Songfacts®:

• Steel Magnolia, which is the boyfriend/girlfriend duo of Joshua Scott Jones and Meghan Linsey, got a big break when they won the CMT show Can You Duet? This was the song they performed when they tried out for the show, and it got the attention of the judges. In our interview with Joshua Scott Jones, he explained why they chose this song, which he and Linsey wrote together: "Well, we originally went in there, we played a Dwight Yoakum song. And then they asked if we had anything of our own. And that was just the first thing that popped into our heads. During editing they didn't show you that, though. They didn't show us playing Dwight Yoakum, they showed us doing our song."
• Jones told us the story behind this song: "'Ooh La La' originally started out based around guitar chords, the riff around that, it's just an inversion of B. I was trying to look for a different sound on the guitar, kind of like different chords. I was trying to find new territory that wasn't really familiar but still sounded good to the ear. So we started writing that thing and I actually started that one off in Louisiana, Meghan's home town in Ponchatoula. it doesn't sound like a Louisiana-inspired song at all, but that's where we wrote it.
  
  So the next half of it we moved to Florida - we lived in Florida for two or three weeks on a horse farm - and that's where we finished the song. So Meghan's idea was to go back and forth with the vocal as far as male/female kind of thing.
  
  It's about more of a fantasy, it's not how we met, per se. It's more of a thing about just everyday life, like maybe you're wandering around and you see someone that you really want to get to know, just from a completely physical aspect. And it's just about how people are timid and shy, or maybe intimidated at first, because you don't get to know people, you just get a notion of the way someone may or may not be by what you think about the way they look. And you've just got to have that courage to just take the first step and say something."
• This is the first song on Steel Magnolia's debut album and very often the first song they play at concerts. Jones explained, "I think that's always been a great opener for our live show. There's a certain energy about the song and it speaks a lot about our sound. So it's a good introduction any time we play out live, because it's back and forth, equal parts, come together on the choruses. And then the big finish for the bridge section kind of boogies, and then it hits that big note, and it just encompasses a lot about us. I think it's a great introduction song."