The Way

Tony Scalzo (1964–)

Another song I heard on the radio while on vacation with Betsy, this time staying with my mom in Dana Point, Orange County, California. It took a few hearings for it to get me––maybe four or five––but it did. I thought it nailed the slacker phenomenon to perfection, so I looked for the details before writing this and found a very strange story. The song was inspired by events that happened in Texas, where Tony Scalzo lives. There were two people who were going around town without even knowing the way––an old Texas couple, both on their second marriages, deeply in love, who enjoyed taking driving trips together. As they had been doing for years, they attended Pioneer Days in Temple, Texas, just 10 miles from their home. But their friends and family started to worry when they never returned. The husband had a recent brain surgery, and the wife was experiencing memory loss. The story of the missing couple quickly spread to the news, where it became a running narrative. This is where Tony Scalzo first heard the story, and like thousands of other Texans, he followed it day by day. Soon he was inspired to write this song, although in it the protagonists were apparently young people, who incidentally during the course of the song, abandon their children, making this the second song of the 100 that involved abandoned children. What are the odds? The couple had been missing for 13 days when their bodies and crashed car was found several hundred miles away, in Arkansas. The story takes an even stranger turn: after “The Way” had become a #1 Billboard hit, it was heard by the couple’s son, who correctly identified the song being about his parents.