Benmont Tench, Still a Heartbreaker, Is Carrying on Solo

New York Times

27-02-2025

Ninety pounds, the approximate weight of a Farfisa organ, nearly kept Benmont Tench from his destiny.
It was late 1971, and Tench, a native of Gainesville, Fla., was home from college for Christmas. His favorite local band, Mudcrutch, was playing a five-set-a-night residency at a topless bar called Dub's, and they'd finally invited him to join them onstage. He started to load his gear into his mother's station wagon, hoisted his Fender amp onto the tailgate and then went to grab his organ.
'I picked this thing up and it was so damn heavy,' Tench recalled. For a moment, he considered blowing the whole thing off. Instead, he heaved the Farfisa into the car. That night, he played with Tom Petty and Mike Campbell for the first time, forging a musical bond and forming the nucleus of what would eventually become the Heartbreakers. 'But it almost didn't happen,' Tench said in a recent interview, shaking his head at the memory. 'I mean, it was that close.'
More than half a century later, the Heartbreakers themselves are a memory: The group ended abruptly after Petty's death in 2017 from an accidental drug overdose. But Tench, 71, continues to make music. His second solo album, an elegiac collection of songs titled 'The Melancholy Season,' will be released on March 7.
The album follows a 10-year period that included a second marriage for Tench, to the writer Alice Carbone, the birth of his first child and the loss of Petty, his longtime friend and band leader.
'Tom died, and our daughter was born three months later,' said Tench, sitting in the living room of his home in the Los Feliz neighborhood. It was a late winter afternoon, and the fine-boned, soft-spoken Tench — his neck wrapped in a blue silk ascot, his head covered by a white Borsalino — was sipping tea as sunlight passed through a large picture window and onto the lid of a 1928 Mason & Hamlin piano.
'The band, the main focus of my life since I was 19 years old, was gone,' he said. 'Losing Tom was a terrible event that blew everything up. But I was damned if I wasn't going to make another record.'
Tench's former bandmate Campbell, now fronting his own group the Dirty Knobs, understands his dilemma. 'The Heartbreakers had intentions of making more records, playing more shows, we would've gone on forever,' he said in a phone interview. 'Even now, the grief is still there — but I have to keep making music, because that's my lifeblood, and it's the same with Ben. This is a whole new part of our lives that we didn't choose.'
More recently, Tench has faced serious health issues. In 2023, he learned that his mouth cancer — the disease he had been dealing with for more than a decade — had spread to his jaw. 'The doctors took half my jaw out,' he said, 'took a piece from my leg, muscle and bone to rebuild it.'
A series of surgeries and treatments followed into 2024, delaying the release of 'The Melancholy Season.' 'I've been letting everything heal, doing a few therapeutic exercises and trying to learn to speak more clearly, and to sing again,' Tench continued, dabbing at his mouth with a handkerchief.
'It's funny, if I go to the Heartbreakers clubhouse, our old rehearsal space, after an hour or so at the piano singing, my pronunciation is much better. It just goes to show that, in my life, the answer to everything is to play.'
ON A WALL in Tench's stylish 1920s Tudor, there's a large framed photograph: a post-show snapshot of a joyous Petty and the Heartbreakers, after their final gig — a sold-out concert at the Hollywood Bowl in September 2017 that capped the band's 40th anniversary tour.
The group was driven by the force of Petty's personality and songs, but it was the Heartbreakers' interplay that elevated the music and the band's fortunes. Campbell and Tench, in particular, could turn Petty's raw melodies and chord progressions into soulful symphonies.
'That was the beauty of Ben and I,' Campbell said. 'Also, Ben had a technical musical knowledge that Tom and I didn't have. He could fill the space between us.'
After Petty's death, Tench sought refuge in his family and in the studio, working on albums for friends like Ringo Starr and Jenny Lewis. Though he's now revered as one of rock's greatest and most prolific session musicians, for the first five years of the Heartbreakers, Petty barred him from doing any outside recording. 'It was the law for the whole band,' Tench said. 'Tom felt like the Heartbreakers had a specific sound, and he didn't want other people's records sounding like us.'
It wasn't until 1981, when Jimmy Iovine, who was then the Heartbreakers' producer, brought Tench into a recording session for Bob Dylan's 'Shot of Love,' that his studio career began to take off. Tench began writing and recording with Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks, helping kick-start her solo career with 'Bella Donna.' And Petty loosened his no-session rule: 'Tom said if we were going to do sessions, they had to be a real high standard,' Tench said and chuckled. 'Well, you can't get much higher than Bob or Stevie.'
Tench's instinctively tasteful playing colored radio hits and cult albums alike. The Tench touch could be felt in the sparkling harpsichord on Elvis Costello's 'Veronica,' the pulsing organ in Alanis Morissette's 'You Ougtha Know,' and on records by Don Henley, Cher, Elton John, X, Ramones and the Replacements.
