Duane Betts Talks Fiery Debut Solo Album ‘Wild & Precious Life’ & Carrying The Family Legacy (INTERVIEW)

“We have coffee so it’s all good,” Duane Betts says, slightly laughing off the fact that his tour bus is broken down on the side of the road somewhere past Knoxville, Tennessee. “It’s these buses. Parts like the belt, they come off so we’re waiting on a new belt to be delivered or something like that. It’s pretty standard stuff.” 

What is not everyday ordinary is getting to walk out onto the stage at the Grand Ole Opry and sing a song in what is commonly known as the Mother Church of country music. But Betts did just that, the night before his tour bus had a hiccup on its way to his next tour stop destination. And that’s when I spoke to the man with a rising star hooked to his belt. With a solo album hot off the presses, a tour with his band Palmetto Motel in full swing, and an ongoing partner in the Allman Betts Band: Betts is feeling pretty good about his career.

The last time I spoke with Betts, it was 2018 and he was about to tour with his friend Devon Allman, a project that would eventually grow into the Allman Betts Band that also features another Allman Brothers Band offspring, Berry Oakley Jr. After two well-received albums, Betts was ready to throw his own self out there as a solo artist. “It felt like the right time to make something that was entirely my own vision … It’s an album about who I am, where I come from and what I believe in,” he said recently about creating the ten songs that comprise Wild & Precious Life, and it’s everything you could hope for in an album: rock spiked with country, blues, folk & funk; songs that evoke nature, heartache, love and contemplation. You put it on, sit back, and just get lost in it, song one to song ten.

Although previously known for his guitar playing, “I played drums the whole time I was a kid,” Betts had explained in 2018 about the musical experiences of his youth. “I was given a guitar when I was really young and I really didn’t like it. It was too difficult and I wanted to play drums so I played drums and got good at drums. Then when I was about thirteen I just started messing around with the guitar and I noticed I started getting better, and the switch was made.” He toured with Dawes, The Doors Robby Krieger, and his father Dickey Betts, recorded an album with Backbone69, and kept honing his craft. 

With Wild & Precious Life, Betts is showcasing his guitar playing and his voice, the latter being something he used to keep to a minimum: “I was always in bands that had singers so I never really took a lot of interest in it.” But lo and behold, what time and experience has done for the young man. His vocals on the album, which dropped officially on July 14th, are confident, strong, and emotion-driven. Collaborating with longtime writing partner Stoll Vaughan has broadened Betts’ oeuvre of subject matter from the very realistic to the philosophy of life and love. Special guests include Marcus King, Nicki Bluhm, and Derek Trucks, at whose studio, Swamp Raga, Wild & Precious Life was recorded.

This brings us back to that broken-down bus in Tennessee the morning after his debut on the Opry stage, giving us a chance to talk about country music, guitars and new songs.

You played the Grand Ole Opry last night. How was that?

I’m still buzzing from it. It was really fantastic and everybody was really helpful, all the folks there. We did two songs off of the record. We did “Waiting On A Song” and “Circles In The Stars,” which I thought were two good choices for the Opry. I wanted to lean more in that kind of direction, not that they’re like country songs but a little bit more of a country direction.

How did you get to be there in the first place?

Well, we’re on tour with Maggie Rose right now. She’s a good friend of ours and she has done the Opry a lot. She actually had an appearance there in the middle of this tour and we had like two days or three days in Nashville and they thought it would be a good idea to pitch to the Opry me doing a debut, that I had a record. They pitched it and they were very enthusiastic about it and asked me to do it.

Any nerves?

Yeah, I mean, you really just try to have fun and not let the nerves take over. I mean, you’re going to have them but you just try to keep it in its place and concentrate on having fun and the rest kind of takes care of itself. I mean, when you’re on the stage and you’re standing in that circle, it’s definitely a heavy thing. It’s like playing in the Beacon Theatre. That is to country music what the Beacon Theatre is to the Allman Brothers Band, I guess (laughs).

When you think of the Grand Ole Opry, who is the first name you think of?

I don’t know, I think of people like Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb and all of those older people. I think of American music, you know, traditional music.

There is a country influence in your music. What do you love about it?

