Townshend's first widely released solo album, Who Came First, features a couple of stellar Lifehouse castoffs, "Pure & Easy" and "Nothing Is Everything" (which had also recently been released by the Who as "Let's See Action") as well as a cluster of songs relating to Townshend's la... 

 Townshend and Lane are co-credited with the subdued Rough Mix, which has the stink of "side project" all over it, despite a couple of pleasant throwaways (try "My Baby Gives It Away").  

 Empty Glass is a painful but occasionally bracing record: an evocation of crushing spiritual crisis whose one moment of relief, a synth-pop quickie called "Let My Love Open the Door," became Townshend's biggest solo hit. "Rough Boys," dedicated to Townshend's daughters and the Sex Pisto... 

 The title of All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes signals its incoherent bombast. It came out only a few months before the Who's It's Hard, but these songs wouldn't have worked with Roger Daltrey singing them–prolix, emotionally stunted and self-pitying, they don't really ... 

 A lot of Townshend's most rewarding solo recordings, unsurprisingly, are the ones where he's not straining so hard to prove his genius. His home demos are bootleggers' favorites; the first double-LP collection of them to see official release, Scoop, is a total delight, the sound of... 

 White City, subtitled "A Novel”–lest anybody confuse it with a mere collection of songs–has another ill-defined concept (it seems to be about a British council estate), but as a mere collection of songs it's got its moments: the indignant blues "Secondhand Love," the weird big-beat bop... 

 White City, subtitled "A Novel”–lest anybody confuse it with a mere collection of songs–has another ill-defined concept (it seems to be about a British council estate), but as a mere collection of songs it's got its moments: the indignant blues "Secondhand Love," the weird big-beat bop... 

 Scoop worked out so nicely that it's been followed by Another Scoop (almost as good, with more rough versions of early and late Who singles, plus a couple of orchestral curiosities like "Football Fugue") and Scoop 3 (on which diminishing returns start to set in, featuring instrumentals of mo... 

 Having not quite conquered the realms of opera and novel, Townshend fell on his legendary nose with his "musical," The Iron Man. Based on a Ted Hughes story, it was a promising idea gone disastrously wrong. Townshend's songs are tedious, the production is an instant headache, and guest vocal... 

 Psychoderelict is even worse, a brittle, slapdash radio-drama-plus-songs about an aging rock star who's still obsessed with a project he failed to realize decades earlier (do you get it? huh? ) and is betrayed by an evil journalist (take that!). When it flopped, it was re-released without sp... 

 In 2000, Townshend finally got Lifehouse out of his system with Lifehouse Chronicles, a six-CD box collecting old and new versions of its associated songs, a two-hour radio play, and some classical and quasi-classical music. That was boiled down to the single-disc Lifehouse Elements, which is a m... 

 Scoop worked out so nicely that it's been followed by Another Scoop (almost as good, with more rough versions of early and late Who singles, plus a couple of orchestral curiosities like "Football Fugue") and Scoop 3 (on which diminishing returns start to set in, featuring instrumentals of mo... 

 A career as spotty but as intermittently delightful as Townshend's is badly in need of a well-curated greatest-hits, and the two-disc Gold isn't it–it skips over the Scoop series, Lifehouse Chronicles and the various live recordings he's released over the years, and its scrambled...