Benmont Tench, still a heart, continues solo

Ninety kilograms, the approximate weight of a plate organ, almost held Benmont Tench.

It was the end of 1971, and Tench, originally from Gainesville, Fla., Was home from the Christmas Faculty. His favorite local band, Mudcrutch, played a five-set residence per night at a topless bar, called Dub’s, and eventually invited him to join them on stage. He began to charge his equipment in the wagon of his mother’s station, raised the protective amplifier on the tailgate and then went to catch his organ.

“I raised this thing and it was so damn hard,” Tench recalled. For a moment, he thought he was blowing everything. Instead, he lifted the plate in the car. That night, he played with Tom Petty and Mike Campbell for the first time, forging a musical connection and forming the core of what will eventually become Heartbreakers. “But it almost didn’t happen,” Tench said in a recent interview, shaking her head to memory. “I mean, it was so close.”

For more than half a century later, the heart itself is a memory: the group ended suddenly after Petty’s death in 2017 from an accidental drug overdose. But Tench, 71, continues to make music. The second solo album, an elegant collection of songs entitled “The Melancholy Season”, will be released on March 7th.

The album follows a 10 -year period that included a second marriage to Tench, with the writer Alice Carbone, the birth of his first child and the loss of Petty, his long -lasting friend and the band leader.

“Tom died, and our daughter was born three months later,” Tench said, sitting in the living room of her house in the Los Feliz neighborhood. It was a late winter afternoon, and the fine-disorderly tench, with a soft speech wrapped in a blue silk ascot, with a head covered by a white-orbrae Borsalino while the sunlight passed through a large image window and on the lid of a Mason & Hamlin piano from 1928.

“The band, the main objective of my life since I was 19, has disappeared,” he said. “Tom’s loss was a terrible event that threw everything. But I was cursed if I wasn’t going to make another record. “

Tench’s former bandmate, Campbell, now in front of his own group The Dirty Knobs, understands his dilemma. “Heartbreakers had intentions to make more records, to play more shows, we would have continued forever,” he said in a telephone interview. “Even now, the pain is still there – but you have to continue to make music, because this is my life element and it is the same as Ben. This is a completely new part of our lives that we have not chosen. “

More recently, Tench has faced serious health problems. In 2023, he learned that Gura’s cancer – the disease with which he was in charge for more than a decade – spread to his jaw. “The doctors took me half the jaw,” he said, “he took a piece of my foot, muscle and bone to rebuild it.”

A number of surgery and treatments followed in 2024, the delay in the launch of “Melancholy Season”. “I let everything heal, do some therapeutic exercises and try to learn to speak more clearly and sing again,” Tench continued, beating them with a handkerchief.

“It’s funny, if I go to the Heartbreakers club, our old repetition space, after an hour at the piano, my pronunciation is much better. It just shows that, in my life, the answer to all is to play. “

On a wall In the elegance of Tudor from the 1920s, there is a photo with a great framing: a post-spectacle instant of a small joy and The Heartbreakers, after the final concert sold in Hollywood Bowl in September 2017, which covered the 40-year-old anniversary tour.

The group was led by the strength of Petty’s personality and songs, but the Heartbreakers interaction raised the band’s music and assets. Campbell and Tench, in particular, could turn Petty’s cruel songs and the progress of agreements into soul symphonies.

“This was the beauty of Ben and me,” Campbell said. “Also, Ben had technical musical knowledge that Tom and I didn’t have. He could fill the space between us. “

After Petty’s death, Tench looked for refuge in her family and studio, working on albums for friends such as Ringo Starr and Jenny Lewis. Although now he is revered as one of Rock’s greatest and most prolific musicians, for the first five years of Heartbreakers, Petty has prevented him from making any external recording. “It was the law for the whole band,” Tench said. “Tom felt that Heartbreakers had a specific sound and did not want the records of other people to sound like us.”

Only in 1981, when Jimmy Iovine, who was then producer Heartbreakers, brought Tench to a recording session for Bob Dylan’s “Shot of Love”, his studio career started to take off. Tench started writing and recording with Stevie Nicks from Fleetwood Mac, helping to start his solo career with “Bella Donna. “And Petty opened his rule without a session:” Tom said that if we do sessions, it must be a real high standard, “said Tench and chuckled. “Well, you can’t get much bigger than Bob or Stevie.”

Tench’s tench, who plays, also plays, colored radio hits and albums of worship alike. Tench Touch could be felt in Harpsichord’s foam on Elvis Costello’s “Veronica”, The Pulsant organ in Alanis Morissette’s “You know Ougtha” And on records by Don Henley, Cher, Elton John, X, Ramones and The Replacements.

