Benmont Tench, in addition to being a founding member of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, has amassed innumerable credits as a session player and written hit songs for other artists.
His work has become an often subtle but always transformative element of whatever music he plays.
Throughout the spring, he’s focusing on performing live dates behind his new album “The Melancholy Season,” including a performance Tuesday, May 20, at The Church Studio in Tulsa.
The famed venue, once the creative hub of Leon Russell, has reopened in recent years and become a functioning studio once more as well as a performance space. It’s also a place that holds special significance in Tench’s personal history and in the rise of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, though that band didn’t yet exist when some of the members wandered into Tulsa in the 1970s.
At the time, Petty, Tench and guitarist Mike Campbell were members of the formidable Gainesville, Florida, band Mudcrutch. They’d attracted the attention of London Records in Los Angeles and were about to make their way there when record producer Denny Cordell, who’d formed Shelter Records with Russell, called.
Tulsa, Cordell said, wouldn’t be too far off the band’s route to California. Why don’t they stop off, spend some time and see if magic struck? If it did, Cordell could sign them and help them realize their dreams. Besides, London Records only wanted a single; Cordell would let them make an album.
“I’d never been anywhere except Central America and the Eastern seaboard and the Northeast corridor,” says Tench, who attended the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in his youth, “we knew about Tulsa and Shelter Records because we loved Leon Russell and JJ Cale.”
The band members fell in love with The Church and found Cordell to be a persuasive figure who also handed them a sizeable chunk of cash as they moved on to California, the London deal by then a memory.
Cordell also sent the group back to The Church to spend some all-important time in the studio.
“We were a really good live band,” recalls Tench, “but we’d get into the studio, put the headphones on, and we weren’t really very good at all. To have access to a really good studio and just play and play and play [helped]. I have wonderful memories of that studio. I can’t wait to go back.”
Those interested in the event at The Church Studio can learn more at the venue’s website or through Tench’s official website.
He released “The Melancholy Season” in March, just a sliver over a decade since his first solo effort, “You Should Be So Lucky.” Produced by Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Margo Price, Billy Strings) and featuring performances by Taylor Goldsmith (Dawes), Sara Watkins (Nickel Creek), singer/songwriter Jenny O. and Sebastian Steinberg (Fiona Apple, Iron and Wine, Soul Coughing), the album further affirms Tench’s prodigious gifts as a songwriter.
The record finds Tench working in the smallest ensembles, frequently groups of two or three players are present, their performances rendered without ornamentation and most often seeming like a musical conversation in which Tench’s voice and lyrics come to the fore, more powerfully conveying the emotional truths that arise across the collection. “The Melancholy Season” is often more remarkable for the sounds that are left out as the ensembles on each tune gain their power from subtraction.
Despite the title the album isn’t enveloped by melancholy. Instead, if there is a prevailing theme, perhaps it’s acceptance or, more simply, recognition, Tench often acknowledging things not as they should be but rather as they are. If there are intimations of mortality they are presented with the recognition that this is inevitable; if there are lines and verses about love, they are not an idealized version of the emotion but instead clear-eyed realizations about loves imperfect nature.
Tench has said that he intended to begin working on a follow-up to “You Should Be So Lucky” somewhere around 2019, just a few years after the death of his close friend and nearly lifelong bandmate Petty. But the veteran keyboardist was still a new father, and he decided to focus instead on his family.
Then came the pandemic and then Tench’s mouth cancer reemerged, resulting in major surgery to his jaw and a battery of treatments. But no doubt, when the record finally arrived, it entered the world at exactly the moment it needed to be there.
Tench recently discussed the making of “The Melancholy Season,” his approach to lyrics and his love of literature with KMUW.
The following interview has been edited for length and for clarity.
There’s a sense of intimacy to “The Melancholy Season.” I feel as though I’m in the room with the musicians.
That’s always the idea. I like some records that have been built up, piece-by-piece. Prince made a lot of records that way. McCartney’s first solo records, Emitt Rhodes, some of Todd Rundgren’s records. A lot of people make great records that way but for me, I prefer to have it as live as possible so that everybody plays off each other and so that it can be spontaneous. If I suddenly decide, “Oh, I want to sing this next line really quietly,” I don’t have to plan ahead. With sensitive players, they’re paying attention. They’ll rise and fall with you, they’ll pick up the tempo, slow down the tempo with you. That was really important.
