Creativity Quote by Benmont Tench

There is something endearingly anti-mythic about Benmont Tench refusing the grand heroic frame. “Five guys against the world” is the tired rock-n-roll poster copy: destiny, rebellion, the whole leather-jacket cosmology. Tench swats it away and replaces it with the stubborn, workmanlike reality of a band: five people trying to make a small set of musical building blocks behave.

The genius is in the scale shift. Three chords are as basic as it gets - the folk grammar of rock - yet Tench casts them as opponents you have to “wrestle” into submission. That verb matters. It suggests sweat, repetition, bruised pride, the unglamorous hours where a song resists you. This isn’t inspiration arriving on a cloud; it’s craft as combat, the band as a unit doing manual labor on sound.

The subtext is democratic, too. He doesn’t say “I’m going to nail it.” It’s “we’re gonna wrestle ’em down,” which quietly argues for the band as a collective intelligence. And it’s a sly rebuke to virtuoso snobbery: limitations aren’t an embarrassment, they’re the arena. Three chords don’t shrink the artistic problem; they sharpen it. When your materials are simple, every micro-decision - feel, groove, voicing, restraint - becomes the difference between filler and something that sticks.

Contextually, it fits Tench’s whole deal as a tastemaker-keyboardist in a famously song-first outfit. The enemy isn’t the world. It’s mediocrity, and it’s hiding inside the simplest progression imaginable.