“He was the first famous musician and hero, with whom we got to meet and block when Haim just played around 10 people,” said Danielle Haim. (Tench played at the beginning of the group of 2013.) “It is so good to slam around all the other instruments, but it stands on its own.”

Tench tends to postpone composers. “It’s really about songs,” he insisted. “If you play the organ ‘Refugee,’ Someone says, “Hey, it’s a wonderful record, let’s take that guy!” I am not false humble. I like the way I play. I. Especially if I threw it right. “

Producer Don was first thrown on the album “Luck of the draw” by Bonnie Raitt from 1991 – where Tench added a Hammond Hammond organ “I can’t make you love me” – and continued to use it on Rolling Stones, Willie Nelson and Brian Wilson. “Benmont has a magical meaning to play,” he was said in an interview. “He always supports the narrative and completes it, but does not prevent the singer’s ability to communicate. It’s a rare thing. Indeed, it’s a kind of genius. “

Ironically, Tench was closed from Petty’s solo album in 1989, “Full Moon Fever.” The frontman decided to record without Heartbreakers at the last moment, and Tench heard the used news. “The possessiveness about the band triggered my possessiveness,” he said. “But I would have played on all these different records with other people, and Tom needed the chance to do this and that.”

By the end of the 1980s, Tench dug in a deep hole in alcohol and drug addiction. “I was bitten with a friend about the fact that I did not play on Tom’s recording,” Tench recalled. “And he said,” Great, he will take at least six weeks to do this, which means you have enough time to go to rehabilitation. ” I went and became sober, which was a blessing. If I would finish working on that record, I would probably be dead. “

Tench experienced his part of Rock ‘N’ Roll’s loss. His closest friend of Heartbreakers, the bassist Howie Epstein died due to a heroin overdose in 2003, at 47. Petty struggled with the drug himself in the 90’s. “Howie never returned. But Tom returned, “Tench said, noting Petty’s later physical struggles, including a broken hip, in the final round of Heartbreakers. “At the end, my faith is that he was only with too much pain and he just wanted to stop.”

For a moment, Tench was silent as he listened to the sound of his little daughter laughing in the other room. “I know how lucky I am,” he said. “I didn’t lose myself. That I stay here now, that I have a wife and a child. And that you have to continue to make music. “

Over the yearsTench has become a successful composer on her own. Former director of Undertones, Feargal Sharkey, had an international hit with Tench’s “Small thief” While Rosanne Cash and Hal Ketchum marked the country’s successes with its compositions. But Tench never pushed her material to Petty. “Tom liked some of my songs, but it was not to” cut one of yours, “he said. “Finally, however, I had a collection of songs that I thought should be recorded and give them a chance to be heard.”

Tench began to sing her songs during the usual appearances at the Los Angeles Largo club, and in 2013, the Veteran British producer Glyn Johns offered to work on a solo album. He was, who also serves as president of the Blue Notes label, signed Tench, and put his debut, “You should be so lucky” the following year. In 2019, Johns proposed works at a Nashville tracking album. “But I could not leave, not even a few weeks, with a daughter of the child,” Tench said. “And then the pandemic came.”

In Los Angeles, Tench met the multi-instant and producer Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Angel Olsen) to play over a Jam’s private session circuit. “I needed a producer to understand songs,” Tench said. “I needed a good drummer. And I wanted to work on analog tape. “Wilson ticked all the boxes.

“I told him, if you need a drummer, you could call Ringo, type,” Wilson said in an interview, laughing. “I think because I am from the south as Benmont, we have a natural rhythmic connection, one thing not raised between us – we put it in the place where the other wants to hear it.”

The meetings for “The Melancholy Season” took place at the end of 2020 and at the beginning of 2021 at Wilson’s Studio in Topanga Canyon. The basic band – Tench, Wilson and the bassist Sebastian Steinberg – worked live without a net. “There were absolutely computers used in this registration,” Wilson said.

Some of Tench’s Largo colleagues, like Sara Watkins from Nickel Creek, guitarist and vocalist Jenny O. and Taylor Goldsmith from Dawes came to add Overdubs. But above all, Tench sought to keep the record in the naked vein of the albums she admired for a long time, such as Dylan’s 1967, “John Wesley Harding” of 1967 of Dylan “what I like about my recording is that it is not crowded,” Tench said. “You can hear the words, you can hear the game.”

Earlier this month, he returned to the stage, singing for the first time since surgery, during a residence at Café Carlyle in New York. Although he intends to visit behind the “melancholy season”, Tench suggested that his road work will be limited.

“I can’t be away from Catherine for a long time,” he said about his daughter. “Most of the time I was away from her is a month and that was a crime. I said to him: “Child, I love you more than music and you don’t even know what that means.” But it means everything. “