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When you need a pep talk in how to get the most out of life, you always want to turn to a woman who grows food out of her own poop.

Okay, hear us out. Yes, it’s true that Goldy Locks, lead singer and mastermind of Nashville’s house-shaking Goldy lockS Band (yes, that’s how she spells it), recently appeared on a 2023 of TLC’s Extreme Cheapskates to explain how she uses her own feces as garden compost. She also mentioned that she collects stray socks from the laundromat to use as sanitary napkins and cuts down on her bar tab by finishing strangers’ discards. But before you dismiss her as some sort of crackpot, you owe it to yourself to take a listen to her band’s new single, “Just Say Yes,” a simply undeniable instant anthem that could convert just about anyone to her philosophy that the glass is always half full (especially when it isn’t yours).

No mere novelty record from a freegan lifestyle guru, the song soars on a can-do spirit and a musical oomph that make it as invigorating a statement of intent as “I Will Survive.” Strings saw away melodramatically, guitar power chords crash and churn, and Locks spews optimism in a voice that sure doesn’t sound like it’s been weakened by second-hand bourbon. Far from it:

I’ll stop at nothing ’til I reach the top

I’ll keep on moving and I’ll never stop

I’ll start a motion where the money’s free

I’ll make it happen where we all agree

Just say yes

Don’t put me to the test, oh baby

Don’t say no

Just how far can we go

If you would just say yes

Don’t make me have to guess

Just stop making a mess of my life

And just tell me yes

Now, who could resist an entreaty that direct? Locks says she wrote the song specifically “to empower people to say ‘yes’ to quitting their deadbeat jobs,” and also as “a female empowerment song showing that women can ALSO be the boss.” But its appeal is as universal as the unexpected joy of finding a perfectly good sofa somebody left out on the curb.

Even the hoot-and-a-half of a music video Locks and her band have whipped up finds liberty in liberation: The vacuum cleaners and other household totems they wield as props were all rescued from the trash, and the kitsch-Americana costumes they’re wearing come from either thrift/secondhand stores or the nearest dumpster.

That’s pretty appropriate for a woman who was discovered while rifling through the refuse at Prince’s Paisley Park complex. (Clarification: She was discovered by the police.) What followed was a circui

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