The Way

I was sitting in my kitchen one morning when I noticed an article in the paper. It was a story about the search for an elderly Central Texas couple who hadn't shown up for a family reunion. They'd been missing for more than a week, the article saying that the husband had recently suffered a stroke, so the wife would most likely be driving. She had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. I began thinking of it as a song, yet I didn't want to write about the story's potentially tragic outcome (even though it had one). I wanted it to be more positive, with the couple making a conscious decision to escape the messes their adult children had left for them. I'd watched my own parents constantly trying to absorb the trouble my siblings and I got into well into our adult lives, and I wished a day would come when they wouldn't have to deal with being parents anymore. In that sense, I guess "The Way" is autobiographical. It took a short time to put "The Way" together, but it took a really long time for it to finally get played on the radio. Next thing you know, the band's performing the song three and four times a day and working harder than any band ever expects to work playing rock & roll. We played with a lot of acts we didn't have anything to do with musically: horrible boy bands like 98 Degrees and O-Town, pop divas like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. There were times we'd play on a six-act bill and Fastball would be the only band with drums and amps. Everybody else just played to a pre-recorded track. Remarkable.