In this song, Yellowcard frontman Ryan Key is fed up and ready to leave. Where's he going? "Way away away from here."
The song speaks to the idea that we are ultimately the masters of our destiny, and we need to own up to what we do with our lives. Key cites his personal journey from dropping out of college to pursue his dream of being a songwriter, and the band's decision to leave their hometown of Jacksonville for California, as inspiration for the song.
"It's like, I'm not going to stay here just because you tell me I have to," he said. "A lot of those people who say that are doing the 9-to-5 and they're not happy. You have to do what you want to do."
Ben Harper, who was the band's guitarist at the time, says the song is also "about our band and facing the people who didn't believe in what we were doing. That's kind of like an ode to disbelievers." (This not the Ben Harper of "
Steal My Kisses" fame.)
"It's the story we have sort of been through as a band in the last couple of years," Ryan Key added. "Hopefully other people will take that song and apply it to their own lives and be able to kind of get out of whatever they are stuck in and don't want to be in."
Directed by Patrick Hoelck, who helmed Alicia Keys' "Girlfriend," the music video shows the band performing in front of the Super A Foods supermarket in Los Angeles, California.
This was used in the TV shows Smallville ("Extinction," 2003) and The O.C. ("The Outsider," 2003). It was also featured in the 2004 movie Sleepover, starring Alexa PenaVega.
"Way Away" was Yellowcard's first single, but they had been making music for years by that point, starting in 1997 when they put out an album called Midget Tossing while they were still in high school. They were on various indie labels early on, including Lobster Records, which they joined in 2000 when they made the move to Los Angeles. They spent a lot of time touring in 2002 and earned a major-label deal with Capitol Records the following year. Ocean Avenue, released in July 2003, was their first album with Capitol, but it took more touring to get the word out. "Way Away" was released as a single that October, followed by the song "Ocean Avenue" in December. The song "Ocean Avenue" was really well received and became a hit in the summer of 2004. They year, they headlined the Warped Tour, a huge leap from their low-on-the-bill status just a year earlier.
"Way Away" is one of Yellowcard's most enduring songs, played at most of their shows. The band went through some tough times when their sound fell out of favor in the 2010s, and in 2017 they called it quits. But in the early 2020s, their pop-punk sound came back around and in 2022 they got invited to play Riot Fest in Chicago. They took the gig and ended up re-forming the band because they now had more fans than ever, since a new generation was discovering them. They released another EP in 2023 and put out an album called Better Days in 2025.
Yellowcard played this song live long before they recorded it, but just before they played it for the first time, Ryan Key decided to rework the song.
"I sat in the front driver's seat of the van 30 minutes before we played, and I just had a feeling," he
said a Riot Fest. "I changed the entire verse, melody and lyric. I actually wrote those verses in the van right before the show. And I don't remember what the old verses sounded like."
