It’s been over a decade since Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench released his debut solo album, You Should Be So Lucky, and he’s back with his sophomore release, The Melancholy Season.
Tench tells ABC Audio that while he’s had enough songs to make a new record since about 2017, “things had intervened” that kept him from doing so, including health issues, a new baby and then COVID-19. But he thinks the delay wound up working out for him.
“Though I had enough songs … I didn’t have all of these songs,” he says. “And these songs, the ones that came in later, when put with some of the earlier ones, made a coherent whole.”
Tench says the tracks on the album paint a picture of what he was going through between 2014 and 2019, which includes Petty’s death in 2017. He says of the songs, “It’s more of a picture of … what was in the air for a concentrated period of time during which there had been a lot of changes.”
As for naming the album The Melancholy Season, Tench shares, “I thought it was a good title for a record. I also thought that it summed up the mood of the record pretty well.”
The album’s cover is a painting Tench had seen at the Art Institute of Chicago, which he says he’s “always loved.”
“And when I thought, ‘I want to call this record The Melancholy Season,’ the first thing I said was, ‘Do you think there’s a way we can use this painting for the cover of the album?’” he says. “Because I think it evokes the record very well.”
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