Amanda Anne Platt of The Honeycutters

by Amanda Flinner

Amanda Anne Platt has always been the frontwoman for The Honeycutters, but it took nearly a decade for the singer-songwriter to attach her name to group's moniker. "I think I've just gotten to a place where I feel comfortable enough to be in the spotlight," she said after the release of their fourth album, 2017's Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters.

The North Carolina-based band made its name performing a unique brand of alt-country dubbed Appalachian honky tonk, starting with the 2009 debut, Irene. But Platt, a New York native, favored punk rock and grunge in her teen years and initially resisted the pull of country music, a staple of her father's record collection. That is, until she realized her earthy vocals and lyrically driven songs about the ups and downs of life were well-suited to the genre.

Songfacts caught up with Platt on a brief break from touring to chat about songwriting, the perils of social media, and how she ended up eating oatmeal with Guy Clark.
Amanda Flinner (Songfacts): You've been writing songs since you were a teenager. Did the interest in performing emerge at the same time?

Amanda Anne Platt: Pretty much, yeah. I always wanted to perform. I always wanted to be in a band, but I never really thought that I could write songs. I remember writing my first song and probably within the month I went to an open mic to perform it. It wasn't very good but I went. I gave it the old college try.

Songfacts: Lots of classic Texas singer-songwriters shaped your musical output. Did you naturally pick up on that particular style?

Platt: I heard so much of that music when I was younger but when I started writing songs I wasn't really listening to that kind of stuff. It was mostly from my earlier memories and since then I've definitely gotten back into it, and I'm sure that it continues to influence me and come out in my songwriting. But I don't remember it being intentional at the time. In fact I kind of remember fighting the whole country thing. I was like, "I don't want to write country music, I want to write rock and roll."

Songfacts: When you started songwriting, did you study song structure?

Platt: I've always listened to a lot of music so I'm sure that on some subconscious level I was taking note of what makes this song feel good, you know. The first song that I wrote I just remember having a melody in my head and wording the thing to fit to it. Other than maybe there should be a verse and a chorus, I don't really remember having any idea of how I thought it should be structured or what would make it good. It was sort of in my head, so I just wrote it. It felt pretty natural.

Songfacts: A lot of your songs have strong imagery that really helps the listener picture what's going on. Are you a visual person?

Platt: Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think I am. A lot of what drives me in my creativity is images. I'm not a visual artist, obviously I'm not a painter or a photographer, but that's kind of my interpretation of what I see.

Songfacts: The Honeycutters are a North Carolina band, but you grew up near New York City. What drew you to Asheville as opposed to Nashville?

Platt: What ultimately brought me to Asheville is that I was looking for somebody to apprentice with to build guitars. I had dropped out of school up in New York and was looking for a different location, so I found a guy in Asheville. But I was looking at Austin because I have family there and at Nashville, being such a big country music town. I think ultimately those moves felt a little too intimidating, like I was really declaring that I was going to let go and try to make a living off my music if I went to either of those cities. Whereas Asheville was more like, yeah that's a place I could go, I already found this guy to work with and it felt like an easy, natural move.

Songfacts: How would you describe your songwriting process?

Platt: It's been changing a little bit for me. When I was a little younger, I felt like it would just sort of fall out of my brain. As you build up a catalog of work and log some miles on the road and play your songs for people, there's a little bit more baggage with it. It's harder for me to just sit down and write a song without having the thought occur to me of, how would this sound with the band. Or how would our fans think of this, or how will people interpret these lyrics. Before, I didn't care because I wasn't thinking about that and I think that made it easier. But these days, it's just whatever the muse is, whenever it strikes me. Usually what happens is I'll have a melody or some words that I've been playing with and all the stars align and I sit down and then I'm able to put it together. A lot of times I start doing that and it doesn't lead anywhere and I'll get frustrated and put it down and go watch TV or something. When everything kind of lines up right, I can grasp onto something. I'm like, yeah okay this feels like something to me, this feels true to me, and then I can usually see it through.

Songfacts: Do you use technology in the way that you capture ideas or are you the pen and paper type?

