#142, "Oh Yeah," Texas Terri and the Stiff Ones (1997)

150 Favorite Songs: #142, "Oh Yeah," Texas Terri and the Stiff Ones (1997)

I was never more lost in life than when I was 21 years old. I had moved to San Antonio to be with a girlfriend, but she'd left to join the Air Force shortly after I got there. So I lived with five dudes in a three-bedroom apartment, and I worked in a comic book store. I didn't have any sort of plan for life.

I heard "Oh Yeah" on a mix one day while I was doing a fill-in shift at another location of the comic store. My boss at the store I worked in most of the time was a very nice dork who did not care for my taste in music. (A running gag that was funny to me, at least, was that I would bring in mixes that would have forty-five seconds of something poppy and pleasant that he liked, maybe a Weezer song or something, and then it would abruptly cut into some incredibly aggressive grindcore, leaving him to dart across the store to turn it off. I was well-tolerated nonetheless.)

But at the store across town, the manager was a hip dude who kept up with music and would bring in mixes with stuff like Texas Terri, the Murder City Devils, Pretty Girls Make Graves—all sorts of good turn-of-the-millennium punk-y indie rock.

That first line sounded like a dream to me. “We didn't need a lot of money / that meant we didn't have to work too much / it was a good life, honey / we never had to be in a rush." I wanted all of that. There are a lot of songs about being broke, which I very much was, but most of those songs are focused on the hard parts of that. Those parts are very real, of course, but I hadn’t heard many that came from the place of “we are choosing this, because we value our time more than we do money,” and that was why I was the bargain I had made at that point in my life.

I was very privileged, in so many ways. I didn’t have a family with money to provide a financial safety net, and I didn’t have money in the bank or, like, useful skills, but my roommate Paulie was one of the most generous people I ever knew. He worked at the KFC down the street from our apartment and would fill the fridge with chicken after his shifts; when my van broke down he let me use his car to get to work for weeks, since my job was further away than his, so he would take the bus while I drove his car. (Shout out to Paulie, we should all be so lucky to have a Paulie during the hard moments of our lives.)

But even still, it wasn’t an easy way to live, and it came with its own costs. A big part of the reason that the relationship I'd been in didn't work out was that the girl I moved to San Antonio to be with wanted me to move toward pursuing a fall-back plan if whatever amorphous ideas I had about how to be a writer didn’t work out. She thought I should go to trade school and learn to be an electrician, which is a fine way to make a living, but it wasn’t anything I was interested in. Ultimately, she decided to enlist so that she would be able to figure those things out for herself.

It was the right decision for both of us, and I never really faulted her for it, but there was something about "Oh Yeah" that really stuck with me—hearing a woman sing about the joys of being poor and happy. I didn’t really know much about Texas Terri, but I knew that I wanted to not need a lot of money, to not feel like I had to rush around. But mostly I wanted that first-person-plural that she sang in.

It would take me years to find it. In the end, that was a good thing, too. And now, every time I hear "Oh Yeah," I feel a little bit like I won something.