'The Seeker' was put to excellent use in the 1999 film American Beauty. Other notable Who-related versions include the 1970 recording on The BBC Sessions - released in 2000 - and Pete Townshend's solo demo on 1972's Who Came First. First released as a single in 1970, 'The Seeker' was included on the excellent compilation of Who singles, Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy. With rich and clever lines like 'I've got values but I don't know how or why,' Townshend manages to cover an extremely serious topic in three minutes and 25 seconds. 'The Seeker' is sort of a spiritual cousin of Eddie Cochran's 'Summertime Blues' in form and lyric, a song the Who covered often. Taking the form of a 12-bar blues merged with pop song, 'The Seeker' is Townshend's look inward, an autobiographical piece about his spiritual quest from the Christianity in which he was raised to the musical answers of Bob Dylan and the Beatles to Timothy Leary - all of whom are mentioned by name and come up empty for Townshend - and finally to his guru, Meher Baba, a silent Indian spiritual leader who was immortalized in Townshend's song 'Baba O'Reilly.' One could be forgiven to think that this all sounds ponderous, but really, the lyrics are lighthearted and a little irreverent and the Who rock it out. The satisfying sound of Pete Townshend heavily strumming a bluesy riff on a Rickenbacker six-string through a Vox AC-30 amplifier begins this perfect power pop single - the kind of song that Townshend wrote before the Who started to spread out into the album format.

The seeker the who lyrics