Benmont Tench

“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 try to find little things that you can do to move the song along and things that serve the song.”

“Bob Dylan's not a hype and a haircut: he's the real thing.”

“Working with Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson takes you up another level.”

“Tom would bring in songs, Mike would engineer, and we recorded about 30 songs.”

“I think I drift toward sad love songs.”

“I think that with Bob Dylan around, we're living in an era where we have Whitman presenting new work, we have Dickens presenting new work, we have Yeats and Shakespeare presenting new work. It's that level.”

“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.”

“Besides, I'm fairly incompetent. I can't play that fast.”

“I loved working with Bob Dylan.”

“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 is. You play what doesn't take you out of the song.”

“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 got to play on a couple of records with the Rolling Stones, and that was really special to me.”

“I quit college and neglected to tell my dad.”

“Jeff Lynne is an arranger, and I think it's probably much easier for him to go ahead and play a part himself than to try to show somebody else what he wants. But it's hard for me to say; I barely know Jeff.”

“In Mudcrutch we all wrote songs, and when it got to the focus on Tom and the Heartbreakers, I kept writing songs, but it wasn't anything that was up the Heartbreakers tree, I didn't think - and I don't think they did, either. So I kept writing songs for the hell of it, but I didn't want to make a record just for the sake of making a record.”