Pete Townshend revealed that less than four months after the release of the Who's last album, he's hard at work writing the followup. Townshend, who's been holed up at his country home studio since the Who were forced to scrap its UK and Irish dates, checked in with England's BBC Radio and gave fans an update as to what he's been doing. He also expressed how sad he was that the symphonic musicians set to tour with the group and the Who's crew were all waylaid with the cancelation of the dates due to the Coronavirus.
Townshend admitted that having time off alone in the studio has worked out well for him, explaining, “It's been an answer to a prayer I don't think I've had the guts to do, which is please cancel everything (laughs) and give me some time in my studio. One job was to focus on a remix of a song called 'Beads On One String' from the recent WHO album, which we're hoping with a remix and a bit of sharpening up, it might work as a single. But the other thing that I've done is I've looked at the possibility of starting work early — I was going to do this next year — but starting work early on writing new songs for another Who album, as the last one did so well — so I'm knocking ideas around.”
Roger Daltrey self-admittedly had a tough time finding his voice in the last batch of Pete Townshend's songs. When we last caught up with Daltrey, he told us that he would like to take a more hands on approach to how Townshend crafts the songs for the band: “I'll work with Pete any time, but I would like to do an album where we work together. Not necessarily in the studio together, but, the project. And it seems to me that Pete cooks up projects on his own that are narratively tricky for the general public to get into, and I think if we work together, and by workin' together some of those problems might be solved.”