Platt: I'm very pen and paper. I will eventually type up lyrics now because I'm trying to get more organized at that. Maybe this is part of me being a visual person, but I like to see it on the page and I like to be able to write words over here and add like a little side note and arrows pointing to things. It kind of looks like a crazy map.

Songfacts: I'm about two years older than you but I was thinking it's funny because when you're born around that time near the mid-'80s, we kind of had one foot before the internet era and one foot after. We kind of grew up with it but we kind of didn't.

Platt: Yeah man, I feel like our generation got the biggest mind fuck. You talk about when like electricity became a widespread thing. Obviously that changed lives. I mean that was a huge development, or like the automobile. But the changes that we have seen in our lifetime, just the internet and social media. Now, the White House tweets. When we were kids nobody knew what that meant. You'd be like, What? The White House tweeted?

Songfacts: Yeah. Because even when we had internet, we didn't have social media yet so we didn't grow up with that.

Platt: Right. I remember instant messaging on AOL. You know, I felt like I was in some sci-fi thing.

Songfacts: So at what point then do you bring a song to the band?

Platt: Well, what we've been doing the past few years - and this might kind of be changing a little bit. Since we've been on a label we've been kind of churning out the albums, and I'm a pretty constant writer. I mean, when I feel like it's time to sit down and make an album I don't like sit down and write all of the songs. I'm not like, "Oh, I need to write these songs now." When it's time to make an album, I'll think about what kind of songs I want and I'll go back into this catalog of songs that I have.

So for the past few years that's been when I bring them to the band. We'll make a little demo with me and my guitar and then give it to the guys on a CD, and they can listen to it and pick out which songs are jumping out to them. Or what they hear, specific beats or hooks or whatever.

I have a bunch of songs that are finished in my mind, at least melodically speaking, and the words are finished. And when it's time to record we round those out with the band. But now this year we don't have any recording date set or any specific plans for the next album. We've had a lot of down time lately so we've had some practices where we're just playing around with this stuff.

Songfacts: I read this really intriguing thing where you mentioned sitting at Guy Clark's kitchen table eating oatmeal and smoking cigarettes. How did that happen?

Platt: Yeah, that was an amazing thing that happened. We had a mutual friend through our old booking agent who said Guy's sitting at home these days and he likes writing with younger writers and likes to keep busy. So I got to go over there a few times and hang out. I think that probably would have been the first time I went over there and had this surreal moment of realizing I was sitting there at the kitchen table with him. His girlfriend was serving us oatmeal and I was looking at the pictures around the kitchen, pictures of him with Rodney Crowell and Townes Van Zandt. It was very surreal.

Songfacts: Did he give you any advice during those conversations?

Platt: The one piece of advice that I remember him giving me is - at the time I was having a little bit of a conversation with our record label about some language in one of my songs. I played it for him and I was like, "They want me to change this word." And he was like, "Fuck 'em." [laughs] That was my advice from Guy Clark.

The Honeycutters at the Grey Eagle in Black Mountain, North Carolina

Songfacts: So do you feel like each word is important in its own way, like you don't want to deviate from what you have in your head already?

Platt: Yeah, definitely. Once it's gotten to the point where I'm ready to record something, the words are set. That's always the most important thing to me. I think I've grown more into a singer and a frontwoman, but for the longest time I always insisted that I just was a songwriter. That was the most important thing, delivering my lyrics. I still feel that way. I need to believe in what I'm saying. And it can be just one little word. In this case it was a cuss word but they didn't want me to use it for their own reasons and that's kind of water under the bridge now.

I'm very intentional with what I write. I try not to write filler where I'm like, yeah I can change that, I just need a line there. I try to really make sure that everything I'm saying is adding to the story.

Songfacts: Do you write while you're on tour?

Platt: Not really. If we're on a really long tour, like three weeks or more, then I usually will end up doing it by default because I need to unload my brain a little bit. But in general I might take some notes on the road of things that I see or things that intrigue me. It's usually when I get home I'll have a period where I can unpack my bag and take out my guitar and see what has been stored in my brain over this past weekend or week or whatever.

