About Benmont Tench: Benjamin Montmorency "Benmont" Tench III is an American keyboardist best known as a founding member of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
My parents always knew that I loved music. They just didn't think I'd try to make it a career. They thought I'd be a painter or an art teacher or something like that.
I'm not the best singer, but I like the way I sing my songs.
I learned that the songs that mean the most to me are the songs that I write by myself. While there were people I wrote really well with, particularly Gary Nicholson and Delbert McClinton, and I really enjoyed the experience, I came away from it feel...
I quit college and neglected to tell my dad.
I'm playing 10 feet from Mike Campbell every night. I look across the stage, there's Howie. Tom's in the middle and we're playing all this stuff I love. It's great.
We started with Denny Cordell, and he was a great record producer. He knew exactly how to take a band that knew absolutely nothing, and guide you without trying to tell you what to do.
You can go crazy and play solos in the right place, and that's great because it can intensify and bring an emotional lift. But the thing is you don't want to get in the way of the song.
I did enjoy Nashville a lot of the time, because I made really good friends who were really good songwriters, and they would be a joy to hang out with.
What a good session musician does is listen to the song, to the artist, and to the other players. That way you can help bring out the song and help the artist express what they want to express. It's never about you stepping out and showing you can pl...
I've spent most of my life playing with Tom Petty, and he's a damn good songwriter.
Whoever hired me might've just heard 'Refugee.' Well, I'm not the secret to 'Refugee.' The secret to 'Refugee' is the song. But if somebody really good calls me up to play on something because they like the way I played on 'Refugee,' then I wind up p...
I was just writing songs because, if a song shows up, you've gotta write it. I didn't know what to do with them. I didn't have any faith in my voice.
Listen to the Beatles' 'Things We Said Today.' Ringo Starr does not play a fill in the entire song. It doesn't need it. 'A Day In the Life' has gorgeous fills, but there, the song needs it. When I play on any record, I'm striving to get where Ringo i...
I think I drift toward sad love songs.
Fortunately, as we all know, it's impossible for anybody but Jimmy Smith to really sound like Jimmy Smith.
I loved Mal Evans holding one note down on You Won't See Me from Rubber Soul.
Besides, I'm fairly incompetent. I can't play that fast.
I don't know about five guys against the world. It's more like five guys against these three chords, and we're gonna wrestle 'em down no matter what it takes.
Tom would bring in songs, Mike would engineer, and we recorded about 30 songs.
I think we've always been better live.