Wow, I’ve never been asked so much about country music (laughs). But I guess I just did the Opry so this is like the country interview (laughs). But I love the storytelling, the honest storytelling of people like Billy Joe Shaver and Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard and people that came before that, like Hank Williams. I love a lot of the fifties stuff that they play on Willie’s Roadhouse. When I’m in Wyoming and I’m looking out at the landscape, I tend to really enjoy listening to Willie’s Roadhouse and that really old country music. I love bluegrass, Bill Monroe, and the stuff that they started out of Kentucky. The music goes way back and the Irish stuff where it came from, it’s just traditional American music, you know. It all kind of formed what we call rock & roll. The blues, obviously, was a huge part of it but I’m not like a country guy per se, but I do listen to a lot of that stuff.

When we last spoke, you told me that you didn’t really sing a lot when you were younger but that was changing and you were giving your voice more attention. And here we are now and you have a brand new album and there is so much confidence in your vocals and in your presentation. How did you get to this point?

I think if you want to do something, you have to practice at it. I did a lot of touring with Allman Betts Band and just kind of worked on it to get it to the point where I can go out and deliver my songs, put a little bit of vocal on them, and feel confident about it. I mean, I don’t have to be like the greatest singer of all time but to get out there and sound like you mean what you’re saying in the song, hold it together and just remember to take deep breaths. It’s still a work in progress but to be able to go out there and sing songs that you wrote and then play guitar. I mean, I’m a guitar player naturally. So to be able to do all three of those things is really cool. There are people that I look up to like Eric Clapton and my dad that have all three and that’s kind of what I aspire to.

I understand that you started writing this album when we were all locked down for covid.

Yeah, I started writing quite a bit during the summer of 2020 when I was in Jackson Hole and there are a few songs off the record that were taken from then. A lot of it was written in collaboration with Stoll Vaughan, who I’ve been writing with for about ten or twelve years now, and Johnny Stachela has a few co-writes on it leading up to the session in Swamp Raga in March 2022. That would be right after Christmas, like right in the new year we started. So yeah, we wrote right up until the session so a lot of the songs were kind of formulated in that time period closer to the recording session.

For you, what line or lyric on this album sums up everything that was on your mind at that time?

Oh man, that’s a hard one, especially when I just woke up twenty minutes ago (laughs). I’m really proud of “Circles In The Stars” I think that’s a really beautiful lyric. I don’t know, it’s kind of hard to pick a line right now. 

Well, I have one that I really liked and it’s from “Saints To Sinners,” where you say, “Spend your days with what you love, even though it can cut you and hurt you so much.”

Yeah, that’s a great line. Me and Stoll wrote that together so I can’t take credit for every line on it. But we were in the room together and we were putting together the verses and I think he threw something at me and I might have changed it and that’s how it came out. But to me it just means that you’re wired to go into the fire. That song kind of has to do a little bit with addiction. It’s not ABOUT addiction but for me personally, I think Stoll and I were writing it from my standpoint and my experiences and what I have been through. When you know something might not be good for you but you’re drawn to it, you’re drawn to the flame. That’s what that line is about to me anyway.

You can read all kinds of things into it

Yeah, it’s not a song about addiction but there is a lot of tongue-in-cheek stuff about how there’s a guy in it and he doesn’t mean to let people down, he doesn’t mean to not keep his word and he’s trying, he promises, but he leaves the girl behind because he runs off to go get into some OTHER business and he’s waking up all alone and he’s trying to just pull it together and figure out which way he wants to go, you know.

In “Cold Dark World” there is some funk in there. How was that song formed?

The main lick of that I had actually for, I want to say, about six years. I remember coming up with that main lick when I was living in Malibu, California, and I had it sitting around and I wanted to come up with something that was a little more funky and bluesy, bring like a bluesier lick into the mix, because we had some songs that were kind of covering some of the other bases. So I brought it in and then we just kind of wrote the lyric. 

And you’ve got Marcus King on that song. Why was he perfect for that song in particular?

He’s so fiery. I mean, he would be great on any number of songs but I thought there was a lot of space to turn that one into a song that could have multiple guitar players. Some of the other ones were just perfect the way they were and I liked Johnny on them and nothing more than me and Johnny; but that one had room for more and I thought that he was great for it. I just love Marcus. He’s a great player, a great singer, and writer and I just like what he represents.

How did Derek help to inspire “Stare At The Sun”?

It was really just taken from something he had said, the impetus for the title. I had started writing the words before I even told that story to Stoll. It wasn’t like we started writing the song off of what he had said. It just kind of came into play because I was thinking about what song he should play on. I said, “Well, this one would be good,” and he actually told me something about my dad and then we incorporated that into the song later. 

