When keyboard player Benmont Tench released his debut solo album in 2014, the founding member of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers had a ready collection of songs to take into the studio.
“As on most first records, I think, the songs that were on the first solo record had been written over the course of my life,” says Tench, who was 60 when “You Should Be So Lucky” came out. “I had them. I’d rewritten some of them right before the record, but those songs came from all over my life.”
For “The Melancholy Season,” his sophomore album, Tench says the timeline of his inspirations was much more condensed.
“These songs were written mostly in the five or six years after the first solo record,” he says on a phone call the day after returning to Los Angeles following a five-night run at Café Carlyle in New York City. “So they’re focused on a specific emotional time period. They’re not your journals, but when I write, it’s going to affect, reflect, where I’m at.
“It’s not like a page from my diary, necessarily, but when I write it’s more like they show up and knock on the door and say, ‘Hey, write me down,’” Tench says. “They’re gonna be consistent with wherever I am.
“[The new songs] are from a concentrated period in which I got married, Tom passed away, I had a daughter,” he says. “All sorts of things. And so it’s of a piece, in a way, that ‘You Should Be So Lucky’ is not of a piece as far as writing goes.”
“The Melancholy Season” arrives on Friday, March 7, followed by shows at Largo at the Coronet in Los Angeles on Wednesday, March 12 and again on March 19.
In an interview edited for clarity and length, Tench, 71, talked about how two albums by John Lennon and Bob Dylan influenced the production on his new record, how a free-verse poem he’d rewritten transformed into its title track, and the role that Largo played in getting him to ready to step out as a solo artist.
Q: It’s been 10 or 12 years since your first solo album. When and why did you start work on “The Melancholy Season”?
A: I had enough songs, not exactly these songs, by 2018. And I started talking to [producer] Glyn Johns, who had done the last record and did a great job, about doing it. But I also had an infant daughter and I couldn’t work out where to find the time to be away from my daughter when she was only a few months old and it was all hands on deck.
Then COVID came along, and I had a couple of health challenges – something I’ve been dealing with for over a decade, and every now and then has to be addressed. It meant that I couldn’t make the record right away, and I couldn’t make it with Glyn Johns.
But all of these factors postponed the making of the record in a way that was beneficial. Because I found a better way to sing the songs. I wrote several more songs. I dialed in the fine-tuning of the way the songs were written. And I played some of them at Largo after COVID lifted and could see which ones affected people in the ways that I wanted them to.
Q: So when did you get into the studio with Jonathan Wilson as your producer?
A: I think maybe at the end of 2020, we went in for a few days. Then we had a COVID scare. We were masked until we got tested. It was a false alarm. So we wound up making it, I think, in 2021. I’m terrible with dates. Over the course of a couple of months instead of over a couple of weeks with Glyn.
We recorded in Jonathan’s studio in Topanga Canyon. The musicians were, as they had been on the last one, all good friends of mine, which makes a big difference. [Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes and Sara Watkins of Nickel Creek are among those who recorded with him.]
Q: I really like the open spaces and kind of spare beauty in it. Your voice and keyboards are up front and there’s not a lot of unnecessary frills from others.
A: I have always wanted to be able to perform them without a band, just to get the point across. Now, some of the songs are really enhanced by having a band, and the band on this record, it’s exactly as I would have wished it as far as the instrumentation and the space.
But when I was writing the songs, and trying to figure out how to sing them – because I wanted the lyrics to be heard – my thought process, if I had one, was “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band” and [Bob Dylan’s] “John Wesley Harding.”
The first Lennon solo record is John, Ringo and Klaus Voorman. “John Wesley Harding” is Bob Dylan on piano or guitar, Charlie McCoy on bass and Kenny Buttrey on bass. There are a couple of songs where there’s somebody else on each record. On John’s record, Billy Preston plays a bit, and Phil Spector plays some piano or guitar in a song. But it’s basically there are three musicians, three instruments, and a voice.
I love both of those records because you hear the songs so well. So well. I didn’t even have to consciously think it, that’s how I gravitate. I really enjoy records made that way. I also enjoy wall of sound records and dense productions. But there’s something I really love about the bare bones. It just lets you hear it.
Q: The title track, “The Melancholy Season,” really does capture that feeling of seasons changing, time passing. I read that it started as a poem about how you’d only see the constellation Orion in those times in the year.
A: I wrote it, not deliberately, as a poem, but it kind of became a blank verse or free verse poetic thing that I thought worked pretty well as spoken word. And it has a lot of lyrics that are in the song. Eventually, I took those, fine-tuned them. Took what I have learned in the intervening few years since I’d first written a bunch of words on paper. I worked that into the song and the situations and people, and changed the focus for it.
And found music for it. At first, I had something that was a bit more, I wouldn’t say pop, but not as moving. My wife said it’s great, but the words deserve something with a mood that matches. She was right, so I wrote it so the music would match the words.
Q: I also saw that “Under the Starlight” started out many years ago before you finished it for this record.
A: I started writing that with a great songwriter in Nashville named Donald Henry a long time ago. I didn’t think we had completed it, I really didn’t. I looked around the house to see if we had, and if I had the piece of paper (with lyrics). I was so sure I didn’t even call Don. I just went, well, I can’t find other lyrics, and for the places I couldn’t remember I wrote some new words.
And it’s a really good thing I did because the first verse is exactly as it was – and the chorus. But in the intervening however many years, it was maybe 10 or 15 years since he and I had started the song, I had learned a lot. I had lived a lot. I had been through quite a lot and I think that made it a better song.
Then I found the words. I talked to Don and he sent me the words. I’m like, ‘Oh well, these are good,’ but the ones that wound up on the record, I like them better because they more express where I’m now and how I feel.
Q: In the Heartbreakers, Tom and Mike Campbell wrote the majority of the songs. I’m curious how much writing you did during the band’s long run and whether you wrote for the band or saved things for a future solo record.
A: I wasn’t keeping anything for a record, but I was always writing. Since I was a kid, I wanted to be some kind of writer of music. I just very rarely would throw something together and give it to whatever band I was in when I was 13. When I was in college in New Orleans, I would ride the streetcar a lot. That’s when I was trying to write songs. When I was 19 or so, whenever I first started playing with Mike and Tom.
But it did not come easily. On the demos that got the first band Mudcrutch [Petty, Campbell and Tench’s precursor to the Heartbreakers] signed is a song called “Once Upon a Time Somewhere” that never came out, that Tom and I wrote together back then. But I was not a consistent songwriter until maybe the last 10 years where I would write a song and would consistently get at what I wanted it to do.
Q: The shows you’re doing right now, it’s just you and a piano, right? No band?
A: It’s just me and the piano, and if I try harder at getting better at it, I might play a song or two on guitar, because a couple of the songs might work well on guitar. I think it would be great to have a band, but I think for the most part the songs come across well by myself.
My friend Sean Watkins, who is in the band Nickel Creek when they’re together and also has a solo career, I saw him when he went out and played by himself completely, and I thought, Wow, I want to try that.
Q: What’s it been like for you moving from the side or back of the stage with the Heartbreakers to front and center solo?
A: It took a little while to get comfortable playing my songs in front of people. But my apprenticeship was in the club Largo, which I started frequenting in the late ’90s, I think, or mid ’90s. Slowly, over the course of time, I would sit in with people who played there regularly, and after a while, they said, “Oh, do you have any songs?”
I’d play one, and they would encourage me and give me feedback. I had the chance for learning to do that at Largo. I would never have made a record if it weren’t for Largo.