Interscope Records
Interscope RecordsAfter focusing on solo projects in 2018, The Who came roaring back with a vengeance this year. Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey announced in January that the band would mount a major trek dubbed the Moving On! Tour featuring accompaniment from an orchestra at each stop. If that weren’t enough, Townshend and Daltrey also revealed that the U.K. rock legends were preparing their first studio album since 2006’s Endless Wire.
The tour kicked off with a U.S. leg that began May 7 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The shows featured The Who’s full touring band joined at all shows by violinist Katie Jacoby and cellist Audrey Snyder, along with a different orchestra in every city. The concerts featured orchestral opening and closing sets that focused, respectively, on Tommy and Quadrophenia, as well as a middle set without the orchestra featuring various Who gems.
In July, The Who played a one-off concert at London’s Wembley Stadium at which they debuted two songs from their forthcoming album, “Hero Ground Zero” and “Ball and Chain,” the latter of which previously was recorded by Townshend solo and, under the title “Guantanamo,” was featured on his 2015 best-of compilation, Truancy. The band continued performing both tunes throughout the second leg of the Moving On! tour, which began September 1 at Madison Square Garden in New York and wound down with an October 24 show at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.
The band’s new album, simply titled WHO, arrived on December 6. It debuted at #2 on the Billboard 200, tying Quadrophenia and Who Are You for the group’s highest-charting U.S. album.
WHO was mostly recorded during the spring and summer of 2019 in London and Los Angeles. Townshend wrote nine of the album’s 11 tracks, and co-wrote one tune, “Beads on One String,” with singer/songwriter Josh Hunsacker. Pete’s brother, Simon, who plays rhythm guitar and sings backing vocals with The Who on tour, penned the song “Break the News.”
WHO finds Townshend reflecting on a wide range of topics, including the plight of being an aging rocker, the tragic 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, musical plagiarism, and the way men approach their interactions with women in the era of the #MeToo movement.
Besides Townshend, his brother and Daltrey, the record includes musical contributions from Who touring drummer Zak Starkey, longtime touring bassist Pino Palladino, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench, and session drummer Joey Waronker.
Meanwhile, 2019 also saw Townshend publish his first novel, The Age of Anxiety, which was released in November. Pete described the book as “a mystery story, and a story about drug abuse, being a parent, creativity, anxiety, being blocked as an artist, and the psychic miracles worked by certain women in the story.”
Townshend also revealed that he’s working on a multimedia production based on the novel that will include original music and which he hopes to premiere in 2021 or 2022.
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