The Way
by Fastball
- 123
- BPM
- F# minor
- Key
- 11A
- Camelot
- 66
- Danceability
- 16
- Acousticness
Tony Scalzo got the idea for "The Way" from newspaper articles about Lela and Raymond Howard of Salado, Texas. In June 1997 the elderly couple left home to attend a festival in nearby Temple, though Lela had Alzheimer's disease and Raymond was recovering from brain surgery. Two weeks later they were found dead at the bottom of a ravine near Hot Springs, Arkansas, hundreds of miles off their route. Investigators believed Lela, who was driving, was trying to find a place where she had once vacationed.
In the song, a couple decide to leave their lives behind and drive off without telling their grown children. The car breaks down and they continue on foot. Scalzo said the pair were probably trying to get back the flavor of young love and adventure. A few seconds of a radio scanning through FM stations open the track, and a fragment of Jewel's "Foolish Games" can be heard among the ads.
Fastball, formed in Austin in 1992, released it on January 7, 1998, as the lead single from All the Pain Money Can Buy. It went to No. 1 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart that April and stayed seven weeks. In Canada it reached No. 1 the week of June 15.
The Way runs at 123 BPM, the tempo of house, disco and most club dance music. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.95 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 488 ms. It is in F# minor, Camelot 11A, which shares its notes with A major and mixes cleanly with B minor and C# minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.