Millions of music fans still feel the 2017 loss of the great Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Tom Petty. For his longtime band mates, like keyboardist Benmont Tench, it left a giant hole to fill.

That is particularly true for Tench, who first met Petty at 11 in Florida, and would play with him for more than 40 years with Mudcrutch and The Heartbreakers. As Tench told me when we spoke for his excellent new solo album, The Melancholy Season, led by the absolutely gorgeous, title track, everybody in The Heartbreakers was committed to that band.

However, having played with Bob Dylan, Stevie Nicks, Courtney Love, Fiona Apple, Alanis Morissette, U2, The Euryhtmics, Sara Watkins and more, as well as being an accomplished songwriter, Tench is more than ready to step into the spotlight as a frontman to continue his career. I spoke to him about songwriting, the intimacy of the new album and more.

Benmont Tench: It's different than the places I played with The Heartbreakers and it's different than the places I played in October and November on “The Last Waltz Tour” with Mike Campbell, among others. But when I put the last record out, I played several small places. And I'm used to playing in Los Angeles at Largo, which now is about twice as big as Cafe Carlyle, or maybe a little more. But when I first started playing there, it was in a very small space that was similar and even served dinner. So, I learned to play solo in places the size of Cafe Carlyle.

.

Tench: That was really cool because that's what I associate it with as well, Bobby Short, come on. I think the best one I ever saw undoubtedly was McCoy [Tyner’s] one. At the Catalina here in Los Angeles years ago, but boy, he was spectacular.

Tench: Yes, I like intimate music. And when I see people play, I prefer to see them somewhere small where I can see them up close. And to play a smaller venue suits this record very well. It was made to sound intimate. I think I would have deliberately chosen a small ensemble. Just myself, one guitarist, one bassist, one drummer with minimum overdubs. I think I would have chosen that for this album anyway, but the constraints of COVID, which was barely over and having to mask until tested, and the concern about not getting COVID, and thus keeping as few people as possible in the studio, yet still cutting it live on the floor. All these things forced it to be more intimate, but that is the kind of music I prefer. [Bob Dylan]

John Wesley Harding; John Lennon, Plastic Ono Band; records like that, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings' records, early Stax Volt, and jazz. Those are small ensembles. So, you can hear everybody's conversation with each other. You can focus on the voice of each instrument. And you can focus on the voice of the leading instrument of the moment. It was a perfect setting.

Tench: I was happy about the response to all of them, because they all got a very good response. Like you said, the Carlyle draws its own audience. Not everybody knew much about me and certainly probably didn't know my previous solo records or my songwriting history or anything and they were very attentive. They listened and while I want people to enjoy themselves, I also value the words on this record, so I want people to listen. That's another reason for making a record with a lot of space in it. You can hear the lyrics. That was true of the first record I made as well. There was a lot, the ensemble was larger, but Glynn Johns knows how to keep space in a record. In this case, Johnson Wilson knows how to keep space in a record.

Tench: On this record, almost everything just showed up and said, "Write me." It simply said, "Write me." For “The Melancholy Season” I had written out some words that had some of those lines in it and something maybe alluding to or hinting at whatever the situation may be in that song between the people in that song. But it was pretty different and when I sat down and first wrote a melody to it, the words rearranged themselves pretty much by themselves and new verses showed up. It didn't need much to pull a new song or a complete song out of the scraps of words that I had written down.

Tench: Oh, yes. I never stopped listening. I listen to new things, and I look for new things, sometimes new old things. I'll find the song on the, there's an app called Radio 0000. You can dial in a decade in the country, going back to the 1920s, or maybe the 1910s, going back to recorded music, and hear what was being played in that country in that decade. I find songs that way that I've never heard, but I still listen to John Wesley Harding. I still listen to probably Bruno Walter playing Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, which is probably the first recording I heard of it. I still listen to Little Richard and Reese Franklin and Billie Holiday and on and on back there, the tone that's from Jamaica. I listen to all of them. I never stop. So, it's always in the mix somewhere. I also read, not as feverously as I did, and I go to museums. I think paintings have a large influence on my songwriting, and on my playing. One Heartbreakers tour, we got to a song, and I was like, “What am I going to play here?” Because I never like to play quite the same thing twice. Mike was wearing a polka dot shirt. And I thought, “Great, I'll play Mike's shirt.” I played some kind of staccato rhythm under whatever else was being played. It worked like a champ.

Tench: No, but when I was in college before I quit school to play with Mudcrutch with Tom and Mike and Randall [Marsh] and Tom Leadon full time, I was an art major, because the only other thing that I cared for was art. But I wasn't consistent at it. And I didn't love it as much as I love music, maybe because I wasn't as good at it. But that was my major.

Tench: There's also a bit in Lust for Life, the Vincent Minnelli film about Gauguin and Van Gogh, where Van Gogh and Gauguin are showing each other's paintings. One says to the other, "You paint too fast," and the other says, "You look too fast." It's like, see, I may be working alone as a painter, but you can have a community. I may have written all these songs except “Under the Starlight” alone. But around me, I had a community of songwriters and musicians who are my friends in Los Angeles, most of whom I met through people at Largo or with people who I had come across at Largo, not all of them. Some of them are I met through David Rawlings and Gillian Welch and other folks, but see you have a community as a solo writer or as a painter and you can show your works. I would think because I never became a painter.

Baltin: I want to go back to when you were talking about intimate music. Obviously with The Heartbreakers, you're playing huge arenas and stuff. But when I look at it back at it, my favorite songs by Tom were always the most intimate ones. Like I think "Crawling Back to You" is a perfect song. I think it’s one of the 10 best songs of all time.

Tench: I agree. Playing music is one of the most intimate things you can do with somebody else. Really, to me it's an extremely intimate experience if you're doing it right. To paraphrase a different quote. And I agree about the kind of song I like from Tom or anybody else. On this record, there's one song, “If She Knew,” that it's just me and the piano. There's another song called "You, Again.” There's just piano and Sebastian Steinberg on bass. The song "Wobbles" just has Jonathan Wilson, the producer, playing brushes and I think brushes and Sebastian on bass and I'm playing piano. So, it's a very deliberately intimate thing. I also worked hard on singing in a different way and a little bit more forcefully, though certainly not intending to bellow on this record. I don't whisper, but I do want to be speaking to somebody up close, like lean in, cause I want to tell you something between you and me.