Songoftheday 5/4/21 - They made up their minds and they started packing, they left before the sun came up that day...
"The Way" - Fastball
from the album All The Pain Money Can Buy (1998)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: ineligible to chart
Billboard Hot 100 Airplay peak: #5 (four weeks)
Weeks in the Airplay Top-40: 35
Today's song of the day comes from the rock band Fastball, who came together in Austin, Texas in the mid-1990s. With lead singer/bassist/main songwriter Tony Scalzo, drummer Joey Shuffield, and guitarist Miles Zuniga, the trio were local favorites when they signed to the Disney offshoot Hollywood Records label. Their debut album, Make Your Mama Proud, was released in 1996, but didn't make a dent outside of their hometown area. That changed with their sophomore effort All The Pain Money Can Buy, which came out two years later. The lead single, "The Way", written by Scalzo and produced by the band with Julian Raymond, was a mid-tempo song that was supposedly inspired by an elderly couple who ran off from their medical captivity to be found dead in a ravine. You'd never know it from the song or lyrics though, as it described lovers just trying to recapture the spark of long ago. The production was very 1960's retro, which was in at the time, much like Smash Mouth's "Walkin' On The Sun". But rather that SM's embrace of garage rock for that hit, Fastball went more for the sophisticated pop of the Turtles and the Rascals. Nevertheless, radio and the public embraced it, and the band found themselves with both their breakthrough and their biggest hit...
Since "The Way" wasn't released commercially as a retail single (most likely to goose sales of the album), it wasn't able to place on Billboard magazine's official Hot 100 pop chart. However, the song got enough mainstream radio love to reach the top-5 on the airplay component of that tally in June of 1998. The track was a massive rock radio hit, topping the Alternative Rock chart for seven weeks, and making it to #25 on the Mainstream Rock list. It also crossed over to the older-skewing Adult Top-40 format in a big way, spending ten weeks at #2. Internationally, the single went to #1 in Canada for a week, and reached the top-40 in Sweden (#7), Australia (#14), Norway (#15), Iceland (#16), the UK (#21), and Switzerland (#36). The All The Pain Money Can Buy album, released in March of 1998, crested at #29 on the Billboard 200 sales list, going on to move over a million copies. It won't be the last of this group in this series.
(8/10)
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Next up, live at the Hard rock Cafe...
Finally, in concert in Texas in 2007...
As a bonus, here's a local TV news story about the song and the tragedy that inspired it, with Scalzo interviewed and playing a little...
Up tomorrow: Rap mogul invites you to follow the monster.
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