The approach of the song is kind of what he’s talking about. Derek had said something really interesting about my father’s guitar playing and his fearless approach. He said he was a player that wasn’t afraid to stare directly into the sun and I thought that was an amazing line. So we kind of used that in the song. But I had started writing the first verse and I had the chorus and the melody to the chorus before we brought that into the fold and we just kind of wrapped the song up with the title, “Stare At The Sun.”

For the instrumental, “Under The Bali Moon,” did you already know what you were wanting to convey with the emotions or did the title come first and inspired the melodicism?

That one actually came into form really late. I had an instrumental with a lot of parts and it was cool but it was kind of like this pseudo-Latin kind of instrumental with a bunch of parts. It kind of sounded like Allman Brothers-y with Santana (laughs). It was cool but it wasn’t as unique as it is now and I really owe that to Tyler Greenwell. When I went in to record it, we weren’t sure what was going to happen. I thought there was a good chance it would be shifted around but I was confident something really great would come out of it. And Tyler really did a great job of steering it into what it became. We had to work all day on it to get it to where it felt like it had a real solid identity. All the parts are mine but Tyler really made the song what it is and that’s why he’s a co-writer on it.

Which guitars did you predominately use this time? And did you use something totally out of left field?

No, I didn’t use anything out of left field, not on this, because it’s like my first record and I wanted to go true to what my sound is. So predominately I played my Goldtop, which is actually my dad’s signature model guitar and it’s actually the prototype of it, so it’s a really great-sounding guitar. Then I used a post-war Martin D-28 for all of the acoustic guitars. Those were the two main ones I played. Then I played my 1961 335 on a few things. Johnny played that one and then he played his SG and one of Derek’s guitars on something. So not a ton of guitars on the record. It’s pretty true blue on that. But I would say the Goldtop was my main guitar on the record. There’s also pedal steel on three or four things. We’ve got a trumpet on one thing. We got percussion. John Ginty is on keyboards. John Ginty, Johnny Stachela, and myself were producers on the record. 

Going back to the Allman Betts Band for a moment, in the video for “Pale Horse Rider,” you’re predominately on a horse while poor Berry is face down in the dirt. Was that really a fun video for you to shoot?

(laughs) Yeah, it was cool. I love Joshua Tree so just being out there and being able to work and make videos, yeah, it was work and it was hot and you want to get that stuff done with so it’s not really fun in the traditional sense but it is kind of fun to play cowboy and be out on the open range with a bunch of cacti (laughs). It was pretty awesome. But it was hot and when you’re done with the day, you just want to take a shower.

Did you grow up riding horses?

I definitely rode horses when I was young but I wasn’t riding horses all the time. My sister owns horses and knows everything there is to know about them. And my dad knows a lot about horses. So I’ve been known to jump on a horse now and then (laughs).

And your dad’s doing well?

Yeah, he’s doing good. He’s relaxing (laughs).

Do you know where your ancestors came from?

Yeah, I think my dad’s family is English and a little bit of Native American. I don’t have all the genealogy right in front of me but I think they’re predominately English. I think they came to Connecticut like really early, like in the 1600s. They were actually up in Prince Edward Island for a while, in Canada, and then they came back and were in Maine and then came down to Florida towards the late 1800’s. And my mom is actually Armenian.

At this moment in time, how would you describe Duane Betts as an artist?

I would just say that I’m learning and growing and I’m ready to work (laughs). I’m always trying to listen and learn and challenge myself and collaborate with new people and get out of my comfort zone. I think that’s how you grow. I want to start writing some new songs and start thinking about a new record. I think once this one is out for a little bit, then I think we can start working on another one, or thinking about it at least, and decide what I want to do.

Are you comfortable writing on the road?

I’d rather be home but it just depends on how much space there is and how comfortable you are. I suppose you can really get into it no matter where you are as long as you have a guitar and have space. I just find it easier when I am at home. I have my coffee table and my notes on the table and it’s a lot easier.

You’re out on the road right now. Is that how you’re going to spend the rest of your year?

Yeah, I’m doing a ton of dates, Duane Betts & Palmetto Motel. We have five Allman Betts Band dates in July – four in the beginning and then one towards the end – but all around that I’m doing my stuff. You can see tour dates at https://www.duanebetts.com/ So look out for me, I’ll be around (laughs).

Portrait by Dylan Jon Wade Cox