Slow Jams: How Many Is Too Many ?

Kailyn & Enrico's First Dance at Sodo Park. Photo by Logan Westom

Watching TV recently, it was brought to my attention that Johnny Carson, the legendary King of Late-Night TV, had an unwritten rule for his writers: No more than three political jokes per monologue. I found this remarkable. Of course, for most of Johnny's 30-year run, America a was a far less divided nation than we are now, so political humor wasn't as big a deal, and people didn't get as uptight about it. But the point's well taken. Carson didn't want politics to distract his audience from his main mission, which was to make people laugh.

A DJ's mission is similar to a comedian's, only instead of making people laugh, the DJ's job is to make people dance (of course some DJ's make people laugh as well, but that's a topic for a different post). To this end, when it comes to deejaying weddings, I've generally employed a rule of thumb to not play more than one slow dance per hour. And there's good reasons for it. The few times I've attempted to play two slow jams in a row, I've mostly been greeted with an empty dance floor for the second one. This is likely because the folks who cleared out for the first slow song aren't coming back, and the folks who hit the floor for that same slow jam don't have a strong need to dance to two in a row. So, momentum killer. People will give you a pass for a single slow number, but play two in a row, and they might not be so forgiving. They're expecting the DJ to pick the energy back up, and if you don't, you've just lost the entire crowd.

Personally, I think the best time for a slow dance, with few exceptions, is either at the very beginning or the very end of the celebration. A DJ's job, after all, is to make people dance. And the best way to do that is to keep the energy as high as possible the whole time. You never want to give your audience an excuse to leave, 'cause once they do, there's no guarantee that they'll come back.