A custom anniversary song, written from your years together

What do you give for a wedding anniversary?

After a few years, anniversary gifts start to look alike: dinner out, flowers, a piece of jewellery, a weekend away. They are lovely, and they say very little about the two people involved. A song about your years says what has built up in the meantime: where you met, what you made together, the small habit that survived every move. The lyrics are written in our atelier, from your story; the music and the voice are generated with artificial intelligence technology, guided by our own craft rules.

An anniversary song is a regular order with its own moment. You start it in the atelier, chatting with Trilo, the atelier's AI assistant, on the site or on WhatsApp. Tell Trilo the day you celebrate, and the year you met or married goes into your story.

What is traditional for the 1st, 10th, 25th and 50th anniversary?

Two anniversaries have names everyone knows: the silver wedding at 25 years and the golden wedding at 50. For the others, lists of materials circulate (paper or cotton for the first year, tin for the tenth), but they change from country to country and from one source to the next.

What matters more than the material is what happens around the table. In the first year, the two of you are still telling the story of the wedding. By the tenth there is usually a home, maybe children, maybe a dog, and a routine that belongs only to you. At twenty-five, the grown-up children are often the ones who organise the dinner. At fifty, grandchildren sit at the end of the table and hear a story for the hundredth time. Each of those tables has room for a song the whole family listens to.

What does a song about 25 years together sound like?

Listen to Rădăcini adânci ("Deep Roots"), one of the atelier's example songs, a Modern pop ballad. The story it starts from: Mariana and Ion met by chance on a bus, love travelling and hiking in the mountains, and have run a clothing business together for 25 years.

That is how an anniversary song is usually built. The first verse says where and how you met. The second carries what held you together or what you built: the home, the family, a habit you kept. The number of years is sung in words, never as digits, once, in a verse, the bridge or the chorus. And the strongest turn is often "then and now": the same place, object or habit, seen in your first year and today.

Can children give their parents a song for their 25th?

Yes. An anniversary song is either the couple's own or a gift from someone else, and children are exactly who that is for. Choose "A gift for another couple" as the dedication, and the lyrics are written about your parents, from what you know about them. The gift page shows the steps.

This is the version we think about for families spread across countries. Your parents celebrate their silver wedding in Brașov or Chișinău; you live in Rotterdam, your brother in Valencia, and only one of you can fly back for the dinner. Put together what each of you remembers: how your father waited for your mother at the factory gate, the cinema tickets she kept, the Sunday soup with the radio on too loud. The song's page can be opened at the table by whoever is there, or sent by email to your parents, so it arrives where you can't. You choose the language it is sung in, one or two of Romanian, English, Spanish and Italian, separately from the language you write to us in.

Which details from their story go into the lyrics?

Concrete things, not adjectives. "They have always loved each other" gives a song nothing to hold; "they waltz in the kitchen on every anniversary" does. A few questions we start from:

• Where did they meet, and what were they doing at the time?
• What did they build together: a home, a garden, a business, a family?
• Which small habit have they kept all these years?
• Which object from their first year is still in the house?
• How many years are they celebrating?

Leave out what hurts, the hard years, illness, people who are no longer here, unless you want to bring them into the story yourself. An anniversary song is warm; humour comes in only when their story asks for it.

How much does an anniversary song cost?

89 €, the same as the "Your First Dance" wedding song. The three-song "The Whole Evening" package exists only for weddings. You hear a free preview before you pay and only pay if you like it. After payment you get two full versions (A and B), the written lyrics, the MP3 download and the song's page, plus 2 rewrites included. Choose one of 7 styles, from Classic waltz to Acoustic folk or Soul / R&B. When you are ready, start your story in the atelier.