Empty Glass

Certain Songs #1527: Pete Townshend – “Empty Glass”

May 3, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Empty Glass
Year: 1980

I was going to call “Empty Glass” my favorite track on Empty Glass, but if that’s true, it’s just by the thinnest of margins over “Rough Boys,” and so it probably really is a tie. One thing is for sure, it’s the most musically exciting song on the album, probably because it has its roots as a song that was recorded for Who Are You.

That version was released as a bonus cut on a reissue of Who Are You, and you can hear why they left it off the album, as — if we’re honest, like many of the songs he was writing around that time — it just didn’t work with Keith Moon, who was the greatest drummer who ever lived, but most definitely had a lane, which was about five streets away from where “Empty Glass” was traveling.

Certain Songs #1526: Pete Townshend – “Let My Love Open The Door”

May 2, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Empty Glass
Year: 1980

I’m not going to lie: it took me awhile to come around on “Let My Love Open The Door.” After all, there were hardly any guitars on it, and it was an unexpectedly massive hit single, meaning it was all over the radio all over the time, while the far more deserving “Rough Boys” kinda got buried.

But at some point over the decades, “Let My Love Open The Door” wore down my resistance, and now I’m a total sucker for one of the most straightforward pop songs that Pete Townshend ever wrote. And I kinda consider it one of the rarest of birds: a non-danceable synth-pop song. (And indeed, because of The Who’s rhythm section, it wasn’t like Townshend wrote a lot of danceable songs, even though dancing was one of his lyrical motifs going back to when he declared he didn’t mind other guys dancing with his girl.)

Certain Songs #1525: Pete Townshend – “Rough Boys”

May 1, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Empty Glass
Year: 1980

In between the time that Keith Moon died in the summer of 1978 and the time Empty Glass was released in the spring of 1980, The Who had become my favorite band. Yeah, I loved The Clash and proselytized them to my classmates to little or no avail, but The Who were it for me.

They were also dead.

OK, well that’s harsh: technically, it was only Keith Moon who was dead, and in fact, part of what made The Who my favorite band at the time was the well-timed history-diggings of The Kids are Alright and Quadrophenia films, not to mention that they were soldiering on without Keith.