A concert ticket usually promises songs, lights, and a crowded journey home. Lucy Dacus added marriage licenses to the evening. During her headline performance at All Things Go in New York City on September 26, 2025, she officiated weddings for nine couples onstage at Forest Hills Stadium.
The ceremonies unfolded during “Best Guess,” a love song from Forever Is a Feeling. Actress Havana Rose Liu appeared as flower girl, carrying roses for the newlyweds. The scene looked spontaneous from the audience, yet careful planning sat behind it.
According to coverage of the festival weddings, couples had applied beforehand, arranged the required paperwork, and arrived ready to make a legally meaningful commitment in front of thousands of strangers.
By the end of Dacus’ wider wedding project, she had officiated 154 couples during her tour. The nine ceremonies in Queens became one of its most memorable chapters.
What Happened During the All Things Go Set?
Dacus began her Friday night headline performance at 9 p.m. at Forest Hills Stadium. During “Best Guess,” nine couples walked onto the stage and slow-danced while the band played. Dacus exchanged her guitar for a bouquet and a prepared ceremony script.
Havana Rose Liu, known for Bottoms and for appearing in Dacus’ “Ankles” music video, handed roses to the couples. Dacus then recognised the vows and pronounced the pairs married as the stadium erupted in cheers.
A typical wedding relies on controlled details: assigned seats, quiet entrances, carefully timed speeches. Forest Hills offered a louder setting. Festivalgoers became witnesses, phones rose into the air, and nine private relationships briefly occupied the largest space in the building.
A Ceremony Inside “Best Guess”
The ceremony was integrated into the song rather than presented as an unrelated interval. Couples danced first, allowing the music to establish the mood before Dacus moved into her role as officiant.
“Best Guess” approaches commitment as a hopeful decision made without perfect knowledge of the future. Bodies change, circumstances shift, and love still gives two people a reason to place a bet on one another. A collective wedding fitted naturally into that idea.
The moment arrived during a particularly significant performance for Dacus. Her All Things Go appearance marked her first time headlining Forest Hills Stadium, despite previous appearances there with Boygenius and as a supporting performer.
Her set also included a cover of Sufjan Stevens’ “Chicago,” the song that inspired the festival’s name, as reported in BrooklynVegan’s festival recap.
Were the Weddings Planned in Advance?
Yes. Dacus had invited fans to apply months before the All Things Go performance.
In July 2025, she announced that she was ordained in the United States and wanted to officiate weddings at selected tour dates. Interested couples completed a Google form and received location-specific instructions.
Her plan generally required participants to obtain a marriage license before the concert, bring it to the venue box office, and collect it later after the necessary signatures had been handled.
The original tour announcement noted that local regulations created extra steps in some cities. Several stops could not support an identical process, so couples needed to follow guidance for the state where their ceremony would occur.
Dacus offered her officiating service free of charge. Cost and logistics formed part of her reasoning, along with concern among LGBTQ+ couples who feared that marriage protections might become less secure.
The few tender minutes seen by the audience therefore depended on venue staff, management, licensing paperwork, applicant screening, and plenty of communication away from the spotlight.
Who Were the Nine Couples?
Reports identified several of the newlyweds, including Mac Craighead and Frankie Terrone of Brooklyn, Ashley Huynh and Matt Moore from Atlanta, Maria Botero and Bella Langlois of Norwich, Connecticut, and Grace Messimer and Jessica Bajorinas.
Craighead and Terrone carried a particularly fitting connection to Dacus’ music. Craighead said the first love letter written to Terrone included a lyric from “Trust,” a Dacus song. They had met at a drag show where Terrone was performing and later applied for the onstage ceremony on a whim.
Modern relationships begin in remarkably varied settings, from live performances and shared fandoms to international dating platforms such as Ladadate.com, where people can connect around the possibility of a serious commitment.
A detail like that explains why the event resonated beyond celebrity novelty. The couples were fans whose relationships already contained Dacus’ songs. Her work had formed part of their shared language before she became their officiant.
Other participants had different reasons for joining. Some wanted an affordable and uncomplicated ceremony. Others had waited for an opportunity that felt accepting, especially when relatives had been unsupportive of their relationships.
Why Did “Best Guess” Work as a Wedding Song?
“Best Guess” suits a wedding because its optimism leaves room for uncertainty. The song avoids presenting love as a guarantee. Commitment becomes a conscious choice to build a future with someone who will continue changing.
Traditional vows often use absolute promises. Dacus’ writing focuses on affection that accepts risk. A partner represents the strongest available hope for what comes next, even when neither person can predict exactly where life will lead.
The track appears on Dacus’ fourth solo album, Forever Is a Feeling, released in March 2025. Much of the record examines intimacy, desire, doubt, and the temporary nature of emotional certainty. A Guardian interview about the album described its relationships as choices shaped by change rather than obligation.
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At Forest Hills, “Best Guess” became part soundtrack and part ceremony. Nine couples supplied living examples of the song’s central idea.
Why Did the Weddings Carry Political Weight?
Dacus framed the project around legal protection as well as romance. When she invited applications, she referred to people seeking the rights granted through marriage and acknowledged the anxiety surrounding their future availability.
Her eventual tour total reached 154 weddings, with 120 involving queer couples. Some participants acted from spontaneity, while others feared losing legal protections or lacked family support for a conventional ceremony, according to reporting on the tour project.
The scale turned a recurring concert feature into a public statement about chosen family and belonging. Audience members who had never attended a same-sex wedding could unexpectedly find one unfolding in the middle of a show.
All Things Go provided a fitting environment. The festival’s official New York page presents the event as a space built around connection and community. Dacus gave that language a literal expression: couples entered the stage as partners and left as newlyweds.
Forest Hills Added Its Own History
Forest Hills Stadium gave the ceremony a memorable backdrop. The 13,000-capacity venue opened in the 1920s as the home of the U.S. tennis championships before developing into a major concert location.
Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan have all performed there. Dylan’s 1965 Forest Hills appearance came shortly after his famous electric set at the Newport Folk Festival.
The stadium’s official history traces its evolution from a tennis venue into one of New York’s distinctive outdoor music settings. Nearly six decades after Dylan’s appearance, nine weddings joined its collection of unusual musical memories.
Concert weddings also have a longer history in New York. On June 5, 1974, Sly Stone married Kathy Silva onstage at Madison Square Garden before his concert. The ceremony featured an enormous audience and the extravagance associated with 1970s rock stardom. A contemporary New Yorker report recorded the elaborate preparations surrounding the event.
Dacus approached the idea from another direction. Attention stayed on ordinary fans rather than on the artist’s private life. Nine couples shared the stage, and their relationships remained the emotional centre.
A Festival Surprise With Lasting Meaning
Nine weddings during one set sound like a story created for social media. The fuller account feels warmer and more deliberate. Dacus developed a process that allowed fans to complete real paperwork, step into a favourite song, and mark a major life event before a supportive crowd.
The ceremony also changed the role of the audience. Festivalgoers became witnesses to commitments involving people they had never met. For several minutes, a headline show turned into a public celebration of lives that would continue long after the final encore.
In a May 2026 interview, Dacus said she had rarely felt as present onstage as she did while officiating the tour weddings. Familiar songs could be performed again at another venue. Each marriage represented a singular moment in someone else’s life, according to her later interview.
Nine happened side by side at All Things Go, accompanied by roses, an indie love song, and several thousand unexpected wedding guests.
