Ninety pounds, the approximate weight of a Farfisa organ, nearly kept Benmont Tench from his destiny.

It was late 1971, and Tench, a native of Gainesville, Florida, was home from college for Christmas. His favorite local band, Mudcrutch, was playing a five-set-a-night residency at a topless bar called Dub’s, and they’d finally invited him to join them onstage. He started to load his gear into his mother’s station wagon, hoisted his Fender amp onto the tailgate and then went to grab his organ.“I picked this thing up, and it was so damn heavy,” Tench recalled. For a moment, he considered blowing the whole thing off. Instead, he heaved the Farfisa into the car. That night, he played with Tom Petty and Mike Campbell for the first time, forging a musical bond and forming the nucleus of what would eventually become the Heartbreakers. “But it almost didn’t happen,” Tench said in a recent interview, shaking his head at the memory. “I mean, it was that close.”

More than half a century later, the Heartbreakers themselves are a memory: The group ended abruptly after Petty’s death in 2017 from an accidental drug overdose. But Tench, 71, continues to make music. His second solo album, an elegiac collection of songs titled “The Melancholy Season,” is out now.

The album follows a 10-year period that included a second marriage for Tench, to writer Alice Carbone; the birth of his first child; and the loss of Petty, his longtime friend and band leader.

“Tom died, and our daughter was born three months later,” Tench said, sitting in his home in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles.

“The band, the main focus of my life since I was 19 years old, was gone. Losing Tom was a terrible event that blew everything up. But I was damned if I wasn’t going to make another record.”

Tench’s former bandmate Campbell, now fronting his own group the Dirty Knobs, understands his dilemma. “The Heartbreakers had intentions of making more records, playing more shows. We would’ve gone on forever,” he said in a phone interview. “Even now, the grief is still there — but I have to keep making music, because that’s my lifeblood, and it’s the same with Ben. This is a whole new part of our lives that we didn’t choose.”

More recently, Tench has faced serious health issues. In 2023, he learned that his mouth cancer — the disease he had been dealing with for more than a decade — had spread to his jaw. “The doctors took half my jaw out,” he said, “took a piece from my leg, muscle and bone to rebuild it.”

A series of surgeries and treatments followed into 2024, delaying the release of “The Melancholy Season.”

On a wall in Tench’s stylish 1920s Tudor, there’s a large framed photograph: a post-show snapshot of a joyous Petty and the Heartbreakers after their final gig — a sold-out concert at the Hollywood Bowl in September 2017 that capped the band’s 40th anniversary tour.

The group was driven by the force of Petty’s personality and songs, but it was the Heartbreakers’ interplay that elevated the music and the band’s fortunes. Campbell and Tench, in particular, could turn Petty’s raw melodies and chord progressions into soulful symphonies.

“That was the beauty of Ben and I,” Campbell said. “Also, Ben had a technical musical knowledge that Tom and I didn’t have. He could fill the space between us.”

After Petty’s death, Tench sought refuge in his family and in the studio, working on albums for friends like Ringo Starr and Jenny Lewis. Although he’s now revered as one of rock’s greatest and most prolific session musicians, for the first five years of the Heartbreakers, Petty barred him from doing any outside recording. “It was the law for the whole band,” Tench said. “Tom felt like the Heartbreakers had a specific sound and he didn’t want other people’s records sounding like us.”

It wasn’t until 1981, when Jimmy Iovine, who was then the Heartbreakers’ producer, brought Tench into a recording session for Bob Dylan’s “Shot of Love” that his studio career began to take off. Tench began writing and recording with Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks, helping kick-start her solo career with “Bella Donna.” And Petty loosened his no-session rule: “Tom said if we were going to do sessions, they had to be a real high standard,” Tench said and chuckled. “Well, you can’t get much higher than Bob or Stevie.”

Tench’s instinctively tasteful playing colored radio hits and cult albums alike. The Tench touch could be felt in the sparkling harpsichord on Elvis Costello’s “Veronica”; the pulsing organ in Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know”; and on records by Don Henley, Cher, Elton John, X, Ramones and the Replacements.

Over the years, Tench quietly became a successful songwriter in his own right. Former Undertones frontman Feargal Sharkey had an international hit with Tench’s “You Little Thief,” while Rosanne Cash and Hal Ketchum scored country chart successes with his compositions. But Tench never pushed his material to Petty. “Tom liked some of my songs, but it wasn’t like, ‘Let’s cut one of yours,’ ” he said. “Eventually, though, I had a collection of songs that I thought ought to be recorded and given a chance to be heard.”

Tench started singing his songs during regular appearances at the Los Angeles club Largo, and in 2013, veteran British producer Glyn Johns offered to work on a solo album. Producer Don Was, who serves as president of the Blue Note label, signed Tench, putting out his debut, “You Should Be So Lucky,” the following year. In 2019, Johns proposed work on a follow-up album in Nashville, Tennessee. “But I couldn’t leave, even for a couple weeks, with an infant daughter,” he said. “And then the pandemic came along.”

In Los Angeles, Tench had gotten to know multi- instrumentalist and producer Jonathan Wilson from playing on a circuit of private jam sessions over the years. “I needed a producer who understood songs,” Tench said. “I needed a good drummer. And I wanted to work on analog tape.” Wilson checked all the boxes.

The sessions for “The Melancholy Season” took place in late 2020 and early 2021 at Wilson’s studio in Topanga Canyon. The core band — Tench, Wilson and bassist Sebastian Steinberg — worked live without a net. “There were absolutely no computers used on this record,” Wilson said.

A few of Tench’s Largo mates, like Nickel Creek’s Sara Watkins, guitarist and vocalist Jenny O. and Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith, came in to add overdubs. But mostly, Tench sought to keep the record in the stripped-down vein of albums he’d long admired, such as Dylan’s 1967 LP “John Wesley Harding.”

“What I like about my record is that it’s not crowded. The music breathes,” Tench said. “You can hear the words. You can hear the playing.”

In February, he returned to the stage, singing for the first time since his surgeries, during a residency at New York City’s Café Carlyle. He plans to tour behind “The Melancholy Season,” but Tench suggested that his roadwork will be limited.

“I can’t be away from Catherine very long,” he said of his daughter. “The longest I’ve ever been away from her is a month, and that was murder. I told her ‘Kid, I love you more than music, and you don’t know even what that means.’ But it means everything.”