Songfacts: "What We've Got" has the house with the peeling paint and a record store with the "Quit looking, Love is blind" sign in the window. Were those real places that you visited at some point?

Platt: The record store with the sign in the window was actually not a real place. That was like a half dream, where I was picturing a real record store that I know and sort of adding my own embellishment with the sign in the window. The house with the peeling paint could be so many houses. That's my house, among others. But when I wrote that, I was actually babysitting for my friend's little girl. She was taking a nap and I was sitting there looking out the window and there is their neighbor's house. It had the wicker chair and the peeling paint and their dog was snoring, and I just kind of wrote that song while she was asleep.

Songfacts: What's the story behind "Birthday Song"?

Platt: That for me is significant because it was the last song that I wrote in my 20s. I wrote it a day or two before my 30th birthday. There'd been maybe a month or two where I'd been really not feeling great. I go through phases of some basic self doubts and self loathing I think we all go through, and I'd been in a lot of fear about money and questioning if I had been making right choices in my life. And I just had this day that was like this amazing break. It was like the heat broke from summer and it was the first really fall feeling day. It was beautiful, the sun was shining and I had just gotten an unexpected check in the mail that was going to help ends meet for that month. It was like this amazing feeling of gratitude.

I remember sitting out on the back porch with my guitar and starting that lyric, "I just got word today the money's going to be okay and the weather ought to hold out to the weekend." And it was all true. It's like this amazing feeling of, oh my God I'm going to be able to pay my rent and the weather's going to be great for my birthday. I can hang out outside and have a fire or whatever.

Songfacts: Now that you've been performing that song for a couple years, what kind of emotions does that bring up?

Platt: Well, there's a few songs that we do that were written from that place of gratitude. You know, opening my eyes and being like, "Oh, things are good right now." Sometimes tours can be a little stressful and when I get on stage and sing a song like that, it's advice to me. Particularly the second verse of that song with, "Everybody gets stuck in the middle sometimes," and, "If love is the seed, the fruit is gonna taste so sweet." That's a reminder to me to be grateful and to try to be present with what I'm doing and not freak out about the future. Just enjoy the moment because the moment is good. When I'm performing with my band the moment is always good. It's all this shit around it that gets stressful. It's like a callback to me just to be like, "Hey, chill out, things are pretty good right now."

Songfacts: "Rare Thing" was an interesting one because it was a fan request. Was that your first commission?

Platt: Yeah, first and only. It was funny because I agreed to do it and had formed a relationship with the person that I was writing the song for. I was writing it for his wife and we had been emailing back and forth. I felt like I was really getting to know him and his wife even though we hadn't met until we went and performed it for them. And all of the sudden there's this pressure, like I had never really felt pressure to write a song before. I didn't want to just fudge it. I still wanted it to be something that I could believe in, something that I felt was true from my own perspective.

I think that as songwriters, and probably any kind of artist, if you're commissioned to do something you have to find that middle. It's their story but to make it authentic and make it breathe you need to have your own story in there, too. So I remember having this pressure of feeling like I didn't have anything to really add to this and the song was feeling like this list of facts that he had given me about his wife. And then my mom gave me the break. She said something to me about the guy I was dating at the time who's now my fiancé. She was like, "Well, if you love him, he must really be a rare thing." That made me think of how there's a lot of obsession with love and romance in our culture. But when you really find somebody that is your best friend that you can be with, that is rare. That was definitely what I was getting from David and his wife Holly. They had this incredible love that has lasted them through the years, and we're actually going to see them tomorrow in Ohio. It's been a lasting friendship now which is cool.

Songfacts: I'm going to take you way back to "Irene." Was that influenced by the folk standard "Goodnight Irene"? You repeat that a lot throughout the song.

Platt: Yeah, absolutely. My dad is a musician as well. He stopped doing it professionally right before my brother was born and went to law school and had a more lucrative existence as an attorney. But when I was little he was always in bands, or one band specifically that was an after work thing with his buddies, you know, weekend warriors. They would practice at our house from time to time and I would always want to hang out with the boys and not go to bed. When it was time for me to go bed they would sing "Goodnight Irene."

