Arden, North Carolina (September 10, 2021) — As Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters reach the halfway point of their “deconstructed album” release with two more singles embodying the collection’s over-arching The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea concept, the singer-songwriter has chosen a pair of titles that offer complementary glimpses of parent-child relationships framed in contrasting musical settings.
“‘Great Confession’ was the first song I wrote after the birth of my daughter,” says Platt. “It carries a lot of the same themes that repeat on this album… growing up, growing old, learning more about what it means to be a parent and a child and a human. Rick Cooper plays the electric guitar, showcasing another one of his unsung talents.”
Indeed, Cooper’s contribution here fits perfectly into the song’s mellow, melancholy country-rock mood nestling next to Matt Smith’s pedal steel guitar as they glide over the bed of sustained organ chords and flashes of piano supplied by Kevin Williams and drummer Evan Martin. With its cold vocal start, swelling, steel-driven outro and meditative story line built around choruses that ask two different, yet equally wistful questions:
“…now you’re up at dawn just waiting on another great confession
don’t it seem like there should be some kind of lesson?…”
“…now you’re staring at the business end of all your bad decisions
don’t it seem like there should be some kind of wisdom?”
“Great Confession” is a performance that at once reminds listeners of a long line of country classics and stands on its own as an emblem of Amanda Anne Platt and the Honeycutters’ quintessential sound and vibe.
On the Deep Blue Sea side, “Even Good Men Get The Blues” takes a slower and even darker tone — though it offers a bit of kindness, too. Framed by a melodic pedal steel guitar and piano figure that’s offered in both restrained and more impassioned versions, the song is filled with Platt’s characteristically insightful turns of speech in lines like “His pain is like an eighteen wheeler/that’s a lot of heavy to slow down,” while echoing “Great Confession”’s paired choruses:
“And it hurts to say you love him
cause you hate him sometimes too
Darling we’re all slave to something
and even good men get the blues”
“And it hurts to say you love him
cause he looks so much like you
Darling we’ll all slave to something
and even good men get the blues”
“‘Even Good Men Get the Blues’ is a song about addiction, and fatherhood, and the space between our intentions and reality,” notes Platt. “I wrote this long before I became a parent myself so it’s interesting to see it in a different light now.”
Listen to “Great Confession” and “Even Good Men Get The Blues” 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.