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Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey are back on tour, and this time around it’s a 17-date North American tour. Townshend, 80, has said that life on the road is starting to feel a bit “lonely” as he tours with Roger. But the guitar great is grateful to be on the road still, and he and Daltrey are contemplating the future as they tour.

“It can be lonely,” the Who guitarist recently told Apple Music. “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’s wistful yet realistic sentiment sums up his life as an aging rocker. He tours with Roger Daltrey, who will turn 80 later this year. Townshend spoke about the weariness he feels after decades of performing on the road, the longevity of The Who’s music, and the nature of the band now. Is it a brand instead of a band?

“Even 50 years on, we have to go out and play and celebrate. It’s a brand rather than a band now. Roger and I are in the service of music and history,” he shared. “The Who still sells records. John and Kim Moon and the Entwistle families have become millionaires thanks to our association with the Who. 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.”

He is specifically talking about the late band members, like drummer Keith Moon and the late bassist John Entwistle. While Townshend is fine with the band, The Who, and Roger Daltrey celebrating the old music. The long work on stage also makes Townshend think on deeper levels about his personal life outside the stage.

“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 that we don’t always play.”

Townshend feels that after 50 years in the public eye, the rock star mystique is not quite the same. But he still gets a jolt from playing rare songs and getting things different from night to night instead of just falling into a rut.

Roger Daltrey’s Comments About Touring, Health, and What’s Next

Roger Daltrey has said similar things about his experience. In April, he appeared at a Teenage Cancer Trust charity concert in London, where he played with Pete Townshend. While at the show, he got real with the audience about his health. “Fortunately, I still have my voice, because then I’ll have a full Tommy,” he said, referring to the lead character from The Who’s landmark 1969 rock opera. He then quipped and quoted one of the album’s most famous lines: “Deaf, dumb, and blind kid.”

Daltrey has been a little more transparent this month on where he and Townshend go from here. In an interview with The Times this month, Daltrey seemed to close the door on fans who have followed the Who for decades. “This is certainly the last time you will see us on tour,” he said, with a kind of finality for longtime fans. “It’s grueling.”

Daltrey was talking about what it was like to go out night after night and perform the Who’s catalog the way it was done back in the day. The Who were one of the busiest bands of the 1960s and 1970s, and they would play two-hour sets for years. Daltrey said he pushed it too hard, and now, at 80, he can’t maintain that kind of level anymore.

“I was playing so many gigs, really nonstop touring for four or five months at a stretch. 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. “To get into the position that we are in now, and it becoming that physical, takes a long time.”

The Who frontman hasn’t ruled out doing one-off concerts at some point in the future. But at 80, the future is still uncertain, at least as far as Daltrey is concerned. “As to whether we’ll play [one-off] concerts again, I don’t know. The Who to me is very perplexing,” he said. Daltrey’s comments ring true as a reflection on the band’s past and present.

“I never saw The Who as some sort of ongoing job for life,” he said in the interview. The Who is a brand, an institution, and nostalgia, but it is also very much an evolving story. It has now lasted seven decades, making The Beatles look like they had a short shelf life.

His voice is something Daltrey has always prided himself on, and it appears to still be there. “My voice is still as good as ever,” he said. That is some comfort to fans who wonder if Daltrey can still take the stage with the same power and energy.

“I’m at the end of the road. We made some bloody good music, though, didn’t we?” Daltrey said. “It’s the end of the road for the Who as a touring band.”