I like it like that. My favorite records were almost all made like that. Ray Charles, The Beatles, Aretha, a lot of The Who stuff, Louis Armstrong. He didn’t have a click track. He didn’t correct his vocal pitch in Pro Tools. He didn’t need to. Also, I love the sound of tape. Tape lends itself especially well to [those times when] you’re using a small ensemble. It captures the warmth and the air, and if you’re on tape you can’t try endless takes of this, that or the other. You have to play it right. You can’t say, “Well, I’ll try a thousand overdubs and see what works.” You have to figure it out and I find that that is really, really good for the creative process and also for the performance.
I wonder if having Jonathan Wilson and Taylor Goldsmith who are such wonderful writers themselves helped.
Everybody on the record is a wonderful songwriter. Sebastian Steinberg is a wonderful songwriter. I’ve known him for a long time so I get to hear a lot of his stuff. Sara Watkins, who sang some harmony, is a great songwriter and Jenny O, who played some wonderful guitar and sang a lot of harmony and background vocals is a terrific songwriter. One of my favorites. They’re all writers. It’s great when you make a record with a bunch of writers especially if they’re into the same kind of thing that you are.
It's always a privilege to play with people you admire and I got to. The Heartbreakers was the same way. Everybody in The Heartbreakers wrote. Stan [Lynch], Mike [Campbell], me, Ron [Blair], Tom, obviously. Everybody wrote. It always pays off. It’s fun.
I want to talk specifically about some of the lyric writing. I discovered, through listening to this album, what a really wonderful lyricist you are and I think of “Under The Starlight”:
"And when comes the hour
The terrible hour
The wonderful hour
That comes to us all
May I wake from my slumber
And rise without terror
To stand at the gateway
That once was a wall"
Thank you, man.
That’s the kind of thing that takes a lifetime to write.
It did take my lifetime. I wrote the first third of the song with Don Henry in Nashville. He’s a great songwriter, Don Henry. I thought for years that we never finished it, so I wrote the last couple verses. The chorus, we had already written together. After I wrote that verse, I called Don and said, “Hey, I wrote some words to finish the song. I hope you like ‘em.” He said, “What are you talking about? We finished the song the day that we started it.” [Laughs.] I thought, “Uh-oh!”
The words we did then were great but this, like I said, I did wait a lifetime to write that song and these songs. I completed that song when I was probably 64 and I’m 71 now, so that’s a lifetime. [Laughs.] But thank you so much.
If you don’t know Donald Henry’s work, I suggest you look it up. He’s a great guy and a great songwriter. Cool singer too.
I have heard that you are a voracious reader and I would imagine that that probably helps with the lyrical process, understanding the structure of language, images.
I love language. I was a voracious reader and then I think devices came along and triggered my ADHD. These days I do read and I’m more of a voracious listener. I can absorb books while I’m driving, which in Los Angeles, where I live, you do a lot of. Late at night I can close my eyes and get involved [in a story] and also buy an actual copy of the book so that I can read it.
I made a really good friend about 20 years ago who knows a lot about poetry. I’ve always loved poetry. She is forever posting great poems or telling me about great poets or sending me a great poem. That is … it fills my heart. I love words and I love wordplay. But I want it to say something. Since I had surgery on my mouth, [I’ve been] looking for diction exercises. I haven’t done it at all today. I haven’t had time. But one of them is Gilbert and Sullivan’s “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” [from “The Pirates of Penzance”]. It’s wonderful! Rhyme after rhyme after rhyme. But it’s not just good, silly fun wordplay, it also makes the point that he is the very model: “I am the model of a modern Major-General/I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral,” and on and on and on. It is wonderful. [Laughs.] There’s something about “About binomial theorem I am teem with a lot o’ news/dah dah dah about the square of the hypotenuse.”