I guess I was 21 when I wrote it. I had not been in Asheville long and I was coming up against the fact that I'm really not a kid anymore. I've moved to this other city and I'm making my own way now and remembering things about my childhood. That chorus felt like a good solidifier of all the things that I was feeling.

Songfacts: "Irene" joins a cast of female characters in your songs along with "Marie," "Josephine," "Angeline," "Eleanora," and "Dora Lee." Are these characters different facets of yourself?

Platt: Probably. That comes back to always having to have a little bit of your own story in a song. Definitely a few of those, "Marie" and "Angeline." Not so much "Dora Lee," but "Irene," definitely. When I wrote it, I was thinking about myself and things I was trying to figure out at the time, and trying to reassure myself a little bit.

Songfacts: "Barmaid's Blues" from On the Ropes is interesting too because it's kind of a flip on the usual story of a patron telling his sorrows to the bartender. Did you look for inspiration to bring that Old West type of setting alive?

Platt: Not really. I actually wrote that song in Florida of all places, around Destin. I forget what town I was in, but there's this little festival that happens on the panhandle called 30A, which is the road that runs out there. A lot of the year it's kind of a resort. Everyone has condos and it's on the beach. It's very beautiful. But then in January they do this little songwriters festival because a lot of people aren't down there. So they put you up in these nice condos that nobody's living in and it's really fun.

But I was down there by myself one year and I was just enjoying my huge fancy beach condo to myself. I think I had that line, "All of the gunslingers have rings on their fingers." I was playing that for a while. It was one of those things where the moment was right and I was like, I have this song now. Now I understand what this song is about and how it needs to come together, and I was able to sit down and write it.

Songfacts: What inspired "Eden"?

Platt: The first inkling of that song came from a drive through Indiana and seeing a little airstream trailer on the side of the road. More and more these days something that fascinates me is the idea of letting things be simple. We were talking about the internet and social media and everything. So much of me is just wanting to run and hide all the time, and I know I'm not the only person who feels that way. Because one of the things with smartphones and all that, there's just a constant bombardment of information and so much talk about keeping up with the Joneses. It's like people used to envy their neighbors, now they can envy the whole world. Everyone's putting their lives on social media and trying to make them look the best they can. That was one other place I was coming from. You know, that idea of moving out in the middle of nowhere, living in a trailer with no TV and just focusing on your kids or trying to keep things really, really simple, almost dumbed down. Not that I think it's a dumb story. I naturally go to the story of the Garden of Eden and how that's what that was. So you eat the apple and then have all this knowledge. And of course it was Eve that ate the apple, of course it was the woman's fault. [laughs]

It's pretty tongue-in-cheek. But it's like, I don't care, whatever, put me back, I'm not going to eat the apple, I don't want to know. That's something I relate to and I've had some other people come up to me since that album came out and told me that they get that.

Songfacts: It's kind of like connecting to your reality again. You get so caught up in the fantasy world of Instagram and social media. It's not so much dumbing down but reconnecting with who you are.

Platt: Yeah, exactly. And trying to figure out what matters. That's one thing about the global community is that it's not just your friends' problems or your neighbors' problems or your own problems. It's like now I know what's going on in Syria and that's horrible and how do I deal with that? How do you just go about your life knowing that there's all this intense human suffering and unfairness going on? I don't have an answer for that. You can spend your life just trying to help everybody and putting as much good into the world as you can, and that's so noble and I would love to do that, but then at the same time I feel like it's so overwhelming that I just want to hide under a rock. It's trying to figure out what can I really do in this world, and maybe it is just trying to really love your kids and giving them a safe world to grow up in. If that's the best that you do in this world I don't think that's a bad thing.

Songfacts: You also did a take on "Hallelujah." Was that something you guys took out on the road before you recorded it?

Platt: Yeah, for a long time. I started doing that when I was still living in New York. I couldn't play a waltz, so I just played it like that. Then it kind of slept for a few years and then we were in Canada and we needed to play a song by a Canadian artist. The venue requested that we do that. At first I thought, I don't know that we know any. And then I was like, wait a second, Leonard Cohen is Canadian.

