Recording - October 2020 - 37

Bless Your Heart is the sophomore effort by the Allman Betts Band, following
its 2019 debut, Down to the River. Both were tracked at the legendary Muscle
Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama. The Rolling Stones, Paul Simon,
Lynyrd Skynyrd, Dr. Hook, and The Black Keys have all graced this classic facility.
Devon Allman is the son of the late Gregg Allman, while co-leader Duane
Betts is the son of guitarist Dickey Betts-both founding members of The Allman
Brothers Band. Bassist Berry Duane Oakley is the son of original Allman Brothers
bassist Berry Oakley. The band also includes Johnny Stachel (guitar, vocals),
John Ginty (keyboards), R. Scott Bryan (percussion) and John Lum (drums).
Bless Your Heart is steeped in southern rock heritage and sonically
textured with shades of 60s spaghetti western guitars, 70s Floydian pianos
and mellotrons, 80s-era straight ahead rock, and a healthy dose of good ol'
triple-guitar, dual-drummer rock 'n' roll!

Devon Allman
and Duane Betts
On Bless Your Heart, I can hear your
southern rock roots and your legacy, but
there's a lot of variety on the album-it
moves and travels.
Devon: If the first record was a postcard, "Hey, here we are, we're a band,"
then this is a love letter that says, "Come
listen to these stories, we have something
to say here." When you listen to the record, you can tell what's in our vinyl collections, and we wear that with pride.

Devon: We all met on the same tour
in '89 and became brothers by association, and the brotherhood got more real
as time went on. At the end of the day,
for the style of music that we're making,
who's better than an Oakley on bass?

Do you guys write separately or collaborate?
Duane: Devon and I wrote a lot of this
record with the help of Stoll Vaughan.
Sometimes the songs develop from
scratch with all three guys, sometimes
one guy has half of it or a melody, but
the lyrics need shaping up, and he brings
it to the other two; there's no one way.

Is it like the Beatles or Kiss, where
whoever writes the song sings it?

Duane: I started out as a drummer,
and then I switched to guitar at around
age thirteen. I never really wanted to do
anything else. We met on the road on
the 1989 Allman Brother's Dreams tour.
Then we'd run into each other at a festival here and there.

Devon: No, I could've sung the shit out
of 'King Crawler', but it sounded so cool
with Duane singing it. And Duane could
have sung 'Pale Horse Rider'-he could
have told that story great. The songs reveal who should be playing lead guitar,
who should be doing the storytelling
and singing.
Duane: The song kind of makes the decision for you, and there's enough space
for everyone to be able to do their thing.

At what point did you say, hey, let's get
Berry in the band too?

What kind of demos did you send Matt for
this album?

Did you go into music because your
parents were in the business? Did you
jam together when you were younger?

Duane: It just happened organically.
Once we started writing together and
knew that we had some chemistry, we
started thinking about who we wanted
to have in the band.

Devon: The demos were a combination of voice memos in the back of the
bus with acoustic guitars, and recordings of us at soundcheck running the
tunes full-band.

How did you come to the decision to
record and mix this album entirely
analog rather than in a computer?

Devon: After we wrote our first few
songs, we knew that we needed the
depth and aesthetic of capturing this
band to 2" analog tape. Layering in
a computer is a great technique for a
metal record or a pop record. You get
the drum take that's got all the fire and
the right tempo, and you stack your
tracks, and you get the perfect bass
tone... No, this a rock and roll band.
Let's dial in our tones, play the shit out
of the songs, put up some baffles, a little bleed is cool, and it's going to lend
itself to some juicy texture.

This album is a little bit more textured
and diverse than the first record-was
that a conscious choice?

Duane: We definitely wanted to get
more ambitious with our influences and
showcase different sounds.
Devon: We approached the first record very much like how a director
would sit down and talk about the type
of film they're planning to make. We
spoke for days-what kind of music do
we want to do, what kind of feelings do
we want to evoke? We kind of had a
framework of Derek and the Dominos,
The Band, Robbie Robertson-these
were the things we wanted to mingle
with, sonically and songwriting-wise.
Since we had already set that precedent,
there really wasn't a lot to talk about on

RECORDING October 2020

Recording - October 2020

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