Fa LALA

Thanks to Sister Bruschetta, selecting the significant songs to be played at our wedding has been a breeze. Over the past several months, the mister and I compiled a list of any and every song we'd like to hear at some point throughout the evening at our reception -- from cocktail hour through dinner, and until everyone's exhausted from dancing. We'd noted the artist and song title, but in some cases (like with some of the lesser-known oldies), couldn't "hear" the tune in our heads any longer with just this information.

Enter Lala.

(source)

No, not the Teletubby. Sister Bruschetta had mentioned this site -- which allows you to listen once to a song in its entirety (each subsequent listen is a 30-second snippet), and add 50 songs to your Lala collection for free (numbers 51 and up are available as 89-cent MP3s) -- awhile back as one of her new favorite sources for music. And I'm so happy she did! Mr. Bruschetta and I both signed up for free accounts, and recently spent several hours on our laptops plugging in artists and song titles to reacquaint our ears with tunes we'd flagged as potential playlist material.

(Here's a snippet of one of the songs we considered -- but didn't end up choosing -- for our first dance.)

I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie...

Lala's library isn't without some holes -- for example, few Beatles hits are available -- and (in my opinion) it trends toward indie songs; search "Guster" or "The Magnetic Fields" (two of my faves), and an impressively lengthy list of live and CD-released songs greets you.

For our purpose, however, Lala was an immense help; we were able to identify our top picks for several significant songs -- including the bridal party introduction, our introduction, our first dance, the father-daughter dance and the last dance -- and will continue to plug away until our playlist is complete.

Are there any other Lala fans in the hive? How are you narrowing down the seemingly endless options to pick your playlist?