.

“I’ve thought, ‘Well, this is my job, I’m happy to have the work, but I prefer to be doing something else.’” So says Pete Townshend, the iconic Who guitarist who is currently on the road with Roger Daltrey for a 17-date tour of North America. Aged 80, Townshend has a certain wisdom with which to contemplate this period of his life: life on the road can be lonely, he’s told Billboard, though he’s also grateful just to be alive and to be playing.

It’s not hard to sense the fatigue when reading that statement, the desire to be doing anything other than walking on and off stage night after night. But of course, Townshend is also grateful for this opportunity; that gratitude he can’t help but appreciate, even at 80 and contemplating the future of the Who.

“It can be lonely,” Townshend said in a separate interview with Rolling Stone. “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?”

This is the thing about working in music for a lifetime; it’s an ebb and flow between gratitude and exhaustion. Townshend has had a front-row seat to the Who’s transformation from scrappy young band to global rock behemoth. The Who, he has said, is no longer a band in the sense that he and Daltrey could just get together and start playing. Instead, it’s something much bigger, much more singular.

“It’s a brand rather than a band,” he 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.”

The Moon and Entwistle he references are the late, great drummer Keith Moon and bassist John Entwistle, two members who died young and whose widows have benefited from The Who’s continued success. (Townshend’s wife, by comparison, sued him for her share of the royalties last year.) The surviving members continue to do right by the music, if they have any say in it. But that stage work also brings up other questions, the ones that ask what we value about our own lives.

“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.”

Townshend here is reminded by the joy of performance — the idea that rehearsing a setlist of rarely played songs, that perhaps his fans may not expect to hear live, has brought new energy to The Who at this point. There’s an excitement to still being on stage after five decades, the risk that this could be the last night someone has paid to see you play. It’s hard not to feel that from the side of the audience.

Roger Daltrey Gets Emotional and Honest About What’s to Come

And of course, there’s Roger Daltrey, the other half of the present-day Who. If Daltrey sounds exhausted by the process, it’s because he is. We’ve known this for a while, and it was particularly evident this summer, when he and Townshend played a Teenage Cancer Trust charity event in London earlier this year.

“I’m just thrilled to be on stage. This is it. This is the be-all and end-all,” he told the audience, choking back tears. “Fortunately, I still have my voice, because then I’ll have a full Tommy.” Tommy, as Daltrey reminded his audience, is the name of the title character from the band’s most enduring rock opera, released in 1969.

Quoting the famous Tommy lyric, Daltrey lightened the mood: “Deaf, dumb, and blind kid.” He reassured the crowd that he and Townshend still had it, still had some music left in them. He also didn’t shy away from the larger questions about legacy and what it means to be an aging rock star when you’re no longer as good-looking as you once were.

In a new interview with The Times earlier this month, Daltrey shed more light on what he means when he says The Who may have played their last show on tour. There was a feeling of finality to it that has only grown in the last few weeks: this is the end of an era, a monumental final chapter for one of rock’s greatest bands.

“This is certainly the last time you will see us on tour,” he said. “It’s grueling.”

It’s been a long time coming; Daltrey remembers performing The Who’s catalog night after night, some of the more active touring years in the band’s history, and still being exhausted. “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.

It’s not a coincidence, then, that he’s 80 and singing 50-year-old songs that he can’t even physically muster the energy to hit without adequate rest. Touring may be a thing of the past for Daltrey, though he did not rule out the possibility of future concerts.

“As to whether we’ll play [one-off] concerts again, I don’t know. The Who to me is very perplexing,” he admitted. It’s an apt description for a band that is part timeless, part nostalgia act, and part ongoing project.