Who's Next

Who's Next is an album by The Who. It was released on August 2, 1971 in the United States and August 25, 1971 in the United Kingdom.

After Lifehouse

The album had its roots in the flotsam of the disastrous Lifehouse project, which Who bandleader Pete Townshend has variously described as intended to be a futuristic rock opera, a live-recorded concept album and as the music for as a scripted film project. The project proved to be intractable on several levels and caused stress within the band as well as a major falling out between Townshend and The Who's producer Kit Lambert. Years later, in the liner notes to the remastered Who's Next CD, Townshend wrote that the failure of the project led him to the verge of a suicidal nervous breakdown.

Related Topics:
Lifehouse - Pete Townshend - Rock opera - Kit Lambert - Remastered

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After giving up on the recording some of the Lifehouse tracks in New York, The Who went back into the studio with new producer Glyn Johns and started over. Although the Lifehouse concept was abandoned, scraps of the project remained present in the final album. The introductory line to "Pure and Easy" ? which Townshend has described as "the central pivot of Lifehouse" ? shows up in the closing bars of "The Song is Over". An early concept for Lifehouse -- feeding personal data from audience members into the controller of an early analog synthesizer to create musical tracks -- was recycled as Townshend used his own vital statistics as random input to generate a backing track on "Baba O'Riley". A primary result of the abandonment of the original project, however, was a newfound freedom: the very absence of an overriding musical theme or storyline (which had been the basis of previous Who projects) allowed the band to concentrate on maximizing the impact of individual tracks.

Related Topics:
Glyn Johns - Synthesizer - Baba O'Riley

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