genre rock

Benmont Tench says that “life” is the reason for the 11-year gap between his two solo albums.
With The Melancholy Season out Friday (March 7), the keyboardist says that a heavy work load with both Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Mudcrutch kept him busy during the interim (both groups toured and released what turned out to be their final albums in the period). A nearly decade-long battle with oral cancer (which included jaw reconstruction during 2023), Petty’s death in 2017, and the birth of Tench’s first daughter, Catherine, shortly after that — not to mention the pandemic — also contributed to the gap between works.

“Life got in the way of making another record,” Tench, 71, tells Billboard via Zoom from his home in Los Feliz, Calif. Already an A-list session player, he also filled some of the time after Petty’s passing playing for Ringo Starr, Jenny Lewis, Chris Stapleton, the Who and the Rolling Stones and was recently part of the Life Is a Carnival all-star tribute tour to The Band. “I would love to have made it sooner,” he says of The Melancholy Season. But, with the benefit of some perspective, he’s glad he didn’t.

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“I made a better record because I didn’t make it right away,” explains Tench, who had much of album’s songs written by, he estimates, the end of 2018 and recorded it with producer Jonathan Wilson (Dawes, Father John Misty, Margo Price) during 2020 and 2021. Unlike 2014’s Glyn Johns-produced You Should Be So Lucky, which was recorded in just 13 days, Tench lived with The Melancholy Season — to its benefit, he feels.

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“I kept fine-tuning and thinking, ‘oh no, no, no, that’s all wrong. It should be this,’” he explains. “It was great to have that opportunity. I could sit with the imagery in some songs and I could check to make sure that I said things the way I wanted do.”

The Melancholy Season’s 13 songs — whether the elegiac title track or the stripped-down “Under the Starlight,” the striding, boogie-styled “Rattle” or the more dramatically arranged “Pledge” and “The Drivin’ Man” — all share a spare and spacious sensibility. The songs are played mostly by Tench, Wilson on guitars and drums and Sebastian Steinberg on bass, with appearances by Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith and Jenny O and, on the closing track “Dallas,” Nickel Creek’s Sara Watkins, who was part of the musical community at Los Angeles’ Largo that Tench has frequented.

“I like records with a lot of space,” says Tench, citing a lesson he learned from original Heartbreakers producer Denny Cordell while making the band’s first two albums during the ‘70s. “Denny said early on that a record is louder if it has fewer instruments. A song like ‘Breakdown’ has more layers than you would think, but the essence of the song is the guitar riff and the Wurlitzer (piano) riff. There are other layers, but there’s a lot of room in ‘Breakdown.’” Additionally, Tench says he was “profoundly affected” by Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band albums. “Each of those is, for the most part, three musicians and three instruments,” Tench explains. “They’re just a songwriter with the instruments he wrote the songs on, plus bass and drums, and they are complete.

“I think it’s great if you have a wall of sound and you do it well. There are fantastic records that use a lot of instruments; the Beatles did a lot of those. There’s Motown, of course. There’s what Brian (Wilson) did, what Phil Spector did… All of these things, and they’re wonderful. But there’s also a way to use fewer instruments and be just as effective. That’s what we did on this record; there were some songs we cut with more (instrumentation) and pulled them back to make (the songs) better.”

Tench dipped into his deeper past for a couple tracks, too. “Wobbles” was an instrumental on You Should Be So Lucky, which Tench sub-titled “Trio with Vocal Arrangement” for the new album. “Under the Starlight,” meanwhile, dates back a good 20 years to a Nashville songwriting session with Don Henry and was never released.

“I dug it and we set it aside and I went home, and years went by and I didn’t think about it,” Tench says. “And then maybe eight years ago I went, ‘What about “Under the Starlight”?’ And I didn’t want to bother Don, so I thought, ‘Lemme see if some words come up.’ I had a whisper of an inkling of what I wanted to talk about that I understood better ’cause I’ve lived a lot longer and been through a lot more and began to see how to do it.

“I got in touch with Don Henry and said, ‘Hey, I finished that song we started.’ He said, ‘That’s nice, but what do you mean finished? We finished it that day.’ (laughs) We wrote the complete song and I spaced out somehow. He sent me the lyrics that we’d originally finished and they were really good, but they made a different point. I hope somebody records it that, way, too.”

The Melancholy Season is being released by Dark Horse Records, the label the late George Harrison started in 1974 and that’s being continued by his widow, Olivia, and son Dhani. “It means a hell of a lot,” notes Tench, a teenage Beatles fan who met Harrison (who worked with Petty in the Traveling Wilburys) several times. “It’s got his vibe and it’s got their vibe, which is like amplifying George’s vibe. For them to believe in this record and want to put it out means quite a lot to me. I’ve had a blessed life in a million ways — and I intend to keep it going.”

That includes on the road as well. Tench previewed The Melancholy Season during a solo residency at the Cafe Carlyle in New York last month, and he has West Coast dates starting March 12. He hopes to hit more of the country as well.

“It’ll be smaller venues because it’s just me with a piano, and I think that the songs come across best that way,” Tench says. “For me, I don’t really ‘get’ it until I see somebody do it live, so I want to drag it around, and if anybody shows up out of curiosity or because they like what I do, or because they like the Heartbreakers, it’ll give them a chance to see what they think up close.”

Tench has “a few sketches” of other songs he’s been working on but isn’t yet focusing on a next album. It’s quite likely his playing will show up on another Petty and Heartbreakers archival set, however, and Tench — who was part of Mudcrutch first, which then morphed into the Heartbreakers during 1976 — says he’s been pleased with how that musical legacy has been handled, primarily by Petty’s daughter Adria along with Ryan Ulyate and guitarist Mike Campbell.

“I’m very happy because I don’t think (Petty) would release so much of this,” says Tench, who’s read parts of Campbell’s book Heartbreaker: A Memoir, that’s coming out March 18 and is waiting for the audio version. “They still keep me in the loop but it’s mainly Adria and Ryan who are going through everything, and I love what they’re finding. Songs that I don’t remember but, ‘Oh, yeah, I loved that song. How come we left that off?’ It isn’t inferior stuff; it’s stuff that I think, if you like the band and wish you could’ve heard more, there’s more, and it’s good. And if you haven’t heard much of the band, it’s a good way to check it out. I think they’re doing a great job.”

Tench’s upcoming concert itinerary includes:

March 12—Los Angeles, CA—Largo

March 19—Los Angeles, CA—Largo

April 2—Ojai, CA—Ojai Playhouse

April 4—Santa Cruz, CA—Kuumbwa

April 5—San Francisco, CA—The Independent

April 8—Seattle, WA—Triple Door

April 9—Portland, OR—Old Church

April 11—Grass Valley, CA—Center for the Arts

April 12—Sonoma, CA—Sebastiani Theatre