Songs that will play at my wedding (probably)
I haven’t always known I wanted to get married, but I have always known what would be on my wedding playlist.
Programming note:
This is, I guess, the first real edition of Ranch Baby! That’s exciting. While I don’t want to be locked in too hard to a regular posting schedule, we’re tentatively going to be releasing new editions weekly when there’s something to say. You’ll also see a few recurring sections at the bottom of each edition—those are probably going to grow and change. This is a baby after all—I didn’t say this was a “fully formed Ranch Adult!”
Last weekend marked Valentine’s Day! It’s a day of love! A day of ooey gooey sappiness! And it is a day I leaned hard into this year amidst the rest of the world being pretty bad!!
I am one of the fortunate ones to be shacked up monogamously, and specifically in a “betrothed to be married way.” Since my partner Jasmine and I got engaged a year and a half ago, I’ve conversationally made ample use of [Borat voice] “my wife,” but we haven’t actually gotten married yet. There are a few reasons for that, chief among them our desire to have a wedding with a big party and our current lack of “wedding with a big party” funds. We’re in no rush, and both mutually acknowledge that we’ve already done the hard and important parts of entwining our lives together—a wedding is just the icing on the cake.
But in this time of pre-wedding engagement limbo we’ve done a lot of head-canoning around what our special day will look like. We’ve gone to a few venues. We’ve made (and re-made, and re-made again) a tentative guest list. We’ve discussed what’s important to each of us when it comes to the event itself (Good food! Good photos! No one there that we don’t like!)
And we’ve talked about the playlist.
I haven’t always known I wanted to get married, but I have always known what would be on my wedding playlist. Every few years, a song would come along and unconsciously in the back of my mind I would file it away into the “wedding playlist.” Even when I didn’t have any idea as to who my future spouse would be, I knew some of the songs I’d want to play when I tied my life to theirs. I recognize this was not exactly logical, considering I was making a playlist for a wedding I didn’t know would happen yet, but this hypothetical wedding playlist was my way of hoping for a future I didn’t see fully crystallized.
Even in my most cynical “no one will love me!” moments, it was a way of at least admitting to myself that I could be loved, and I could be loved by someone for a long time. And specifically, it was a way if admitting that I could be loved by someone for a long time and would have a dreamy wedding montage with that hypothetical person set to the Lucy Dacus cover of “La Vie En Rose.”
Now that I do have my future wife in my life, the wedding playlist is becoming a lot more real, and I’m looking forward to merging my hypothetical playlist with hers—even if it does feature “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls … I love my cringe future wife.
This topic also came to my attention last week since one of the songs that’s been on my hypothetical wedding playlist since I was 15 (“Turn to Stone” by Ingrid Michaelson) featured heavily in a Grey’s Anatomy episode we watched last week (Alex and Izzie’s wedding, Season 5).
Jasmine and I have spent the past few months systematically working our way through the early seasons of Grey’s, and getting all of the musical memories associated with it. I loosely watched this era of the show with my family when it was ariring while I was a teen, but I’ve never sat down and watched the whole thing. And Jasmine’s going in totally blind to all spoilers, which has been very fun for me—the revelation of who John Doe is at the end of Season 5 … chills!
Last week, we watched Izzie Stevens get her perfect wedding and walk down the aisle to that Ingrid Michaelson song and we both cried together on the couch thinking about how special our wedding is going to be. I was struck by how I was forming this new core memory of this song in real time—a song that I had carried with me for half my life. And now it will carry new meaning when it’s on the playlist at my own (hopefully perfect) wedding.
In a world that feels increasingly hostile to my love, leaning into love—cheesy, sappy, Grey’s Anatomy/”Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls sort of love—is an act of resistance in and of itself. So whether you’re single or married or somewhere else, keep putting the songs on the hypothetical playlist—because you never know when it might become real.
Things I made this week:
- The birth of Ranch Baby! Tell your friends!
- A TikTok looking into how to deal with Trump’s “shock and awe” assault of policies.
- A TikTok returning to what was a perennial topic of my coverage at HuffPost—can one simply just move to Canada?
@xtramagazine How easy is it to just “move to Canada” from the United States? Especially if you’re an American trans person thinking about escaping your own government trying to legislate you out of existence? As U.S. president Donald Trump continues to attack trans rights, the concept of moving to Canada may seem increasingly appealing. But one does not simply hop the border and slap on a Blue Jays cap—and that’s not even taking into account what LGBTQ2S+ rights are going to be like when you get here. Senior editor Mel Woods breaks down what you actually need to know—from what that process is actually like for immigrants coming to the Great White North to what’s going on here in terms of LGBTQ2S+ rights 🇨🇦🇺🇸 #fyp #canada #unitedstates #movetocanada #lgbtq #lgbtqnews #canadanews #transgender #trump #poilievre
♬ original sound - Xtra Magazine
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Things I loved this week:
- This story from Kerensa Cadenas in Bustle gets to a very specific queer experience, which is picking Kevin as your favourite Jonas Brother because you feel bad for him. I was an archetypical closeted baby dyke version of this, and did, in fact, have a giant poster of Kevin Jonas above my bed when I was 13. I bought it at the HMV at Bower Mall in Red Deer, Alberta. Nothing but respect for my fav Jo-Bro, Kevin!
- Xtra’s parent company Pink Triangle Press launched the Queer Joy podcast, full of inspiring conversations between LGBTQ2S+ community leaders and influential figures. It’s warm, it’s fuzzy, and it marks the podcasting debut of the great Canadian playwright Daniel MacIvor, who I happen to be collaborating with on ANOTHER podcast that should see the light of day in the coming months.
- I love both Lucy Dacus’s new video for “Best Guess” AND the ensuing discourse about who counts as a “hot masc.”
- I watched all six episodes of the new season of Love Is Blind in what felt like a fugue state Friday and I already have concerns about these terrible straight people!
This plus the dude who basically dumped a very nice woman after she came out as bisexual to him are not giving me good vibes for the rest of this season!!!
— Mel Woods (@melwoods.me) 2025-02-15T20:32:33.665Z
- We took a walk this weekend to go see a Saturday matinee of Companion, and really enjoyed it more than I expected! Fantastic cast, great horror comedy vibes, and a tight 90 minutes—everything you could ask for in a film!
- I also finally watched Flow with some friends last night, and it does live up to the hype. Thoughtful and beautiful and unlike anything I’ve seen in a long time.
Thanks friends! Chat soon!