'He was the first famous musician, and hero, that we got to meet and jam with when Haim was just playing around L.A. to 10 people,' Danielle Haim said. (Tench played on the group's 2013 debut.) 'He's so good at slithering around all of the other instruments, but standing out on his own.'
Tench tends to defer to songwriters. 'It's really all about the songs,' he insisted. 'If you play the organ on 'Refugee,' someone says, 'Hey, that's a great record, let's get that guy!' I'm not being falsely humble. I like the way I play. I do. Especially if I'm cast right.'
The producer Don Was first cast him on Bonnie Raitt's 1991 album 'Luck of the Draw' — where Tench added a halting Hammond organ to 'I Can't Make You Love Me' — and continued to use him on records by the Rolling Stones, Willie Nelson and Brian Wilson. 'Benmont has a magical sense of where to play,' Was said in an interview. 'He always supports the narrative and complements it but doesn't hinder the singer's ability to communicate. That's a rare thing. Really, it's a kind of genius.'
Ironically, Tench was shut out from the session for Petty's 1989 solo album, 'Full Moon Fever.' The frontman decided to record without the Heartbreakers at the last minute, and Tench heard the news secondhand. 'It triggered my possessiveness about the band,' he said. 'But I'd been playing on all these different records with other people, and Tom needed the chance to do that, too.'
By the late '80s, Tench had dug himself into a deep hole of alcohol and drug addiction. 'I was bitching to a friend about not playing on Tom's record,' Tench remembered. 'And he said, 'Great, it'll take him at least six weeks to do that, which means you've got plenty of time to go to rehab.' I did go, and I got sober, which was a blessing. If I'd wound up working on that record, I'd probably be dead.'
Tench has experienced his share of rock 'n' roll loss. His closest friend in the Heartbreakers, the bassist Howie Epstein, died of a heroin overdose in 2003 at 47. Petty struggled with the drug himself in the '90s. 'Howie never came back from it. But Tom did come back,' said Tench, noting Petty's later physical struggles, including a broken hip, on the Heartbreakers' final tour. 'At the end, my belief is that he was just in too much pain, and just wanted to make it stop.'
For a moment, Tench was silent, as he listened to the sound of his young daughter laughing in the other room. 'I know how fortunate I am,' he said. 'That I didn't lose myself. That I'm sitting here now, that I have a wife and child. And that I get to keep making music.'
OVER THE YEARS, Tench quietly became a successful songwriter in his own right. The former Undertones frontman Feargal Sharkey had an international hit with Tench's 'You Little Thief,' while Rosanne Cash and Hal Ketchum scored country chart successes with his compositions. But Tench never pushed his material to Petty. 'Tom liked some of my songs, but it wasn't like, 'Let's cut one of yours,'' he said. 'Eventually, though, I had a collection of songs that I thought ought to be recorded and given a chance to be heard.'
Tench started singing his songs during regular appearances at the Los Angeles club Largo, and in 2013, the veteran British producer Glyn Johns offered to work on a solo album. Was, who also serves as president of the Blue Note label, signed Tench, putting out his debut, 'You Should Be So Lucky,' the following year. In 2019, Johns proposed work on a follow-up album in Nashville. 'But I couldn't leave, even for a couple weeks, with an infant daughter,' Tench said. 'And then the pandemic came along.'
In Los Angeles, Tench had gotten to know the multi-instrumentalist and producer Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Angel Olsen) from playing on a circuit of private jam sessions over the years. 'I needed a producer who understood songs,' Tench said. 'I needed a good drummer. And I wanted to work on analog tape.' Wilson checked all the boxes.
'I told him, if you need a drummer, you could call Ringo, dude,' Wilson said in an interview, laughing. 'I think because I'm from the South like Benmont, we have a natural rhythmic bond, an unspoken thing between us — we put it in the place where the other one wants to hear it.'
The sessions for 'The Melancholy Season' took place in late 2020 and early 2021 at Wilson's studio in Topanga Canyon. The core band — Tench, Wilson and the bassist Sebastian Steinberg — worked live without a net. 'There were absolutely no computers used on this record,' Wilson noted.
A few of Tench's Largo mates, like Nickel Creek's Sara Watkins, the guitarist and vocalist Jenny O. and Dawes' Taylor Goldsmith came in to add overdubs. But mostly, Tench sought to keep the record in the stripped-down vein of albums he'd long admired, like Dylan's 1967's LP 'John Wesley Harding.' 'What I like about my record is that it's not crowded, the music breathes,' Tench said. 'You can hear the words, you can hear the playing.'
Earlier this month, he returned to the stage, singing for the first time since his surgeries, during a residency at New York City's Café Carlyle. Though he plans to tour behind 'The Melancholy Season,' Tench suggested that his roadwork will be limited.
'I can't be away from Catherine very long,' he said of his daughter. 'The longest I've ever been away from her is a month and that was murder. I told her, 'Kid, I love you more than music and you don't know even what that means.' But it means everything.'