Behind Blue Eyes

Two songs bolted together, and the seam is the point. It opens a cappella — Roger Daltrey singing alone, then joined by Townshend and Entwistle in a close, almost churchly harmony that sounds nothing like the band that would detonate ninety seconds later. The confession is quiet and unnervingly plain: no one knows what it's like to be the bad man, the sad man, to have your dreams turn to nightmares and your vices go unnoticed. Then the band arrives and the same narrator's restraint snaps into a demand — hit me, throw me, put your fingers through the cracks — before subsiding back into the hymn. Townshend wrote it as a villain's prayer for the abandoned Lifehouse project, words meant for a character named Jumbo, which explains why the self-pity is written with such clear eyes: it's a portrait, not a diary. Daltrey's performance sells both halves, tender without softening and violent without shouting. Its long afterlife as the go-to song for anyone who feels misunderstood slightly obscures how carefully made it is. Best heard with headphones and full attention to the vocal blend in the opening — it's the most delicate thing on Who's Next, hiding in plain sight.