Taylor Swift is not the kind of girl who is going to pick just any song at her wedding. So when it comes to the big first dance, you know it will be deeply meaningful and meticulously planned out. “You would think that I had been the type of person who would have obsessed over the idea of a wedding my whole life,” she said last year after her engagement, “but I actually never thought about what I would ever do or what I would want until I met the person.” Sure, Taylor, sure.
As a pop superstar, she can practically guarantee a live rendition of whatever classic she wants from just about any living musician. She’s also been a huge fan of several songbooks, showing love for everyone from Carole King to the National. There’s still a lot up in the air about the wedding of the decade century, and we’ve got burning questions about all of it, including if it’s even happening this weekend. But as we presumably get closer to the big day, we compiled a list of top song selections we think could make the first dance cut.
Stevie Nicks, ‘Landslide’
Kevin Mazur/Getty ImagesStevie Nicks will be in the room, so it’s a safe bet that the night will not end without her singing “Landslide,” her most beloved song. “Stand Back” might suit the Swift/Kelce story, but it’s too much of a rocker for a first dance, and for damn sure nobody’s in the mood for anything from Rumours tonight. Count on Stevie to deliver “Landslide,” and to work all the drama in “snow-covered HIIIIIIIILLS” like it’s never been worked before. —Rob Sheffield
Paul McCartney, ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’
Jim Dyson/Getty ImagesIf Paul McCartney makes it to the wedding, as is rumored, he’ll surely sing a not-so-silly love song for the bride and groom. “Maybe I’m Amazed” would be the ideal choice. We know Swift is into the fine details of the 1970s Paul-and-Linda love story, ever since she took their “what a mind” anecdote and turned it into her own song, “Sweet Nothing.” We also know how much Stella McCartney loves this song, and Swift is the self-proclaimed “Tennessee Stella McCartney.” Plus, “Maybe I’m Amazed” has one of the greatest bridges ever — and there’s nothing the bride appreciates like a bridge. —R.S.
Kenny Chesney ‘You Had Me From Hello’
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Kenny Chesney cancelled a concert to be at this wedding, so don’t be surprised if he’s got something up his sleeve. He was one of the first major country stars to give her a break when she was just a kid starting out. She’s never forgotten that — 10 years later, she surprised him by showing up on his birthday to sing a duet on “Big Star.” Maybe he’ll do one of his beloved first-dance standards like “You and Me,” or “You Had Me From Hello,” which really fits their story, even if it could be retitled “You Had Me From Begging Me To Date You on Your Podcast.” —R.S.
Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, ‘It’s Your Love’
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Tim McGraw is one of the stars confirmed for the guests list, according to Page Six, which also reported that the country singer will perform at the wedding. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance he brings up his superstar wife Faith Hill along for the ride of a lifetime. We know Swift loves Hill’s crossover hit “This Kiss,” but it’s admittedly too saccharine and upbeat for a first dance feeling. No worries, the mom and dad of country music have more than a handful of collaborations together, though nothing beats out their first duet “It’s Your Love.” The 1997 hit is a perfect ballad and makes even more sense as Swift leans back into her country roots. —Maya Georgi
Ed Sheeran, ‘Thinking Out Loud’
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The only musician who loves a wedding more than Swift might be Ed Sheeran. He’s written sweet melodies tailor-made for walking down the aisle, depicted a Persian wedding for one of his music videos, and literally just crashed a wedding this week to perform his latest release. As his close friend, Swift also knows this fact about Sheeran very well. “It would be hard to keep him from it, I think,” she said when asked if he would perform on her big day. “It’s like, ‘Ed, if there’s a stage you know that you’ll be on it.’ He knows what people want, and he wants to give people what they want,” she added. Well, the people want Sheeran trying his hand at his Swift collab “Everything Has Changed” but the (solo version) or even that song mashed up with “End Game” — it is the perfect opportunity to sing “somethin’ was born on the 4th of July” after all. But a Sheeran wedding classic like “Thinking Out Loud” would be just as sweet, maybe even more so coming from such a longtime pal. —M.G.
