Pete Townshend: Not writing songs for new Who album

Pete Townshend spoke about the Who's upcoming plans for 2008, and said he's not writing or producing the band's upcoming album.

Townshend posted on the band's official website thewho.com, "I have requested that our manager... look at a winter Pacific tour, and prior to that we are considering some webcast ideas and a TV thing for VH1... Our recording schedule has been pushed back to the middle of September, or later. For once this has nothing to do with my songwriting output, as we are not recording my songs, nor am I producing the record. Now you skeptics... can see what happens when the Who are completely freed from the evil clutches of Pete Townshend."

The new Who album is expected to be released in 2009, and both Townshend and Roger Daltrey have recently said that Townshend had been busy writing material for the album.

T-Bone Burnett, who most recently produced Robert Plant and Alison Krauss' Grammy Award-winning album Raising Sand, has signed on to produce the Who's followup to 2006's Endless Wire.

In the late 1980s Townshend said that he wanted to enlist the help of outside songwriters such as Ray Davies and Bruce Springsteen to write material for a new Who album. Townshend went as far as approaching Paul McCartney, who didn't take Townshend seriously.

Townshend has toyed with the idea of streaming full live concerts and webcasts over the Internet. He says that ultimately he'd like to push his work further using the world wide web: [ Click to listen if you have a backstage pass] "What I'm looking forward to is using the Internet live as a music medium. And live events on the Internet. There's a sense really that the music industry is changing so fast that the only thing we're certain of is if we put tickets on sale and they sell."
Submit the above story to:

Del.icio.us   Digg   reddit   StumbleUpon   Facebook