Send Me On My Way Ecstasy Cat Turned Blue Rusted Root

Send Me On My Way Album: Cruel Sun (1992)
Ecstasy Album: When I Woke (1994)
Cat Turned Blue Album: Cruel Sun (1992)
by Rusted Root

One of the most joyful songs ever recorded, "Send Me On My Way" was never a huge hit, but roughly a decade after it was released, it found its way to various media uses to convey a pleasant journey. It was featured in the movies Matilda and Ice Age, on the TV shows Chuck and New Girl, and in ubiquitous commercials for Enterprise Rent-A-Car, which built an ad campaign around the song.

Rusted Root had seven members at the time, and they all shared the songwriting credit on this one. Their frontman Michael Glabicki wrote the lyrics, and their other members - Liz Berlin, John Buynak, Jim Dispirito, Jim Donovan, Patrick Norman and Jennifer Wertz - contributed to the track. Glabicki told us about writing the song: "I remember just walking right into our studio during the day. I remember it being very sunny. We had these big windows in this warehouse and the sun was shining in, and as soon as I walked in I picked up the guitar and just started writing it. It was just a very, very happy feeling. You could feel that there was a lot of happiness in the room. Whether that was an extension of me or something else in there that was very happy, you just felt it. Just like a super happy feeling." (Here's our full interview with Michael Glabicki.)

Send Me On My Way contains the most famous penny whistle solo since Morris Goldberg used one on Paul Simon's "You Can Call Me Al." It was played by Rusted Root band member John Buynak (Johnny B.). Michael Glabicki told us how it happened: "When I first went to hang out with him and played some music, it was kind of like visiting the Hobbit. He had all these little toys laying around and he would just randomly bop around and pick up different little things, whether it was a flute or a saxophone or penny whistles or little percussion things that he had all laying out in his apartment. I don't think he considered himself a musician at the time, but he just had this great light energy to him.

When I asked him to join, it was mainly for the flutes and the woodwinds. He was like a little wizard guy, he picked up these things and just played around with them. And the first time he heard the song, it was kind of goofy. Everybody was happy - there was this happy vibe over the room. Jenn (Wertz) was going, 'On my way, on my way,' real goofy like. And Johnny picked up the penny whistle and they were doing this little goofy dance and just having fun and laughing with it. That's how the penny whistle part came about."

There are some phrases in Send Me On My Way that if you believe hard enough can form real words, but are really just made up. One part sounds like "Oohmaseeyou," and another like "Mamasaydobeddyalong." Michael Glabicki says that these words aren't supposed to make rational sense. He explained: "I was in the process of coming up with lyrics, and it just sounded so good and felt so right that it had a meaning of its own that you couldn't make better by making it a word. So I left it."

An influence on Send Me On My Way was Toni Childs, an American singer who uses many African sounds in her work. Like Rusted Root, she had just one Hot 100 entry ("Don't Walk Away," 1988) and it also placed at #72.

Cruel Sun was Rusted Root's 1992 debut album, and contained the first version of this song. Two years later, a new version was included on their second album When I Woke, which was the charting single (It didn't hit the charts until a year after the album was released). It did very well with the college crowd, and for a while it looked like the band would follow the trajectory of Blues Traveler and Dave Matthews Band, but "Send Me On My Way" never got the exposure of "What Would You Say" or "Run-Around," and they never became headliners or radio stars.

Regarding Send Me On My Way's success, Michael Glabicki told us: "It made it onto a good portion of radio stations across the United States. And I think where it really came about was on college campuses. It was spread by word of mouth and just by college students. I think that's how the song really had its foundation. But we did get some pretty significant radio play, so there was that portion of it, too. I think it wasn't more a matter of being marketed a certain way, it was more the industry and how the industry was on the brink of changing drastically at that point."

The original version on Cruel Sun runs 4:57. The 1994 When I Woke version was cut to 4:19, and edited down to 3:56 for the single. Bill Bottrell, who was Sheryl Crow's collaborator on her debut album Tuesday Night Music Club, produced When I Woke, including the updated version of "Send Me On My Way."

Ecstasy was inspired by Rusted Root lead singer Michael Glabicki's trip to Nicaragua in 1987 during the Contra War. Growing up in Pittsburgh, Glabicki spent his high school years on activism, fighting against apartheid, nuclear weapons, and racism. One of his causes was Central America, which led him to Nicaragua on a humanitarian mission to Pittsburgh's sister city, San Ysidro. He worked on improvements to their irrigation and drinking water systems, but also took note of the politics. "The country that I came from had really started the wars down there, and it didn't make sense to me," Glabicki said, referring to the Reagan administration practice of arming the Nicaraguan rebel forces.

In 2012, Rusted Root revisited political themes on their album The Movement, which was influenced by Occupy Wall Street.

Perhaps you're wondering why the cat turned blue. We were, so we asked Rusted Root frontman Michael Glabicki, who wrote the lyrics to Cat Turned Blue, for details. He explained: "I think it's one of those things where it either makes sense to the individual, or it doesn't, but it's nothing that I could explain. Some people draw from it and go, Oh, it at least feels good or I understand it. Some people think it's about an overdose, so I've heard that a lot. Sometimes I write songs and you know that there is something going on there, but everybody's going to draw their own meaning from it.

And it's not a matter of it needing to make literal sense. But there's a point, like you see a scale and there's a meter, and when it's at 10, you know that people are going to like it in the sense that they will draw from it and make their own conclusion. And there's a whole spectrum to be viewed and to be really conscious of that you're not just throwing stuff out there and hoping it sticks. Sometimes when you write a song it makes no sense whatsoever literally, but that meter goes up. And you know that everybody's going to go, Wow, that's really mysterious and I really feel it, or they'll draw some of their own conclusions from it. And that's that song."

Like "Send Me On My Way," Rusted Root included this song on their 1992 debut album Cruel Sun, but put a new version on their second album, When I Woke. Michael Glabicki explained: "on the version on When I Woke, we decided to come up with different first lyrics, so everybody in the band just started throwing stuff around. And I remember a couple of books that people were reading, and people came up with some images from those books, and other people threw in other images, and we came up with those lyrics. That's one song that I didn't write completely."