Custom songs by occasion
A custom retirement song for someone who gave it forty years
For the leaving do, the last shift, or the card the whole office signed. From $21.99, delivered in as little as an hour.
Retirement presents are famously bad. A carriage clock nobody winds, a garden voucher, an envelope collected in the staff room that ends up being about the amount. Forty years of turning up, and the summary is a cake with the wrong spelling on it.
A song does what the speech is trying and failing to do. It names the desk, the tea round, the thing they said to every new starter on their first morning. Ten minutes of questions from you, original lyrics and a proper recording from us, and the leaving do suddenly has a moment in it.
What to put in a retirement brief
Careers are remembered through repetition, not promotions. Give us the daily stuff and the one story that gets told at every leaving do.
The job in plain language
Ward sister, foreman, forty-one years on the same route. Job titles change; what they actually did every day does not.
Their unmistakable habit at work
The radio always on the same station. The lunchbox at 11:45 without fail. The mug nobody else was allowed to touch. This is the line the room will recognise instantly.
The person they trained
Half the people at the leaving do learned the job from them. Naming one or two of them turns a nice song into a legacy.
What they are going to do now
The allotment, the caravan, the grandchildren on Wednesdays, or genuinely nothing for the first time since 1984. Good final verses come from here.
Which genre tends to work
Soul
Generous and full, with a chorus a room of colleagues can pick up by the second time round.
Country
Made for a long working life told in order. Handles decades without sounding like a list.
Gentle rock
For the one who kept the workshop radio on and knows every word of everything from 1979.
Reggae
Warm and unhurried, which suits a song that is genuinely happy for someone rather than sad they are going.
It also works instead of a speech
Most leaving speeches are given by whoever is most senior rather than whoever knows them best, which is why they lean on words like dedication and end with a bottle of wine. A song sidesteps that entirely. Nobody has to stand up, and the details are the ones the team supplied.
Play it after the presentation and before people drift to the bar. Two to three minutes is exactly long enough to hold a function room, and it gives everyone something to talk about for the rest of the night.
From a team, or from the family
Colleagues order these as a group, and the brief improves when several people add to it. One person remembers the catchphrase, another remembers the night shift in the snow, someone else remembers what they did quietly for a person going through a bad year.
Families order them too, usually for a parent finishing a working life that paid for everything. That version is a different song and we write it that way: less about the job, more about what the job bought and who it kept fed.
When to order a retirement song
Leaving dos get organised weeks ahead, so order once the date is fixed. That gives you time to test the sound in the room, which matters more than people expect in a function suite with one ceiling speaker.
For the last-minute version, where somebody realises on the day that the card is not enough, Priority delivery is 4 hours and Express is 1 hour. The form takes about ten minutes, and colleagues can fill it in together at a desk.
Questions
Can a whole team order one song together?
Yes. Collect details from everyone first, then one person fills in the form with the best of it. The song is credited however you tell us, from the team, the department or the whole company.
Will it work played over a function room speaker?
It arrives as a high quality audio file, so it holds up on a PA, a laptop or a Bluetooth speaker. Download it in advance rather than relying on venue wifi on the night.
Can we include inside jokes from the workplace?
Please do. The nickname for the old photocopier, the shift nobody wanted, the annual argument about the thermostat. Inside jokes are what make the room laugh.
What if we get a detail wrong?
Tell us and we run it again free. A wrong job title or a misremembered year is quick to fix, and the song is not finished until it sounds like them.
Ready when you are
About ten minutes of questions. A finished song in as little as an hour, from $21.99, yours to keep forever.
Start their song