So we worked it up again and played it for maybe four years before we recorded it. I was always of the mindset that that song does not need to be recorded anymore. It just got to the point we had a lot of people asking if we had recorded our version and if we were planning to record our version. So finally I said, well alright we'll just do it. I don't regret it, but I think there's probably a lot of people that rolled their eyes, like, oh god another person singing that song. But I feel like we've brought our own take to the table, and I'm happy with how it came out.

Songfacts: Did you know going into your last album that you were going to step out as Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters?

Platt: I'm not sure. It's something that we've always talked about, even with Irene. We had been playing around Asheville as the Honeycutters but there were a few people that were saying, you should go ahead and just use your name. I've always thought, well I'd rather just be part of the band, but then we started working with a new manager in December of 2016 and that was something that he felt strongly about. He was like, I really think that you guys should do this. But I don't remember if I had agreed or not before we actually went into the studio or if that was a kind of a quick, "okay fine let's do it," after the recording happened.

Songfacts: Yeah, I was wondering if that would add extra pressure going into the album knowing that your name was going to be front and center.

Platt: Yeah, it probably would have or did if I knew. It's funny the things we can forget about. I felt some pressure around the whole thing just in general. It's funny, I've always used my full name for music. Even when I lived up in New York, but most people around town here just call me Amanda, and my friends call me Amanda. When we put that album out, I felt like all of these people that I've known for years started very kind of like snidely being like Amanda Anne. I mean, I answer to both. I don't mind, but it's just funny. I feel like people were looking at me in a different way a little bit or maybe thought I was putting on airs.

Songfacts: Last year, you guys finally got to tour the UK. What differences did you notice between your audiences over there versus your audiences over here?

Platt: First of all, there's an interest in American music over there that is very present. I felt like there were a lot of people that came to see us not really knowing our music but just being, oh it's a kind of country band from the States, we want to check this out, this is something that we're into. So that was cool. And it's funny, I had other friends that had toured over there, and they were like, you're going to think that they hate you. I remember the first couple of shows we played I had that feeling. There seems to be this tradition over there, and I didn't really ask anyone about this, but most of the venues we played, there's a politeness while you're playing your songs. They'll applaud after a song but it's not like woooooo! It's like almost like golf clap. [Joan Armatrading agrees. She told us: "There's an honesty about the American audiences. If they like what they're seeing, they'll demonstrate that. They'll shout, they'll woop, wail or whatever."]

There were some exceptions, like we played a couple of gigs that were more like bar gigs, where people were really just like balls to the wall. But I think the majority is this very polite applause after songs. But then when your show is over, after you play your last song, you get a standing ovation and stomping on the floor and calling for more. So during the set it was difficult to feel that people were really into it, at first. Then you get used to that idea and you're like, okay they're just listening. What a novel idea.

Songfacts: Did you notice that certain songs were more popular?

Platt: I don't remember. Probably I did see that but I don't remember. A lot of audiences here, if you play more of a stomp-and-holler upbeat song it usually gets a bigger response. There's a song off Me Oh My called "Ain't It the Truth" that's usually a crowd pleaser. We tend to play a lot of mid-tempo stuff, so you play something faster and people really respond to it.

Songfacts: Are those the ones you like to perform more, that are more fun to play live?

Platt: Not necessarily. I love letting my band cut loose a little bit and showcase their soloing talents or have a little more fun, but for me sometimes it seems like a lot of those songs are songs that I wrote earlier on without a lot of thought. Like, oh this is a fun fast song to write. It's not necessarily as fulfilling for me to deliver lyrically. I probably wouldn't play those songs in a solo show, but they're fun with the band.

April 19, 2018
Find more about Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters at http://www.honeycutters.com
Further reading: interview with Guy Clark
photos: Jeff Fasano (1) Wayne Ebinger (3) Eliza Schweizbach (2,4)

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Comments: 1

  • Rich from Albany, N.y.That was an interesting interview of one of my favorite songwriters. You asked questions I wanted the answers too.
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