We’ll be the first to admit that hiring a wedding band for your reception isn’t necessarily the best fit for everyone.  While we find that we are comparable in volume to a DJ, there are other expectations that couple have, especially at an event when all of their extended family and friends are in attendance.  Everyone wants their wedding to be a reflection of themselves and their personalities as well as wanting to make sure they aren’t offending anyone who is there to celebrate their marriage.  That leads to concerns that we hear about regarding volume, appropriate material, and so on.  Since we’re not a loud group and are a very family-friendly band, it’s an easy thing for us to address up front, but occasionally you’ll see some outlier questions, like this one that we found on Reddit’s Wedding Planning forum recently:

hey there – so, we’re having a bit of a rockabilly wedding, and having a rockabilly band play the reception. a whole slew of my cousins have young/ish kids and are awfully religious, and i’m afraid that they won’t be super happy about the noise and the swears. i’m not asking the band to tone down their sets, cuz…. no. but i wondered about some sort of note in the invite or maybe a card included with the invites to people where their kids are invited?

basically I want to say that of course your kids are invited, but that after dinner we’ll be having a band that may not be exactly kid-friendly and then include a link to their website.

not that i expect that people won’t come if they know that there’s a band, but more that i’d hate for my cousins to feel like they were unprepared.

Again, we are constantly aware of this concern. Despite a bride and groom saying that they might not necessarily care about some suggestive lyrics or outright swear words in songs, we don’t choose much material that would cross a line that we aren’t comfortable with performing in front of everyone.   First, it’s rough for us to have to try to change lyrics on the fly to accommodate each event.  Inevitably, that will lead us to slip up, and the last thing we want to do is drop the “f bomb” in front of grandma.  Second, aside from playing in bands, we all have professional careers that, like it or not, are reflected as much as our band life is.  Finally, we get a lot of leads by word of mouth.  We don’t want to have someone see us at an event or wedding reception and consider not booking us because we were inappropriate.

Granted, we are aware of songs in our set like Baby Got Back, Hot In Herre, and a few of the tunes in the hip hop medley.  We’re certainly a PG-13 band, even with cutting out a lot of the controversial stuff.  But there’s nothing in our set that we wouldn’t (and haven’t) played in front of our own children and grandparents!

Additionally, the bride and groom always have full access to our current song list and can have anything leading up to the day of the wedding taken out if they’re uncomfortable with anything.  We can also make our curated DJ list available to them, although it’s been heavily vetted for content and language.  We firmly believe in there being no surprises or uncomfortable moments for the bride and groom and their family to have to worry about.  This way they can relax and enjoy the music with the rest of their guests!