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There are ways to feel old, but at 80, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend have found an age-defying elixir: Touring North America with the last of The Who.

Though no stranger to the road, the Who guitarist told Rolling Stone in a recent interview that touring as he approaches the group’s 60th anniversary can also feel isolating. He’s grateful to be on stage, of course. But as Daltrey and Townshend wonder aloud about the end of The Who, they also see how their “jobs” now overshadow the rest of their lives.

“It can be lonely,” Townshend admitted. “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?”

Decades into an undeniably lucrative career, Townshend can finally afford to embrace such seeming contradictions: exhaustion and gratitude. “It’s a brand rather than a band,” he explained in the interview. “Roger and I have a duty to the music and the history. The Who [still] sells records, and 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 iconic late drummer Keith Moon and bassist John Entwistle, who died in 1978, are inescapable parts of the band’s history, Townshend knows. But his self-effacing asides also belie what is certain to be final performances from the band’s two surviving members. Tellingly, Townshend also noted that the work onstage has inspired him to reflect on the division between the self as artist or “celebrity” and the “actual personal work” that he and Daltrey used to do before being eclipsed by The Who. “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 said. “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.”

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After 50 years and counting, neither Daltrey nor Townshend has grown entirely inured to the thrill of anticipation before taking the stage. For the Who’s current trek, both say they still feel the pleasure of rehearsing rarely played songs from the group’s extensive catalog and working on unusual setlist choices.

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Though equally candid about the price of performance and uncertain about the future, Roger Daltrey has his own evolving perspective on life with The Who. While the band was in London earlier this year to play a gig for Teenage Cancer Trust, he used the opportunity to give a progress report to fans about his health, noting how the work of late-career touring has kept him limping along. “Fortunately, I still have my voice, because then I’ll have a full Tommy,” Daltrey said to the crowd, referencing the role he originated in The Who’s celebrated 1969 rock opera. From there, Daltrey quoted the opera’s famous refrain. “Deaf, dumb, and blind kid,” he declared, to an explosion of applause.

In an interview with The Times earlier this month, Daltrey elaborated. The singer also let slip that the group is moving past the point where there will be future Who tours. “This is certainly the last time you will see us on tour,” he said. “It’s grueling.”

Daltrey noted in the interview that he and Townshend were used to performing Who songs for three hours straight six times a week, a punishing tour schedule during the band’s first two decades. “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,” Daltrey said. “But now I’m 80, it’s a lot more work.”

If this is indeed the end of an era, Daltrey seemed less sure as to the prospects for The Who one-offs in the future. “As to whether we’ll play [one-off] concerts again, I don’t know. The Who to me is very perplexing,” Daltrey admitted. “It’s not like being in a normal band where you have a family history and do things that seem very predictable.”

Fans will likely have to wait and see, but for now, they can catch Townshend and Daltrey at each of the tour’s 17 dates across North America, some of them in combination with orchestras. As for Daltrey, his voice is “still as good as ever.”