The title song on Benmont Tench's new album, The Melancholy Season – his second solo record after four decades at the keyboards in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – began as a poem, inspired by the autumn chill of a Southern California evening under the constellation Orion.
"At the house where I lived for many years, in the hills overlooking the San Fernando Valley, Orion was only visible in the fall and winter," Tench explains. "I associated the constellation with that time: 'Oh, there's my friend.' But that season, when it starts getting cold in California, has always been a bit melancholy to me." That passing of warmth and time in his poem eventually led Tench back to a song he had written "years ago but never been able to complete."
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