Lana Del Rey, ‘Young and Beautiful’
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Swift is a huge Lana Del Rey fan; she’s gushed about the singer time and time again, and even called her “one of the best musical artists ever.” So it’s not out of the realm of possibility that the singer would not only be in attendance, but might even perform one of her cinematic cuts at the wedding. Sure, there’s always the Taylor-Lana 2023 collaboration “Snow on the Beach,” but those mellotron notes sound much more disquieting than the ones on “Strawberry Fields.” Plus, Del Rey has a plethora of romantic, slow-dance songs to pick from. There’s “Video Games,” of course, but the devotional “Young and Beautiful” feels like the obvious choice here. —M.G.
Taylor Swift, “Mary’s Song (Oh My My My)”
John Shearer/Getty ImagesAdmit it: Her wedding would be a pretty bad-ass place to announce the long-awaited Taylor’s Version of Debutation. “Mary’s Song,” from her debut, is the first wedding song she ever recorded when she was just a teenager. But it has the prophetic line, “I’ll be 87, you’ll be 89,” prescient since 87 is Travis’ uniform number and 1989 was one of her biggest albums. True, it’s a little tricky to have the bride try to sing at the same time she’s hitting the dance floor, but Taylor does specialize in trying things that have never been done before. As for Rep, though, we can feel very, very, very sure the bride is not singing “Getaway Car” tonight. —R.S.
A New Taylor Original
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Picture this: Swift and Kelce share their first dance to a soft, finger-plucked song that no one recognizes until a familiar voice comes in. It’s Swift singing a brand new release that swells with the beauty of the “Eldest Daughter” bridge and the hopeful feeling of “Begin Again.” All 1,000 guests are too stunned to speak. The track is titled “Something New” because that is simply the most Swiftian thing that could happen at Swift’s wedding. Go big or go home type of vibe. There’s absolutely no indication that this will happen, but it would be the first dance song of our wildest dreams. —M.G.
Foreigner, ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’
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A week after Swift and Kelce announced their engagement, the classic-rock dudes in Foreigner decided to shoot their shot. They issued a public plea, volunteering to play the wedding. “Dear Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce,” their Instagram post began, “We know what love is. We spent 40 years figuring it out…and now you guys have too. Please accept this as our formal offer to be your wedding band.” As far as we know, Swift never said yes — but she never publicly said no, either. So maybe they’ll play, or maybe Selena Gomez will belt “I Want to Know What Love Is” Or Cara Delevingne singing “Waiting for a Girl Like You”? Phoebe Bridgers doing “Hot Blooded”? —R.S.
Holzman and Hughes at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.Courtesy of Ekko Astral
Holzman and Hughes in Brooklyn, May 2026.Griffin Lotz for Rolling Stone
There’s no immediate resolution in any of this. There’s no surrender either — and a lot of great escape. White’s slide guitar in “Dollar Bill” sounds like a National Steel on steroids until the solo, when it turns into what seems like a theremin gone postal. “I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing” has a great pop-wise chorus closer to the Pretty Things than Son House. And don’t miss White’s wry aside to the White Stripes’ old creation myth in the second verse of “G.O.D.,” on the way to the real business at hand. “Well, it’s the beginning of the world now,” he declares at the song’s end. “Let’s do it all over again.”
Jay-Z has turned the 30th anniversary of his classic debut album into a major marketing event
Jay-Z Knows the Past Still Pays
There’s a pleasant absurdity to the advertisements for JAŸ-Z30 that are currently found across New York’s subway tunnels. Their dramatic imagery — a stark black backdrop pierced through the center with a pair of hands, presumably Jay’s, fixed into the famous Roc diamond — invites a kind of religious authority that feels a touch ironic for anyone who’s old enough to remember all types of handwringing over those very hand symbols only a few years ago. And maybe that’s the point. By now, nostalgia’s grip extends layers deep. So much so that you could find yourself waiting for the train, reminiscing on the days when people still made jokes about the so-called Illuminati.
Jay-Z’s months-long campaign commemorating the 30th anniversary of Reasonable Doubt and the 25th anniversary of The Blueprint has indeed resurfaced the rapper-turned-mogul’s success story. Reasonable Doubt, released in 1996, positioned Jay as not only a resonant voice in hip-hop but also in the increasingly lucrative business around it. After major labels passed, the album was released independently through Roc-A-Fella Records and Priority Records, setting the tone for Jay’s career as a business…man.
