He said that several songs explore how advancing years changed him, and how his approach to writing for Daltrey had changed too.
“Paul McCartney thinks he knows who he is,” Townshend says. “Mick Jagger thinks he knows who he is. Keith Richards thinks he knows who he is.” “I don’t.”
“Growing old includes growing up, even in the rock business,” Townshend told the Dallas News in a new interview. “I listen now to what Roger says, attend to what he needs as an artist and try to be a supportive colleague onstage. I also try to sincerely demonstrate that I love him.”
He noted that he "certainly wrote a few songs specifically about what happens when you get old. But funnily enough, I did a fair bit of that the first time I thought I had got old, when I passed through being 30, in 1975. I think in writing songs that I hoped Roger would connect with, I had to accept that, although we are both old men now, we are very different. So it's the broader issues I ended up writing about. The songs are about what we agree on, and one thing we can't argue about is that we are both old.”
Asked about the biggest misconception of the Who, Townshend said, "That we are, in any way, a heavy rock band. We can do it, but we're closer to prog-rock than, say, Led Zeppelin. On the other hand, there is a part of me that really doesn't give a shit what you think of us. That may be what makes us seem like an old-school rock band: We do our best, but if we fuck up, so be it.”
Townshend didn’t think that The Who was fit for rock and roll, telling Guitarist, “The interesting thing is that rock and roll was denied to The Who in a way. The Who were more of a pop band than a rock band. Some people get confused when they read the history of The Who, or they hear me talking about ‘rock’…The fact is that rock and roll itself lasted as long as pundits said it was…a couple of years”.
The Who were not a particularly financially successful band. We had big hits and Tommy was our biggest, but the money didn’t exactly roll in.
I tended to work purely for the art. I had written a bunch of songs, all of which had done pretty well, and one was “I Can See For Miles” which I took a lot of trouble with recording and arranging harmonically. I think still to this day it’s a masterpiece, and I can’t really work out why it isn’t in the shrine of rock history as the best song ever written about anything at all.
