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The Who guitarist Pete Townshend has been back on the road once again in 2023, this time for a 17-date North American tour with his longtime musical partner Roger Daltrey. And while Townshend, 80, said he was grateful to still be playing, life on the road at this stage in his career had its moments of loneliness. After decades of touring, there are also big questions about what’s next for the British rock legends.

“It can be lonely,” Townshend said in an interview last week. “I’ve thought, ‘Well, this is my job. I’m happy to have the work, but I prefer to be doing something else.’ Then, I think, ‘Well, I’m 80 years old. Why shouldn’t I revel in it? Why shouldn’t I celebrate?”

Townshend, whose creative work as a composer and painter goes far beyond his work with The Who, stressed that while he and Daltrey were lucky to be performing decades after The Who first came to international attention, the band had become something much bigger than the sum of its parts. “It’s a brand rather than a band,” he said. “Roger and I have a duty to the music and to the history. It sells a lot of records. The Moon and the Entwistle families have become millionaires because of it. But there’s also something more, really: the art, the creative work, is when we perform it. We’re celebrating. We’re a Who tribute band.”

The late bandmates Keith Moon and John Entwistle get a mention from Townshend there because the music continues to look after both the Moon and Entwistle families financially, thanks to licensing, royalties, and record sales. However, Townshend also alluded to the sense that stage work stirs up other questions, about what is important in life and priorities. “It does whet an appetite to think about how we should bow out in our personal lives, you know, what we do with our families and our friends and everything else at this age,” he said. “We’re lucky to be alive. I’m looking forward to playing. Roger likes to throw wild cards out sometimes in the set, and we have learned and rehearsed a few songs that we don’t always play.”

For the Who guitarist, playing some rarely played songs he has had to rehearse and dusting off new material to play on stage has made touring less of a humdrum experience in recent years. “It’s certainly got better over the last few tours because we’ve been throwing in songs that we don’t always play to make it a little more challenging for ourselves,” he said.

Roger Daltrey: Touring Is Grueling and There’s No Plan for One-Off Shows in the Future

Roger Daltrey has also expressed a mixture of gratitude and a sense of being spent after five decades as a professional musician. While playing a show with Townshend at the Teenage Cancer Trust charity in London in May, the singer was honest about his health issues with fans in the crowd. “Fortunately, I still have my voice, because then I’ll have a full Tommy,” he told them, referring to the title character in The Who’s 1969 rock opera of the same name. Quoting one of the most famous lines from the album: “Deaf, dumb, and blind kid.”

Daltrey was even more candid in a recent interview with The Times. When fans hear The Who say, “This is the last time you will see us on tour,” Daltrey said of the band’s upcoming and final series of shows, “It does sound like it’s the end of the road, doesn’t it?” He added, “This is certainly the last time you will see us on tour. It’s grueling.”

Daltrey has spoken about the toll the band’s material took on his body when he was in his 60s. He told the Times that performing Who songs for three hours, six nights a week, was hard work, even then. “In the days when I was singing Who songs for three hours a night, six nights a week, I was working harder than most footballers,” he told The Times. That’s true. His point was that when he was 60, the touring was hard on him.

Asked about one-off shows in the future after the tour, Daltrey said he didn’t know but did say: “As to whether we’ll play [one-off] concerts again, I don’t know. The Who to me is very perplexing.”

Daltrey was also asked about his voice and whether it could carry the same power and weight as it used to when he was on stage performing as The Who. “My voice is still as good as ever,” Daltrey said.