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When the North American leg of The Who’s final tour kicked off on August 15, Pete Townshend was, of course, back out on the road with singer Roger Daltrey. During a recent interview with UCR, the 80-year-old guitarist and primary songwriter for the English rock band said touring life can often be a lonely existence at his age, but he is still thankful to be able to play.

“The problem is, it can be lonely,” Townshend said. “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 went on to explain that even though he knows he’s fortunate to be able to tour and play for as long as he has, there is also a sense of exhaustion from the decades he’s put in. The Who began as a group in the 1960s, so it’s a sense of mortality that he isn’t as tired from the band touring, but rather what it represents.

“It’s a brand rather than a band,” he said. “Roger and I have a duty to the music and the history. We also have the fact that The Who still sells records and that the Moon and Entwistle families have become millionaires, so there’s a little bit of jealousy there! There’s also something more, really: that the art, the creative work, is when we perform it. We’re celebrating. We’re a Who tribute band.”

He later added, “It does whet an appetite to think about how we should bow out in our personal lives, what we do with our families and our friends and everything else at this age. 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.”

The mention of late drummer Keith Moon and late bassist John Entwistle comes after Townshend elaborated on a question regarding what song he feels “crowds love[d] but we don’t play very often.” He replied by highlighting an in-joke between him and Daltrey.

“We do, and a lot of that is Roger doing these odd songs he asks me to help him with,” Townshend said. “We played ‘Pure and Easy,’ which is a truly beautiful song, and it’s a song that Roger and I have a laugh about, as he thinks it’s played all the time and I know it’s not.”

The 17-date tour across North America is something audiences there should be grateful for, as it’s unlikely to be the last. Both Townshend and Daltrey remain unsure of what the future holds for the band, but they admitted they were also looking forward to having some free time and getting away from the stage.

Roger Daltrey Talks Touring and Future Plans for Who

The other half of this band, Roger Daltrey, has also had a relationship with The Who that’s had similar arcs of elation and exhaustion. While playing a song at a benefit for Teenage Cancer Trust in London earlier this year, Daltrey, 80, took the time to address the audience and give an update on his health. “I’m well. Fortunately, I still have my voice because then I’ll have a full Tommy,” he said. “Deaf, dumb, and blind kid.”

When speaking with The Times last month, the frontman had similar messages about his state of mind when it came to The Who’s future. Daltrey told the outlet the 17-date U.S. tour would be his last with the band, saying, “This is certainly the last time you will see us on tour, and we are already taking the vans back. It’s grueling.”

Daltrey previously spoke to Rolling Stone about a lifetime spent performing on stage. In the story, he was quoted as saying the hardest part of all of this, now, in 2023, is that the songs haven’t aged like he has.

“The problem with playing this kind of music is that, when we were doing this music 50 years ago, it was for young people,” Daltrey said at the time. “This kind of music doesn’t age very well, so we’ve got to play to much younger audiences.”

“It was different when we used to tour and play Who songs all over the place,” Daltrey continued in the recent interview with The Times. “I used to be out in front of thousands of people, five nights a week. It was all great, but it was hard work, with everybody doing it. You see the evidence of footballers who haven’t had that kind of workload. They last longer.”

Daltrey went on to close his thoughts about the band and The Who with, “As to whether we’ll play [one-off] concerts again, I don’t know. The Who to me is very perplexing.”

There may or may not be one-off concerts in the future, but for now Daltrey is grateful his voice hasn’t left him: “My voice is still as good as ever,” he said. “I’m lucky.”