Empty Glass by Pete Townshend

Empty Glass, released by Atco on 21 April 1980, is Pete Townshend's third solo album but the first one built entirely from his own new songs, and he produced it himself. Away from the Who, where he'd long been the principal songwriter, Townshend sounds like a man emptying his pockets onto the table: the record wrestles with drink, drugs, a marriage under strain and friends he had lost, above all Keith Moon, the Who's drummer, who had died in 1978.

For all that, it doesn't wallow. "Rough Boys" and "A Little Is Enough" went out as singles, and "Let My Love Open the Door", a devotional love song with a bright, bouncing lilt, climbed into the US top 10. It's confession with a backbeat, and it hits all the harder for being so plain-spoken.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.