countries too. (The Ketchup Song). Throw your hands up in frustration and consider quitting this whole playlist thing (isn’t this the DJ’s job anyway??) then get some chocolate and get back to it.
Remember that Europeans love ABBA more than Americans and feel delighted that you can add multiple ABBA songs to the playlist and not just Dancing Queen.
Add Shut Up and Dance to your playlist.
Take copious mental (and actual) notes at every party you attend from now until the wedding. Flee from the dance floor at said parties to take notes on your phone of any song that seems particularly popular.
Chuckle to yourself at the reactions the Americans will have to the intro of Ces soirées-là when they realize the song is in French.
Remember that you’ll have non-American English speakers (Brits) at this wedding and spiral into another bout of top-hits research focused on the UK only to realize that it’s basically the same hits as the US with some European hits thrown in too.
Sadly accept that you’ll have to put some Ed Sheeran on the playlist, for the Brits.
Wonder why you can’t just do an instrumental version of Get the Party Started by P!nk as your first dance song.
Suddenly remember that you have to pick a first dance song and agonize briefly over which language it should be in…English? French? But you don’t know enough French love songs and you don’t want to choose one that’s too cheesy. Anxiously set the first-dance-song matter aside for now.
Wonder if you should do Disney songs because that’s a wedding trend you’ve been seeing on social media? Everybody loves Disney right? Realize that Disney dubs all movies and songs in different languages when releasing the films in other countries and immediately scratch this idea.
Remove Shut Up and Dance from your playlist.
Listen to every “wedding” and “mariage” playlist you can find on Spotify and YouTube during your workouts. Let your workout sessions turn into one-person dance parties and judge songs for your playlist based on how much they distract you from working out and make you want to shake it.
Add Shut Up and Dance to your playlist.
