.

Pete Townshend is currently back on the road. Along with longtime collaborator Roger Daltrey, the guitarist is making his way on a 17-date North American tour. At 80 years old, Townshend has been candid about the loneliness that can accompany life on the road in the later years of his life, but he is also grateful to have the chance to be on stage.

“It can be lonely,” the guitarist said in an interview. “I’ve been thinking, ‘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?”

The sentiment Townshend shared with the interviewer perfectly summarizes the thankfulness and weariness of life spent on stage. After all this time, and more than five decades after The Who made their initial splash in the music world, he’s come to terms with the fact that the band has evolved into something more than just a group of musicians playing songs. “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 are millionaires. 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 drummer Keith Moon and bassist John Entwistle are part of what the band celebrates. And while Townshend and Daltrey remain alive and continuing to perform The Who’s music, Townshend added, the work has also led him to grapple with the more serious questions about personal priorities. “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 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 we don’t always play.”

Performing after 50 years still seems to offer some of the same anticipation as it did in the band’s youth. For Townshend, rehearsing songs that don’t usually make the setlist and otherwise varying the sets seems to be enough to keep it from getting stale.

Roger Daltrey Opens Up on Health, Touring, and The Future

Touring for Roger Daltrey has been similarly bittersweet. Back in March, during a Teenage Cancer Trust charity performance with Pete Townshend in London, he shared an update on his health status with the audience. “Fortunately, I still have my voice, because then I’ll have a full Tommy,” Daltrey told the crowd, speaking of the title character from the Who’s revolutionary 1969 rock opera. He then alluded to the lyric, saying, “Deaf, dumb, and blind kid.”

In an interview earlier this month with The Times, Daltrey opened up about the possibility of there being no tour after the current 17 dates. To fans who have supported the band since its beginning, his words were an honest and perhaps definitive conclusion. “This is certainly the last time you will see us on tour,” he said. “It’s grueling.”

The time and dedication that performing The Who’s vast catalog at this point takes, particularly in the heyday of the band’s output, was something Daltrey reflected on. “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. Now, at the age of 80, it is becoming less and less feasible to keep up.

As far as single concerts in the future are concerned, Daltrey was less clear. “As to whether we’ll play [one-off] concerts again, I don’t know. The Who to me is very perplexing,” he admitted. It is hard to know what to expect with a band as multifaceted and nearly as long-lived as the Who.

Daltrey is not as concerned about the future of his voice, however, even if other aspects of touring are growing in difficulty. “My voice is still as good as ever,” he said. It’s at least a slight bit of reassurance for fans wondering if he will be able to perform to the same standard as before in the future.

Touring this North American run may be the last chance for fans to see Townshend and Daltrey on stage together as The Who. But for the musicians themselves, the journey that leads to their current tours is both an end and a beginning: a capstone to decades of redefining rock and roll, as well as a commentary on aging with the baggage of a legacy on their shoulders. Townshend summed it up simply in the interview, saying, “We’re lucky to be alive.”