Song of the Day 8/22: Fastball, “The Way”

Fastball is a band out of Austin, Texas, that formed in 1995 and scored a massive modern-rock hit in 1998 with this rockabilly-flavored tale of a road trip with no destination. Technically they’re not a one-hit wonder — a couple of other songs from the same LP reached the charts, and they were nominated for a couple of Grammy awards — but like most ’90s bands they struggled to find much of an audience after they were finished mining that album for singles.

The song’s backstory is fairly well-known. Frontman Tony Scalzo’s inspiration was a 1997 news story about Lela and Raymond Howard, an elderly Texas couple — one had Alzheimer’s, the other was recovering from brain surgery — who set off on a 15-miles drive to a local fair and disappeared. They were stopped by police hundreds of miles away in Arkansas for driving without their lights on at night but allowed to continue on their way, and they promptly disappeared again. Scalzo wrote the song while they were still missing, imagining the couple as finding their bliss on the open road. In reality, the couple was found dead a couple of weeks later at the foot of a 25-foot bluff in Arkansas that they drove over, Thelma and Louise style, without ever hitting the brakes.