Amanda Anne Platt and the Honeycutters’ new album was made the old-fashioned way

Editor’s note: This article was written prior to Tropical Storm Helene. 

In early August, Amanda Anne Platt and the Honeycutters released their latest album, The Ones That Stay. After a high-profile slot at the AVLFest, the Asheville group was off to tour the United Kingdom, their fourth tour there, but the first since the pandemic. With that tour concluded, for now Platt is settling back into a quieter routine, focused more on home, family — and more songwriting.

That straightforward, emotionally resonant songwriting is at the heart of The Ones That Stay. The immediacy of Platt’s lyrics is well served by uncluttered yet appealing arrangements featuring bassist Rick Cooper, Evan Martin on drums, pedal steel player Matt Smith and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Williams. To capture that blend, the group employed an old-fashioned method that has fallen out of widespread use.

Lost in translation

One virtue of modern recording technology is the ability to record each instrumental and vocal part individually, piecing the parts together into a seamless whole. But something can be lost in the process; the end product risks taking on a sterile, too-polished quality that can detract from its authenticity.

With that in mind, for The Ones That Stay, singer, songwriter and guitarist Platt made the decision to track “live” in the studio. Working with co-producers Scott McMicken and Greg Cartwright, Platt and her bandmates focused more on an audio vérité aesthetic than a technically flawless one.

“To me, there’s often something that gets lost in translation in the studio,” Platt says, “when you’re trying to get everything spot-on pitchwise, rhythmwise.” With a goal of combining the living, breathing vibe of a concert performance with the sonic quality of a recording studio, the musicians gathered in one room, without separation, to record the album’s 12 songs. “We tried to capture the performance rather than trying to make a ‘correct’ record,” Platt says.

Adding to the spontaneous, real-time character of the music, the Honeycutters made a point of not playing the songs onstage before the sessions; that approach brought a freshness to the way each musician tackled his or her parts. And as the finished product demonstrates, the sessions came together brilliantly. “We’ve been playing together so long that it’s like family,” Platt says. That “family” provides musical support for Platt’s lyrics, always a highlight of her work with the Honeycutters.

Best of both worlds

Some songwriters draw upon personal experience for their lyrics; the results can be starkly confessional. Others write with an eye toward universal themes; the danger there is that there’s not always something new to be said about well-worn topics. Yet many of the most effective lyricists navigate a path that takes the best from each of those approaches. That’s often Platt’s favored method.

“There’s always some kernel of my personal experience or emotion in the songs,” she says. “I’m not usually comfortable writing from a purely autobiographical place.” Platt explains that an event in her own life — or an observed event in the life of someone else — will often serve as the spark of an idea.

“I’ll hear a story from somebody else,” Platt says. “I’ll think, ‘That’s never happened to me, but I can relate to it because of the core emotion.’ And I’ll write from there.”

That method of songwriting brings with it a kind of freedom because it allows Platt — when she wishes to do so — to dig deeply into the kinds of emotion-filled topics that she might not feel comfortable sharing in the first person. And built into that approach is a kind of universality that’s achieved without specifically aiming for it. Platt values those qualities both in her own songwriting and in the work of artists whose music she enjoys.

“As a listener, if something really confessional is handed to me on a platter — ‘This is exactly what I was thinking and feeling when I wrote this song’ — then I have more trouble connecting to it,” she explains. “That’s how I digest other people’s art. And when I’m writing, I don’t want to paint such a complete picture that I’m painting out the listener’s own experience.”

As opposed to writing with a specific album project in mind, Platt says that in a real sense, she’s always, always writing. She’ll collect lyrical or thematic ideas and save them for when the time is right. “I’m always taking notes,” she says.

And when she finds an opportunity to sit down and strum her guitar (“an extremely rare moment these days,” she admits) she’ll refer to those notes. “I’ll start to go over my stash of napkins, journal pages, phone memos and what-have-you,” Platt says.

Looking ahead

Both in its sound and lyrical content, Platt’s music has much in common with classic country. And she has no problem with that label being applied to her work. “I’m certainly not offended by it,” she says with a chuckle. “When I first started writing, I was very into classic country and old-time music. And I wasn’t all that sure of myself as a songwriter… or as a human being.”

In those days, she admits, she felt she was hiding behind a genre label. “When I listen to early recordings of myself, I feel like I was singing with a very strong Southern accent. I was trying to sound like a Southerner and a ‘country singer.’”

Having lived in Asheville for more than 20 years, New York-born Platt observes that if anything, she has more of a Southern accent today than she did back then. In her music, though, her singing style is more natural than on her early albums, not at all forced or flecked with artifice. “I’m more comfortable with myself,” she says. “I just sound how I sound.”

That sense of becoming more comfortable in one’s own skin makes itself known in both the music that Platt writes and records with the Honeycutters and in her approach to the whole business of music. “We put out our first album, Irene, in 2009,” Platt says. “And it did reasonably well, better than expected. It had a reach beyond Asheville.” But she says that as a result of that modest success, when the time came to make a follow-up record, she was “gripped with fear” that it could never be as good as the first.

“I found that instead of thinking about what I was trying to express, I would think about how people might hear it: ‘How will this be received?’” With hindsight, Platt believes that such thoughts dilute the artistry of making music. “The lesson there,” she concludes, “is to separate those things and to try to remember why I started writing songs to begin with.”

The Honeycutters’ recent run of dates in the U.K. marked the band’s first tour there in more than four years. “It was the nicest thing,” Platt says. “We reconnected with friends over there; it felt a little bit like coming home.” With the U.K. tour concluded, Platt is back home with her family.

And save for a likely holiday-themed hometown show later this year — a long-standing Honeycutters tradition — Platt doesn’t have much planned for the near future. “Having two little kids now, it’s easier to sit close to home,” she says. But one thing is for sure: Amanda Anne Platt will keep writing songs.