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In the same “long goodbye” week in which Roger Daltrey told audiences in North America and Europe that he and his long-time bandmate, Pete Townshend, “won’t be taking to the road again in the same way,” the guitarist reflected on the joy and loneliness of touring life at an advanced age.

“We’re lucky to be alive,” Townshend said. “It can be lonely. I think to myself sometimes: ‘Well, this is my job, I’m happy to have the work, but I prefer to be doing something else.’ But then I think, ‘Well, I’m 80 years old. Why shouldn’t I revel in it? Why shouldn’t I celebrate?”

Touring this spring and summer will be the Who’s 17th North American jaunt with the same stage setup and lighting design, Pete Townshend noted. For the 80-year-old guitarist, that means that while he’s “happy to have the work,” the shows often still feel “routine,” even after decades of gigging.

“There’s only so much preparation you can do,” he said. “We work hard, but then we’re on stage performing, so we don’t have that long to kind of work on this gig. I do find it gets to be a routine, to be honest. The last couple of weeks we’ve been in Europe have felt quite routine.”

Townshend understands that his relationship with live music and touring has changed. It’s been nearly six decades since The Who’s early incarnations took to the streets of London. He now sees his band not as a collection of musicians or singers but as a much larger, more sprawling brand.

“I think it’s become a brand rather than a band,” Townshend added. “Roger and I have got a responsibility to the music and the history of the work, and we love the Who, and we love the audiences, and we don’t want to let that go. The Who sells records — the Moon and Entwistle families have become millionaires — but we’ve moved on to a stage where the art, the creative work, is when we perform it. We’re celebrating. We’re a Who tribute band.”

With a chuckle, Townshend’s reference to the late drummer Keith Moon and the late bassist John Entwistle also touched on The Who’s legacy. While Townshend and Daltrey remain alive and kicking, they also noted during their interview with The Times that stage work has the power to give one an appetite for living. “It does whet an appetite to think about how we should bow out in our personal lives,” Townshend said. “You know: what we do with our families and our friends and everything else at this age.”

He went on: “We’re really 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. So for me, it’s not as predictable as it might otherwise be.”

After 50 years in the business, an appetite for touring new material and revisiting old cuts is perhaps not surprising. While the stage work feels in many ways the same for Townshend, it’s also a powerful testament to his and Daltrey’s persistence as creatives and performers who share a willingness to bring fans something different, even after all this time.

“I am going to do a Who gig in North America for the first time in ages, and I haven’t toured in ages,” Townshend said. “But somehow in England, somehow, Roger and I have become professional.”

The Who Touring at 80: Roger Daltrey Weighs In

With a sold-out tour of the U.S. and Canada behind him earlier this year, Roger Daltrey has also made the grueling life on the road a point of focus, if only to reassure fans who continue to wonder how much longer Townshend and Daltrey can continue as The Who.

Fortunately, Daltrey’s vocal health is still strong, and he quipped during a Teenage Cancer Trust concert in London earlier this year: “Fortunately, I still have my voice, because then I’ll have a full Tommy. Deaf, dumb, and blind kid.”

“It’s just very, very, very hard work,” Daltrey said, according to The Times. “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. It was a grueling period, and I can’t see how we could do it now.”

Daltrey will be 80 in March, and a tour-heavy life is not what he will have when he retires as The Who. He was non-committal when it came to answering the most common question: When will The Who play again? As to whether the band will stage one-off concerts, Daltrey said: “I don’t know. The Who to me is very perplexing.”

For Townshend, Daltrey, and their fans, the shows are both an end and a recognition of what has come before, as a salute to being lucky to have lived for so long to play and sing the songs of The Who. As for Townshend, he echoed Daltrey’s closing line from their recent Times interview in the same sentence that he said they were lucky to be alive: “We’re lucky to be alive.”