A Custom Father Daughter Dance Song Made For You

You have both been quietly dreading three minutes of this wedding. Not the vows. The dance, where the room forms a circle and watches the two of you, and the usual options are a country song about a truck or a ballad that has played at every reception since 1998.

Here is the move. Build it out of his music. If the radio was on in the garage through your whole childhood, that is the sound: Motown, Springsteen, outlaw country, seventies soul, whatever was playing while he was under the car. He recognizes the style inside four bars, which relaxes him, and then the words are about her. The bike with the banana seat. The way he still calls the back route the shortcut. The drive to college with the mattress tied to the roof.

That combination is what keeps it from being awkward. He is not being asked to feel something about a stranger's song. He is standing inside a song he already likes, hearing his own life read back to him, in front of people who know them both.

Not a writer? You do not need to be. Send the details flat, one per line, badly punctuated. Making them scan and rhyme is our job.

You get an original studio-quality song written from what you send, $19.99, delivered by email within 24 hours. Order early enough to play it for him once before the day, or do not, if you want his real face on video.

Start with the name of the artist he played most in the car. Everything else builds off that.