Bloggerhythms

How can a song be considered a hit without ever making an appearance on the Billboard Hot 100 at all? Easy, release a track as catchy as "The Way." Fastball did just that in 1998 on their second album, All the Pain Money Can Buy . The single charted well in Canada, Australia, Iceland, Sweden and Norway. In America the full length CD reached #29 on the Billboard 200 album chart so it's possible that the success of the album here at home may have hurt sales of the single. "The Way" also spent seven weeks at the top of Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks survey and VH-1 ranked it #94 on their list of the hundred greatest songs of the nineties. Lead singer, Tony Scalzo, who composed "The Way," was inspired by a real news story about an elderly couple who disappeared and were found dead two weeks later in their car a long way from home. The couple, Lela, 83, and Raymond Howard, 88, were driving to a festival nea...

All during the nineties new rock bands were sprouting up like dandelions in early Spring and Fastball, an Austin, TX trio influenced more by power-pop than the raging grunge scene, was among them. Unusually, all of the group's original members are still in the lineup more than a generation after they organized. Guitarist/vocalist Miles Zuniga and bassist/vocalist Tony Scalzo are still teamed up with drummer Joe Shuffield. Zuniga and Scalzo are the primary songwriters. All The Pain Money Can Buy , the band's second album hit pay dirt as they wrote concise, modern, pop-rock with a 70s aesthetic that could make you smile even while it possessed enough of a 90s edge to avoid being labeled as throwbacks. A song doesn't get stuck in your head any easier than Scalzo's "The Way." Radio loved it, and the medium propelled it to #4 on the American Mainstream Top 40 chart and #1 in Canada. Zuniga's "Fire Escape," their second single off the album, didn...