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Pete Townshend is hitting the road. He’s out on a 17-date North American tour with long-time bandmate Roger Daltrey. But at 80 years old, the guitarist and singer-songwriter says that touring life at this point in his life can feel isolating. That said, he’s also thankful for the work and is still trying to figure out what comes next for the Who.

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

Touring after so many decades can be a strange dichotomy. On the one hand, Townshend says that he’s grateful to still have a band to tour with, a feeling that many musicians don’t share after 50-plus years in the business. On the other hand, the time on the road is emotionally taxing.

Decades after The Who first found fame, the band is much bigger than the individual musicians who comprise it. “It’s a brand rather than a band,” Townshend said. “Roger and I have a duty to the music and the history. The Who [still] sells records – the Moon and Entwistle families have become millionaires. 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.”

Townshend is referring to former drummer Keith Moon and bassist John Entwistle, who both died youn, and left the band. While Daltrey and Townshend continue to revere the music, the guitarist also said that the stage work is reflective of deeper questions of personal preference. “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,” he added. “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 passage of time, even after 50 years on stage, has also not dulled the enthusiasm for live shows. For Townshend, at least, going back to the songbooks and relearning the songs he and the band don’t usually perform is a reminder that the shows don’t have to be the same every night.

Roger Daltrey on Touring, Health, and the Future

Roger Daltrey has been in the band longer than anyone. When he took the stage with Townshend at London’s Teenage Cancer Trust charity earlier this year, he told the audience, “Fortunately, I still have my voice, because then I’ll have a full Tommy,” the character in The Who’s seminal 1969 rock opera. “Deaf, dumb, and blind kid,” he quoted the famous lyric.

In a recent interview with The Times, Daltrey opened up further about what’s next after this tour. For fans who have been with the band since its first incarnation, his words seemed to suggest that there might not be a next chapter. “This is certainly the last time you will see us on tour,” Daltrey said. “It’s grueling.”

The veteran rocker was quite frank in his assessment of what it means to perform The Who’s catalogue oregularly “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 said. At 80, the wear and tear from those decades of singing his heart out is catching up with him.

There is still a possibility of one-off concerts in the future, although Daltrey is still unclear on whether that will happen. “As to whether we’ll play [one-off] concerts again, I don’t know. The Who to me is very perplexing,” he said. That confusion, at least in part, is echoed in the very nature of the band itself: part monument, part nostalgia, and part unfinished project.

Daltrey also had reassuring words for fans who are concerned about his voice. “My voice is still as good as ever,” he said. That reassurance is, of course, something for fans to look forward to, who have been following the band since before some of them were born.

Touring the US and Canada this summer may be the last opportunity to catch Daltrey and Townshend playing under the Who banner. For the musicians, it is both an end and a new beginning, at once marking an acknowledgment that the time has come to stop as well as a reminder of why and how they came together in the first place.

At this stage, The Who is about more than just preserving the music. It’s also about appreciating life, the family, the friends, and the friendships that have all been shaped by the music. For Townshend and Daltrey, the shows are a way of honoring that, and each other, with songs they all know by heart. As Townshend succinctly put it, “We’re lucky to be alive.”