The Hidden Cost of Picking Songs From Memory
Every worship leader who runs a multi-year repertoire from a mental catalogue eventually hits the same wall. You've used the same 40 songs for three months because those are the ones you're confident about. The congregation can feel it before you can name it — the set has a ceiling, there's a sameness to the climactic moment that used to hit harder. Meanwhile there are 80 songs in a folder somewhere that you played twice in 2023 and haven't touched since, not because they're bad but because they didn't make it back into the rotation before you forgot about them.
The Date Last Used field exists precisely for this. Filter by songs not played in 90 days and you have your excavation list — the inventory of material that's been sitting outside the active rotation not because it was rejected but because nothing systematically brought it back.
The problem compounds in multi-musician worship teams. The pianist knows what works in Eb. The lead guitarist strongly prefers G and D. The drummer has opinions about which songs actually lock in at 3/4. Without a database that captures all of these simultaneously, set planning is a negotiation happening in someone's memory, and the decisions made are usually the safe ones.
What the Worship Flow Placement Field Actually Resolves
The Place in Worship Flow field — Submitting Ourselves, Lifting Up/Exalting God, Unifying Under God — is the field that separates this template from a generic song list.
Liturgical architecture matters in a way that secular music curators never fully appreciate. The same song placed at the opening of a set versus at the climactic position before the message produces a categorically different congregational response. A song tagged as "Lifting Up/Exalting God" in the worship flow can't simply be swapped into the "Submitting Ourselves" slot without rethinking the set entirely. Having this as a queryable field means you're not building a set from scratch each week — you're running a filtered query: give me three songs in the key of A or G, climactic tempo feel, worship flow position "Lifting Up," not used in the last 60 days.
That query returns actual candidates rather than the first songs that come to mind.
The Set Position field adds a second layer of placement logic. Opening Song, Communion Song, Invitation Songs, After Announcements Song — these are functionally distinct roles. A song that works as an invitation piece, where the emotional register is open and personal, will collapse a pre-announcement slot that needs energy and movement. Both fields together give you a two-dimensional placement system.
The Closing Chorus Count Tells You Something Specific
Number of Times Used as Closing Chorus is a separate integer field alongside the general usage count, and that specificity is worth examining.
Closing chorus is a distinct musical role with a narrow performance profile — usually slow free-form or melodic slow tempo, "Unifying Under God" flow position, length in the 3.5 to 5 minute range to allow extended instrumental time. A song that's been used 22 times total but zero times as a closing chorus has never been trusted with that slot, which is information. Either it doesn't have the emotional arc for a closing, or it's never been tried there.
A song with 8 general uses and 7 closing chorus appearances is a workhorse for that slot — and probably overdue for a rest.
The Seasonal multichoice field — Christmas, Easter, Memorial Day, July 4th — does quiet but important work. Filter by seasonal songs to build a Christmas set and your candidates pre-populate. Filter them out for a regular Sunday and you stop accidentally pitching Advent material in March because the song happened to be near the top of your list.
The Instrument Used to Start field captures something a chord chart doesn't: the sonic identity of the song's entrance. A guitar-led opening feels different from a piano or keyboard intro, and when you're building a set with three consecutive uptempo songs, varying the instrumental entry point matters for keeping the congregation tracking with the transitions. This is the kind of detail a music director carries in their head and loses when they're sick and someone else is running the set.