The Best Anniversary Gift: A Custom Song (Plus 6 Classics)

You want a song for your anniversary, something that says what the year (or the twenty-fifth year) actually meant. Maybe it is for a first dance, a dinner at home, or a post you are putting together to mark the day. The trouble is that the famous love songs are about someone else's love. Here are six classics worth cueing up, and one way to get a song that is only about the two of you.

Six Classic Anniversary Songs (and One Made for You)

Every song below is a verified standard that has carried people through anniversaries and first dances for years. Play any of them and you will feel why they last.

1. "At Last" by Etta James. Etta James released "At Last" on her 1960 debut album of the same name, though the song itself was written by Mack Gordon and Harry Warren years earlier for the 1941 film Sun Valley Serenade. In 2009, her recording was inducted into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry. It is the sound of waiting a long time for the right person, which is exactly the feeling an anniversary revisits.

2. "Can't Help Falling in Love" by Elvis Presley. Recorded for the 1961 soundtrack album Blue Hawaii, this ballad has become one of the most popular first-dance songs ever recorded. Its melody is actually based on an eighteenth-century French song called "Plaisir d'Amour." Slow, plainspoken, and impossible to sit still through.

3. "Isn't She Lovely" by Stevie Wonder. From his 1976 album Songs in the Key of Life, Stevie Wonder wrote this one to celebrate the birth of his daughter, Aisha Morris. It opens with a real recording of a baby's first cry. It is not, strictly, a couple's love song, which is what makes it a lovely choice for an anniversary that is also about the family you built together.

4. "Have I Told You Lately" by Van Morrison. Van Morrison wrote and recorded this for his 1989 album Avalon Sunset. It was originally written as a prayer, and it is now a ballad played often at weddings. Rod Stewart's 1993 version reached number five on both the US Hot 100 and the UK Singles Chart, so you have two takes to choose from. The question in the title is the whole point of an anniversary: have you said it lately?

5. "Thinking Out Loud" by Ed Sheeran. Released in 2014 from his album x, and co-written with Amy Wadge, this one imagines still being in love at seventy. It reached number one in the UK and number two on the US Billboard Hot 100. If your anniversary is about the long haul, this is the modern standard for it.

6. "All of Me" by John Legend. John Legend wrote "All of Me" for his wife, Chrissy Teigen, and released it in 2013 on Love in the Future. It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2014. A piano ballad built entirely on loving someone's whole self, flaws included, which is the quiet promise a marriage keeps year after year.

The one that is actually about you: a custom song from Penned For You. Every song above is somebody else's story that happens to fit yours. A custom song flips that. Instead of borrowing "At Last," you get a song with your names in it, your first apartment, the joke only the two of you understand, the year everything almost fell apart and did not. We write it from a short form about your relationship, so the details that make the day yours are the ones in the lyrics.

Here is why a custom song beats a playlist for an anniversary: the six classics above are gorgeous, but none of them know your names. We do. You fill out a short form, about five minutes, describing your partner and your years together: the qualities, the inside jokes, the notes only you would think to include. Then we write and record a custom song built around all of it. Standard turnaround is 24 hours, and if your anniversary is tomorrow, the 1-hour rush has you covered. It starts at $29.99, with 24-hour standard turnaround and 1-hour rush. Start your song and give them the one anniversary song that could only ever be about the two of you. Write their song while the details are fresh.

Cue up the classics for the drive to dinner, then save the last dance for the song that is only yours. When you are ready, we will write it for you.