Reflections: Benmont Tench
photo: Josh Giroux
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How do you follow an act like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers? If you’re Benmont Tench, the band’s keyboard master throughout its four decades, then you just keep doing what you love the most.
On March 7, Tench released his sophomore solo album, The Melancholy Season, a long overdue follow-up to 2014’s You Should Be So Lucky. Much had transpired since that Glyn Johns produced debut, which included guest cameos by Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr and Petty himself. For starters, there was the devastating news that, on Oct. 2, 2017, Petty had died unexpectedly, just a week after the band’s 40th anniversary tour concluded with a show at the Hollywood Bowl.
When he got the call that Petty had been hospitalized with cardiac arrest, Tench’s first thought was: “He’s gonna be fine. They’ll pull him around.”
He adds, more than seven years after his longtime collaborator’s untimely passing, “I always thought, ‘Tom’s too tough.’ The devil shows up, and Tom’s like, ‘Oh, fuck off.’ I just thought the grim reaper was not gonna get the better hand with Tom. I was staggered. It still affects us.”
Two months after Petty’s death, Tench—then in his mid-60s—and his wife Alice welcomed a daughter. Yet just three years after that, Tench faced another roadblock when he was diagnosed with tongue cancer. Through surgery and radiation treatments, the keyboardist went into remission but there was yet another impediment keeping him from working on the album he’d begun piecing together—COVID. Getting a group of musicians together in a recording studio at that time proved daunting, but, finally, Tench, producer Jonathan Wilson and a small group of collaborators were able to finish the recording. And The Melancholy Season—which takes its title from the set’s opening number—was eventually released by Dark Horse Records, the label launched by George Harrison in 1974 and now operated by his son Dhani and widow Olivia.
All of the album’s 13 tracks are Tench originals, and despite the title, he says, “It’s not at all a morose record. I think a lot of the record is really funny, sometimes in a dark or sardonic way. I’m writing about things that aren’t necessarily happy, but they are love songs—a lot of them, not all of them. I think there’s survival in the record.”
There’s also variation, from the rocking “Rattle”—which is as raucous as a Chuck Berry classic—to the low-key “You, Again,” the soulful ballad “The Drivin’ Man” and the tender, minimalist “Under the Starlight,” a tune Tench honed over a 20-year period. “If She Knew” is rendered as a solo piano performance, while “Wobbles” is a title that will be familiar to those who enjoyed You Should Be So Lucky. The remake, however, is not an instrumental, as it was on the debut.
“We had cut ‘Wobbles’ as an instrumental [for the first album], and the day after we cut it, the lyrics showed up,” Tench recalls. “I told Glyn Johns, ‘Hey, I’ve got words!’ And he said, ‘That’s nice, but it’s an instrumental.’ And he was right. That version was really good, and it should’ve remained an instrumental like it did. This time though, the lyrics dictated the vibe.”
Prior to the release of The Melancholy Season, Tench set out on a brief solo tour that began with a series of dates at New York’s storied Café Carlyle, then shifted to the West Coast in March and April. Tench also took some time in late January to participate in the charity organization MusiCares’ 2025 Persons of the Year Gala, honoring the Grateful Dead as part of the event’s all-star house band. Tench—who played with Phil Lesh and Friends a handful of times—first discovered the Dead in the late ‘60s, but he didn’t really get what they were about until a few years later.
“The thing about the Grateful Dead is the songs,” he says. “The playing can be exquisite and lyrical and moving, but the songwriting! ‘China Doll,’ what a spectacularly gorgeous song. And ‘Wharf Rat’—song after song after song after song.”
Tench isn’t a stranger to collaboration in general. The Heartbreakers famously accompanied Dylan on tour, and Tench contributed to the latter’s 1981 album, Shot of Love. “It was a very unusual experience to have somebody walk in and show you a song as extraordinary as ‘Every Grain of Sand,’” he says, “Especially the guy who created it.”
Tench’s keyboards can also be heard on recordings by artists as diverse as Stevie Nicks, Roy Orbison, Aretha Franklin and the Ramones. But to most music fans, he will always be associated first and foremost with Petty and his Heartbreakers. The two first met in Florida, where they both lived, when Tench was still in his teens; he became a fan of Petty’s early ‘70s, pre-Heartbreakers band Mudcrutch and, ultimately, joined the nascent project. Their musical partnership remained intact until Petty’s passing.
“When that band got back together, I was overjoyed,” Tench says of Mudcrutch’s on and-off reunions from 2007 until shortly before Petty’s death. “I had such a wonderful time with Mudcrutch. I really regret that that can never happen again. I regret all of it. It [Petty’s death] was a terribly, genuinely tragic thing. [My time with the Heartbreakers] means everything to me; it’s my whole life. I learned my sense of humor from those guys. I got a lot of really good character traits from those guys—and some not so good character traits from those guys. Tom could walk into a room with a guitar and nothing going on in his head and, in front of you, write something beautiful. I watched him become a songwriter.”
Now, Tench says, he takes the lessons he learned and applies them to his own life and work. So what does he want to do next?
“The nice thing is, I don’t know,” he says. “But I want to do it.”
