Creativity Quote by Benmont Tench

On paper, "I loved working with Bob Dylan" is almost aggressively plain. That plainness is the point. Coming from Benmont Tench - a musician known for taste, restraint, and serving the song rather than dominating it - the line reads like a deliberately unflashy stamp of credibility. Dylan collaborations come with myth, volatility, and a thousand anecdotal traps. Tench sidesteps all that. No war stories, no reverence-soaked adjectives, no coded complaints. Just "loved."

The subtext is professional and political in the best way: I was there, it was real, and it was good. In music culture, especially around Dylan, people often signal status by implying difficulty ("genius, but..."). Tench refuses the flex. He frames the experience as work, not pilgrimage, which is its own kind of respect. "Working with" matters as much as "loved" - it's a nod to Dylan as a craftsperson in the room, not just a legend floating above it.

Context sharpens it. Tench comes out of the Heartbreakers ecosystem: bandmateship, tight arrangements, egos managed through competence. Dropped into Dylan's orbit - where sessions can be opaque and hierarchies shift - that steady, functional language communicates something fans actually crave: the human version of the icon. The sentence is a quiet endorsement that protects everyone involved. It suggests that whatever Dylan's reputation, the collaboration had enough clarity, generosity, or musical charge to make a famously measured player say so out loud.