“The Way” by Fastball

"The Way" was the lead single from Fastball's second album, All the Pain Money Can Buy, sent out on January 7, 1998, and it's one of those songs that sounds like pure sunshine until you know where it came from. Tony Scalzo, the band's lead singer, wrote it after reading about an elderly couple who went missing and were later found dead in their car, far from where they had meant to go. He turns that grim news item into something tender and dreamy rather than morbid.

The music plays it light and breezy, a jaunty, rolling shuffle with a hummable hook and a vintage pop bounce. The band produced it with Julian Raymond for Hollywood Records, and it wears its craft lightly.

It sat at number one on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart for seven weeks from April 1998, went to number one in Canada and topped the RPM Alternative 30 for four weeks, hit number seven in Sweden and reached the top 20 in Australia, Iceland and Norway. VH1 later placed it at number 94 among the 100 greatest songs of the '90s.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.