Arden, North Carolina (August 13, 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. The latest, “Dallas” and “Reverie,” finds the Organic Records artist bearing down on unanswered questions, whether they’re framed in a slowly simmering country-rocker (“Dallas”) or by the more introverted, acoustic treatment of “Reverie.”
“‘Dallas’ is kind of a tribute to our old tour van, Toby (no vehicle of mine goes without a name),” Platt notes — though, as is often the case, the ostensive subject barely makes an appearance in the song’s lyric — ”and also to all that went on in the years I spent traveling the country in that van. It’s weird to look back on that time and realize how young I was for a lot of it. This is a song about feeling older but maybe not any wiser…or wiser just by virtue of understanding how little you know. The track features Kevin Williams on keys and my dad, Mark Platt, on harmonica.”
With its pent-up energy and vintage-sounding piano and organ combination, “Dallas”unwinds like the endless miles of road Platt and the band traveled, as the singer-songwriter wistfully recalls:
“It all seemed so clear while we were drinking
I knew how to set the whole world straight
but the sun came like a thousand bells ringing
and I found I’d just been looking at it sideways”
By the end, as the band swells into a classic-sounding crescendo, what’s left is a final observation and a faintly hopeful question: “The darkness, it’ll find you that’s for certain / Don’t we all get born with a little bit of light to shine?”
And while “Reverie” opts for a more acoustic setting, with the organ giving way to a dobro, and upright bass replacing electric, its contemplative narrator is no more certain than the one in “Dallas.” The song moves from its quiet opening observation to reveal the heart of the matter:
“I woke to a letter on my front door
Said you ain’t gonna come around here no more”
And though she hasn’t wholly given up on the relationship, the closing seems to acknowledge the inevitable as it offers only a forlorn recollection: “I awoke from the wildest dream / We were side by side and we both knew peace.”
“‘Reverie’ is basically a break up song that I wrote during a time when I also wrote five hundred other break up songs (maybe not quite), so I was self conscious about beating a dead horse and never did anything with it,” Platt says. “I find that it doesn’t feel so specific to me now… it’s just a song about saying goodbye to someone you still care about. Rick Cooper played upright bass and Matt Smith played dobro on this, giving it an acoustic feel that I really love and hadn’t explored in a while.”
Listen to “Dallas” and “Reverie” 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.