That kind of thing is wonderful but they’re getting to a point about this guy’s personality. When you write lyrics, even if they’re silly, you want to convey something. That’s what I’m after. If I listen to music, I get more acquainted with and I have more access to the language of music. If I read Shakespeare [or] Raymond Chandler and if I listen to Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, or Mick and Keith … Mick Jagger and Keith Richards who are great songwriters and don’t get the credit for it because they’re the Rolling Stones and it kind of overshadows [everything]. But, hey, they became the Rolling Stones not just because of their charisma but because they write great songs.
If you familiarize yourself with all of that and some Tennessee Williams and Wisława Szymborska’s poems and Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Shelley, Keats, Shakespeare, the king of ‘em all y’all …. It feeds my soul. It also gives me access to another way to express something because nowadays we all just say, “That’s really awesome!” or “That’s fantastic!” I do it myself. But there are much better ways to express it. I can’t think of any right now.
[Laughs.]
I’ve been reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of late. The Sherlock Holmes stories. What a wonderful writer. I mean that cat could write. They’re not just great stories about a clever detective. He’s a great writer, he’s a great wordsmith and he’s a great teller of tales. Mike Campbell, my compatriot, has an autobiography out [“Heartbreaker: A Memoir”] and it opens with a paraphrase of the opening few lines of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” If you aren’t educated and you don’t read enough you’ll miss that and you’ll miss a good chance to laugh out loud.
Briefly: I’ve read his book and the one thing that really came across to me was how much all of you in The Heartbreakers love each other.
Oh yeah. I’m several chapters in and my wife and my daughter were here [on tour with me] for the first several days but now they’ve gone home. So I will doubtless be going, “What can I do now?” I’ll be able to dive into Mike’s book and finish it. I loved what I’ve read so far.
Is there part of you that wants to do poetry or prose writing in the future?
I don’t want to do prose. I don’t think I qualify as a poet. I think you really need to aim to be a poet and a poet is not the same as a lyricist. Dylan says over and over again that he’s not a poet. He’s not. He is in a very special and certain way but [in terms of writing] a book of poems, he’s not. But he’s an extraordinary lyricist. That’s what I like to aim at.
I’m glad you noticed that last verse to “Under The Starlight.” It took me a long time to get just the right lines. Sometimes songs come really quickly and sometimes they take a long time. And to find exactly the right lines—and I’m still not certain I did—really took me years of singing this that and the other and trying to find out what it was. The title song, “The Melancholy Season” started kind of as a poem, like a series of images and notions that I wrote out longhand on my phone or something. Then, I decided, eventually, to shape it into a song and I changed it drastically and I left out some of my favorite lines because they didn’t work with the song. So it was kind of a poem.
I got to play at a Patti Smith tribute concert at Carnegie Hall. She’s a wonderful poet. I read her poetry before she was performing with music. I read her poetry, I read her writing because she was published in “Creem” magazine, maybe in “Rolling Stone.” Her stuff had popped up, I had been able to find it. It had surfaced on my radar.
Jim Jarmusch, the filmmaker, at that tribute, read a poem of hers that was, of course, a knockout and then he read a poem by Arthur Rimbaud called “Departure” and it was great. He said, “I wanted to read this because Rimbaud wrote it for Patti just got their timelines crossed.” [Laughs.] Rimbaud’s been gone a long time. He said, “Actually, Rimbaud texted me this English translation this morning.” [Laughs.]
The poem, it’s very brief. Look it up. It’s called “Departure.” If you see and it touches you, that’s why I love poetry. But lyric writing is different.
It’s wonderful because you match the lyric to the music. The song “The Melancholy Season” had different music. I played it for my wife and she said, “It’s beautiful but the music’s all wrong for it.” I was all, “How dare you? What do you mean?” I listened and she was right, which she usually is, and I reshaped the music to fit the mood of the lyric and it came out much better. There are so many beautiful things about songwriting. To make a lyric that is singable? It’s really something when you find a lyric that’s easy to sing, physically and to let the mood of the lyric match the mood of the music or deliberately do it the other way around. Like some of The Beatles lyrics, which are sad, are matched to great, upbeat rockin’ music. They knew what they were doing.
I’m glad you noticed. That means a lot to me.
