Choosing music for a funeral: where do you begin?

Four questions to start with

Grab a pen and paper, or open the search box on this site, and for each question write down whatever comes to mind first. Whether it suits a funeral is something you can figure out later.

• Which song takes you straight back, to the kitchen at home or your room when you were fifteen?
• Which song belongs to someone you love or have loved?
• What was playing on the best night you can remember?
• Which song do you turn up when it comes on the radio, even when nobody else is listening?

With that last question, you might think the answer isn't solemn enough. Write it down anyway. A funeral also has room for the record everyone at home has been sighing about for years.

From a long list to five

After an evening of searching, you can easily have forty songs on paper. Then the cutting starts, and two questions help. Which songs say roughly the same thing about you? Keep one of them. And which song is there because you feel it belongs, even though you hardly ever play it yourself? That one can go.

For the records that remain, write down why they belong. On this site you can do that for each record separately. Whoever reads your list later may know the song, but usually not the story behind it.

You don't have to finish in one go

Put a few in, listen to them again, and take another look a week later. Save the list, and it stays as you left it until you change something. Other people only see it once you share it.