Fastball Explains How They Found "The Way"

After playing this coming weekend's rite of spring, the annual HFStival radio show in Washington D.C., Fastball, Marcy Playground and Everclear will launch a month-long tour together next Tuesday in San Francisco.

Each band comes to the tour with heavy-duty rock radio hit, and while Marcy Playground comes armed with "Sex And Candy," and Everclear is packing "I Will Buy You A New Life," Fastball brings "The Way" to the table.

Some have misinterpreted the song as a sort of anti-slacker anthem, but bassist Tony Scalzo says those folks are missing the point.

"Because I used the word 'slacker,' they got all bent out of shape about it," Scalzo told MTV News recently. "It's 'slacking.' It didn't even have anything to do with 'slacker' or any kind of Gen X cultural icon word. It fits... slacking, packing... that's how that works folks. It rhymes."

Scalzo said the song was actually inspired by a newspaper article about an elderly Texas couple that he read a year ago.

"When I first came across the story, it was a running story," Scalzo explained. "It's a missing person story, the kind of thing that will be in the paper for two weeks or at least until there's a resolution. There was no resolution at the point where I wrote the song, so I romanced my own sort of take on it."

"There's not even really an ending," guitarist Miles Zuniga added.

"It's an open-ended story," Scalzo noted.

"If you read the lyrics, it's really that they took off and no one knows where they went," Zuniga said.

"I like to say it's not about the story, it's inspired by the story," Scalzo summarized. After penning the song, Scalzo learned that the story had a tragic ending. The couple who inspired the song were on their way to a family reunion, but never made it. They were later found dead in their RV, at the bottom of a canyon.

The Foo Fighters, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and Green Day will also play this weekend's HFStival. After that, here's where Fastball, Marcy Playground, and Everclear will be:

5/19 - San Francisco, CA @ Warfield
5/20 - West Hollywood, CA @ Hollywood Palladium
5/22 - Tempe, AZ @ Hayden Square Amph.
5/23 - Las Vegas, NV @ University Of Nevada
5/24 - Albuquerque, NM @ State Fairgrounds
5/25 - Austin, TX @ Austin Music Hall
5/27 - Atlanta, GA @ Masquerade
5/29 - Camden, NJ @ Blockbuster - Sony Ctr.
6/2 - Worcester, MA @ Palladium
6/4 - New York, NY @ Roseland
6/6 - Pittsburgh, PA @ I.C. Light Amphitheatre
6/9 - Detroit, MI @ State Theatre
6/10 - Milwaukee, WI @ Modjeska Theatre
6/11 - Chicago, IL @ Riviera Theatre