Arden, North Carolina (October 8, 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 series of paired singles, with each pair drawing on both of the titular concept’s two sides.
On the Devil side of this month’s double-barreled release, “Girls Like You” gets an appropriately muscular setting for Platt’s homage to Mary Magdalene, as the singer/songwriter muses on the many roles women have taken — and the categories into which they have been placed by others. The Honeycutters — Evan Martin(drums), Rick Cooper (bass, acoustic guitar), Matt Smith (electric guitar) and Kevin Williams (piano) — lay down a throbbing, country-rock groove while Platt delivers an edgy vocal that culminates in a pointed chorus:
Oh Mary, like an angel with your long red hair
but his mother was a saint, how could you possibly compare?
The story books all tell us,
doesn’t matter what you do
it’s never easy for girls like you
“‘Girls Like You’ I wrote after watching something on TV about Mary Magdalene,” notes Platt. “I’m always intrigued by the human experiences behind great historical myths and figures, and particularly the idea of motherhood all wrapped up in that. Our friend Tina Collins of Tina and Her Pony sang the angelic harmony on this one.”
Of the Deep Blue Sea entry in this pair, “Always Knew,” Platt says it’s “a song I wrote for my daughter.” “We wanted to keep the arrangement simple,” she adds, and indeed, the track pares down to the basics — just Platt’s wistful yet determined voice and unadorned finger-picked guitar, embroidered by Martin’s organ and Rhodes piano. A meditation on how life’s realities can bend away from some expectations while somehow managing to fulfill others, “Always Knew” feels almost like a lullaby, or an intimate letter meant to be read by a daughter grown old enough to appreciate its depth.
Now for every rule I’ve had to follow
every truth I’ve had to swallow
there’s another silly notion I outgrew
but I always knew that I would love you
before I ever heard your name or saw your face
in all this blue
Between the two, “Girls Like You” and “Always Knew” reveal, as they move toward the completion of this sprawling, pandemic-engendered song cycle, the depth of Amanda Anne Platt and the Honeycutters’s achievement.
Listen to both HERE.
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.