The Way

This song is based on the true story of Lela and Raymond Howard, an elderly couple from Salado, Texas who drove to the annual Pioneer Day festival 10 miles away in Temple and didn't return. She had Alzheimer's disease and he was recovering from brain surgery. When they disappeared, a reporter from the Austin American-Statesman wrote a series of articles about the missing couple. Fastball bassist Tony Scalzo came up with the idea for the song after reading the articles (the band is from Austin). "It's a romanticized take on what happened," he said. Scalzo pictured them "taking off to have fun, like they did when they first met." Thirteen days after the Howards went missing, they were found in Hot Springs, Arkansas, about 400 miles from their destination; they were still in the vehicle (an Oldsmobile Delta 88), which had veered off the side of the road and was hidden in brush. Scalzo had finished writing the song when he learned that the couple had died.

The couple vanished on June 28, 1997. The song was released in February 1998 as the first promotional single from Fastball's second album, All The Pain Money Can Buy. The band was little known at the time, so it took a few months for the song to catch on, but by the summer of 1998 it was getting lots of airplay. The song wasn't sold in stores as a single (a ploy to sell more albums) but it made #5 on Billboard's Airplay chart on June 20, 1998, almost a year after the Howards went missing.

The keyboard figure that plays throughout this song was made with a Casio keyboard Tony Scalzo had. It was processed to loop around itself, creating a distinctive, but lo-fi sound.