The 1980 song Pete Townshend called his greatest work: “This is one of the best songs I’ve ever written”
Anyone like Pete Townshend was usually operating on a higher level than most pop songwriters.
He had grown up looking at the more artsy side of music, so when The Who began, his role as the chief songwriter was to make tunes that had a bit more to go on than a bunch of cheap tunes about love all the time. He wanted to set a scene every single time he made an album, but sometimes the biggest tunes that he ever created are the ones that cut through all of the bullshit and lay everything out as clear as day.
Because as much as Townshend didn’t want to admit it, he was a stellar songwriter when it came to power pop. A lot of the biggest names in that genre may not have had the most substance of any other rock and roll band, but long before he started making tunes like ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ and ‘Baba O’Riley’, hearing him make tracks like ‘So Sad About Us’ hit about as hard as any other mindless love song that everyone else was making.
But when you’ve scaled the heights of rock opera, where the hell are you supposed to go next? Sure, Townshend could make a great operetta out of a couple guitar chords if he wanted to, but it had to mean something a bit more to him than just a bunch of mindless lyrics. That meant that most party songs were off the table, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t dissect the concept of romance a little bit more.
‘Behind Blue Eyes’ has always been misconstrued as Roger Daltrey grappling with his own anger issues, but when Townshend sings the song, it’s about the oppression of love. He didn’t know how to express himself in that way every time he made a new record, and if he had the chance to make a handful of tunes that could have an effect on people, he was going to at least try to sort out some of his own problems along the way.
And after hitting a rough patch in his marriage, Townshend was starting to wonder whether his wife even loved him that much anymore. Anyone would have been crushed if they heard that their other half only loved them a little bit, but after getting some advice about his love life, he felt that the best way to write down his feelings was to give his wife the kind of songs that said everything he needed to say.
‘Let My Love Open the Door’ was the first step towards that, but ‘A Little is Enough’ was the moment where he felt like he truly hit on something powerful, saying, “I wrote a song called ‘A Little is Enough’ and recorded it using the same system as I’d used on ‘Let My Love Open the Door’. Although I’d always thought my love songs were terrible, I think this is one of the best songs I’ve ever written.”
Sure, the song isn’t the kind of mind-blowing revelation that most people were getting from Townshend at the time, but it never was supposed to be. Townshend firmly believed that he needed to keep things simple so that the audience would come with him on every musical journey, and by going back to the concept of love, Townshend hit on a profound sense of truth that even a little bit of love can go a long way.
The Beatles might have exhausted the topic to the point where they practically own the love song formula, but Townshend was out to prove that there was always more ground to be covered. He could still make people see the version of himself that he felt inside, and that made him feel like all of those days slogging away with The Who were all worth it whenever he got back in the studio.