And in the full-court press campaign around this summer’s anniversaries, culminating in this weekend’s trio of performances at Yankee Stadium, Jay’s business acumen is again at center focus. You’d be forgiven for throwing around buzzwords like “multichannel” or “cross-platform” to describe the slate of festivities. There was a Spotify-backed takeover of the J and Z trains; custom JAŸ-Z30 subway maps and a Google Maps guide; commemorative Brooklyn Public Library cards; and most recently Bowery Station and DUMBO pop-ups with archival footage and merch. (That these Yankee Stadium shows come on the heels of Taylor Swift’s wedding at MSG suggests some sort of mega-rich takeover of cultural institutions, but let’s leave that one for another day.)
The moves come as nostalgia continues to drive a considerable chunk of the music industry’s profits. In an era when old songs can circulate infinitely on streaming platforms, gaining new life in the form of everything from samples to memes, and when superfans are willing to spend on physical goods, limited merch, and live experiences, album anniversaries have become their own product launches. Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt campaign is only the splashiest recent example.
No wonder, then, that Beyoncé already appears to be setting the stage for her own run of commemorations for the upcoming 20th anniversary of her album B’Day in September. Over the weekend, she released her first new song in two years, titled “Morning Dew (Donk),” to tease the upcoming reissue. According to Luminate, older music still dominates attention, with only 43 percent of U.S. on-demand audio streams in 2025 coming from tracks released in the previous five years. This is also one reason why vinyl and physical formats have seen renewed value in recent years, with the RIAA reporting that vinyl sold 46.8 million units in the U.S. in 2025, compared with 29.5 million CDs. Luminate says superfans are 20 percent of U.S. music listeners and spend heavily on live events and physical merchandise; 73 percent of these fans purchase physical merch, versus 26 percent of general music listeners.
In today’s industry, having a major anniversary is like having a new product to promote, a way to participate in an already thriving marketplace for nostalgia. The demand is visible well beyond official artist stores: Vintage concert tees now trade as collectibles, with one 1967 Grateful Dead shirt selling at Sotheby’s for $19,300 and rare rap tees treated as wearable archives of hip-hop history. Anniversary campaigns give artists and labels a way to reclaim that energy, turning the secondary market’s appetite for old symbols into new, officially sanctioned products.
Jay-Z’s official anniversary store turns that logic into a menu of objects: a $1,500 collector’s crate, a $300 cassette box, $400 Yankees jerseys, and four-figure varsity jackets. Of course, Jay is far from alone when it comes to legacy acts cashing in on nostalgia. He’s more like one salient example of a much larger wave of artists and promoters marketing anniversary products that includes the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness 30th anniversary super-deluxe edition, My Chemical Romance’s Black Parade stadium tour, and the returned Warped Tour, among many others.
Five years before Reasonable Doubt became the occasion for library cards, pop-ups, collector crates, and stadium spectacle, its 25th anniversary was marked by an NFT. In 2021, Sotheby’s and Roc Nation auctioned a one-of-one Derrick Adams artwork tied to the album, billed as the only official Jay-Z-authorized commemoration of the anniversary. Around the same time, Roc-A-Fella was in court over co-founder Damon Dash’s attempted sale of a Reasonable Doubt-related NFT, a dispute that ended with a judgment making clear that no shareholder could sell or dispose of an interest in the album — including through an NFT — without the company’s authorization.
That ownership question is becoming harder to avoid as music enters the AI era, where the archive is not only something to reissue, exhibit, or sell, but something that can be scraped, modeled, and trained on. Last week, SZA took to Twitter to express frustration with AI music company Suno, notably calling out Diplo by name as one of the company’s investors. “DO NOT GIVE AWAY YOUR VIBRANIUM !!! DO NOT TRAIN AI WITH YOUR GENIUS,” she wrote on Twitter. Her complaint was joined by Kenneth Blume, who said Suno’s workers were “stealing from countless struggling musicians.”
For an artist with a legacy as impactful as Jay-Z’s, the current anniversary boom feel like the latest phase of a longer project of deciding who gets to turn hip-hop history into intellectual property. Jay-Z’s legacy deserves preservation; few catalogs have made a stronger case for it. But the more that preservation arrives through limited-edition objects, auction platforms, luxury merch, and authorized experiences, the more it has to answer a harder question: When does protecting the archive become another way of extracting value from it?