Life for Duane Betts happens at its own divine pace, the journey as important as the destination.
“Dreams have their way of changing us with time,” he sings on his remarkable new album, “Wild & Precious Life,” set for release on Friday, July 14.
For the veteran guitar collaborator — Sarasota-born son of legendary Allman Brothers guitarist Dickey Betts, touring sideman with L.A. folk-rockers Dawes, and co-conspirator with The Allman Betts Band — it marks, at age 45, his first solo album.
A genre-defying 10-song collection, “Wild & Precious Life” (Royal Potato Family) echoes with alt-country, Americana, jam-band and Southern-rock sounds, carrying lyrics that cherish the precarious joys of life and, especially, the uncomplicated tranquility and restorative natural beauty he grew up with in Old Florida. It is a radiant and revelatory debut.
So what took him so long to step out front?
“It was just the right time to do it. You have to make the most of the time you’ve got,” Betts says, succinctly. “This is a record that guitar players will get into, but it’s also about the songs, and telling about where I’m from.”
Betts is sharing his new music on a tour that comes to Revolution Live in downtown Fort Lauderdale on the same day as his album release, Friday, July 14. It will be the first Florida stop on a tour that runs into October.
He will be accompanied by the top-notch band heard on the album, Palmetto Motel, which includes guitarist Johnny Stachela, bassist Berry Duane Oakley and keyboardist John Ginty, all from The Allman Betts Band, along with drummer Tyler Greenwell.
Earlier on Friday, Betts will sign records and perform an acoustic set beginning at 5 p.m. at Radio-Active Records in Fort Lauderdale.
Betts first put pen to paper on the songs that would coalesce into “Wild & Precious Life” during the early days of the pandemic, but inspiration has been collecting for years.
As a teenager, he watched hundreds of shows on tour with The Allman Brothers Band, then played guitar in the shadow of his father in Dickey Betts & Great Southern for nearly a decade. In 2018, he released a well-received EP, “Sketches of American Music,” and he did two albums with The Allman Betts Band in 2019 and 2020.
When the Allman Betts Band decided to go on temporary hiatus after its 2021 tour, Betts accelerated plans to record a solo album. Part of the process included developing more confidence as a vocalist.
“I always was a guitar player and I wrote some songs for the bands I was in, but I never really sang. I started singing a lot later,” he says.
“Wild & Precious Life” is laced with Betts’ trademark guitar work — muscular and melodic, warm and beckoning — that seems equal parts nurture and nature. In Betts’ solos and duels with Stachela and guest guitarists Derek Trucks and Marcus King, it is impossible not to be reminded of his father’s shimmering glory with the Allman Brothers.
Best examples include “Waiting on a Song,” a bright and hopeful, windows-down, Allmans-style road trip, and “Stare at the Sun,” a bluesy, anthemic rocker anchored by Trucks and a sturdy rhythm section.
Some of the new songs were written in Dickey Betts’ Sarasota home, where Duane returns when in Florida. The album was recorded in Jacksonville in early 2022 in the Swamp Raga Studio of blues-rock power couple Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, nephew of Allman Brothers cofounder Butch Trucks.
Dickey Betts, born in West Palm Beach 79 years ago, still picks up the guitar around the house, but is happily retired, his son says. He did have some indirect influence on the album.
“He was not in the room with us while we were writing, but he was adjacent. We were definitely bouncing ideas off of him,” Betts says by phone from his second home in Jackson Hole, Wyo. “We’d come back (from Jacksonville) and we played him some of the stuff we had done and then, you know, his presence was felt.”
Dickey did offer his son a review of “Wild & Precious Life.”
“Yeah, he really feels pretty strongly about it. I mean, I don’t want to say he likes anything I do — I mean, he’s pretty honest about stuff — but he was really impressed with it,” Betts says.
In addition to buoyant guitar and pristine sound production (see the instrumental “Under the Bali Moon,” a playful groove that weaves between rock and jazz), “Wild & Precious Life” is a showcase for the evocative and largely affirmational lyrics cowritten by Betts and songwriter Stoll Vaughan.
With an engaging and unadorned vocal that sits in the upper register, Betts poignantly touches on life before sobriety in the gently rocking, Grateful Dead-influenced “Colors Fade,” with guest vocalist Nicki Bluhm. He got married in 2019 and celebrates that relationship on the irresistibly tender country ballad “Circles in the Stars.”
And allusions to Betts’ home state hang like moss throughout: “Forrest Lane” traces small-town life out among the cypress and palm trees; a hurricane is rolling though “Cold Dark World” (featuring Marcus King); “Waiting on a Song” opens with Betts by the water waiting for a metaphorical fish.
The cover of “Wild & Precious Life” is a painting by artist Pierre Rochard, a native of France who arrived in Sarasota in 1930. The work depicts an egret by a lake surrounded by lush forest. Betts says the painting illustrates the “Old Florida vibe” he sought for the album.
“I wrote a lot of the record in Florida, and I grew up there, I was born there,” says Betts, pointing out that his father’s side of the family settled in their first homestead in the late 1800s. “There’s a lot of influences, but it just kind of speaks to my roots. My deepest roots are in Florida.”
Duane Betts & Palmetto Motel perform at 8 p.m. Friday, July 14, at Revolution Live, 100 SW Third Ave., Fort Lauderdale. Tickets cost $19+ at JoinTheRevolution.net. That same day, Betts will perform an acoustic set during a record-signing appearance at 5 p.m. at Radio-Active Records, 5975 N. Federal Highway, Fort Lauderdale. Visit Radio-Active-Records.com.
Staff writer Ben Crandell can be reached at . Follow on Instagram @BenCrandell and Twitter @BenCrandell.
