Arden, North Carolina (July 19, 2021) — Since April, Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters have been releasing music from their upcoming collection, The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea, a concept suite built from songs recorded under the straitened circumstances of quarantine and envisioned as a “deconstructed album,”released, not as a package, but in a monthly series of paired singles. The band, led by Platt, has released the fourth pair, “Saint Sebastian” and “This Night.”
“‘Saint Sebastian’ came from a story that my grandmother told me about how she and her mother had spent a long time looking for the grave of Florence, her grandmother. They were never able to find it. Her mother (my great grandmother) was kind of a troubled soul and died young, and from what my grandmother has told me this caused her a lot of sadness and confusion in her childhood,” says Platt. “While I was writing this song I was drawing a lot of imagery from the world on lock down (I wrote it in April/ May of 2020), and that’s where the idea of a ‘strange holiday’ came from… the kids were all home from school but not allowed to play with their friends, grownups whispering…at one point my grandmother was sent to live with family in Italy for a while, a time that she remembers fondly but which was probably also confusing a little sad. A strange holiday in itself. This track features Rick Cooper on the keys, one of his many talents that doesn’t get showcased in the Honeycuttersvery often.”
Of “This Night” Platt says, “‘This Night’ is another older song that kept getting shuffled to the back of the pile when it came time to make an album. It’s a song about being displaced, being alone, having lost too much to comprehend. I was moved to start writing when I first started hearing stories on the news about the Syrian refugee crisis. It’s so easy to distance ourselves from what is happening in other parts of the world, to turn people into numbers. I guess I was trying to remind myself of the hundreds of thousands of personal experiences that are wrapped up in a five minute news segment.”
Listen to “Saint Sebastian” and “This Night” HERE.
Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters have also released a video for “New York” — a song from the first pair of singles released from The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea — after a premiere by The Bluegrass Situation.
“I always get ideas for videos when I’m listening to mixes in the car. My 20-month-old daughter really took a shine to this song one day while I was listening and started demanding it every time we got in the car… over and over and over. So I had a lot of time to visualize the story,” Platt told BGS. “It’s a song I wrote about leaving the house that I grew up in, and kind of saying goodbye to that younger version of myself. Our friend Gretchen Kauffman did such a great job as little Amanda! We had a really fun time.”
About Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters
Lyrically driven, the songs of Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters blend the band’s old-school country roots attitude with their shared influences of rock and folk. Based in Asheville, North Carolina, Amanda Anne Platt is a storyteller by nature with an incredible band backing her. Performing along with Platt, The Honeycutters are Matt Smith on pedal steel and guitar; Rick Cooper on bass, guitar and vocals; and Evan Martin on drums, piano, organ and harmony vocals.
There is an empathetic and charming wit ingrained in Platt’s songwriting. She has a knack for accessing a deep well of emotion and applying it to her story-telling, whether she is writing from her own experiences or immersing herself into the melody of emotions in another person’s life.
Music City Roots’ Craig Havighurst writes, “She’s soothing (even in the hurtin’ songs) and sobering (except for the drinkin’ songs) and nuanced… I’d be hard pressed to find a finer string of recordings from any band working in the classic country/mountain tradition in these last five years.”
A homegrown entity, the band is critically acclaimed locally, regionally, nationally, as well as overseas. Their prior album Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters [Organic Records 2017] placed #2 (sandwiched between Jason Isbell and Gregg Allman) in their regional radio station WNCW’s year end listeners poll for 2017. The station’s Music Director Martin Anderson said to No Depression, “Amanda Platt writes songs on par with Lucinda, Isbell, Lauderdale, Hank Sr. In my opinion, anyway.”
“This is a band that does everything right,” says Goldmine’s Mike Greenblatt. “Platt deserves all that might come to her over this, her fifth (and best) album. Backed by pedal steel, electric guitar, keyboards, bass, drums, percussion, and vocal harmony, it’s Platt’s show as she writes, sings and co-produces. Complete with lyrics of introspection with the kind of words you can chew on long after the album ends, it also works on a lighter level by dint of the fact that it just sounds so damn good. Go as deep as you want. It’s all good, as they say.”
Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters received a shout out from Fodor’s Travel Magazine in a write-up about the band’s hometown of Asheville, NC, and a couple of years back they were also featured on XPN World Cafe’s Sense of Place series. In 2017, their music also placed into the Americana Music Association Year End Top 100 list of Americana Airplay for the second year in a row.