Back with the next installment of their The Devil/The Deep Blue Sea project—dubbed a “deconstructed album” and released in a monthly series of paired singles—Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters offer another duo of songs that complement the series’ debuts, “New York” and “Open Up Your Door,” while deepening the conceptual contrast that animates the entire suite.

With its minimalist, syncopated verses that lead to fuller, more effusive choruses and an instrumental interlude that intertwines electric guitars to good effect, “Burn”—the “Devil” side of this pair—is a masterful meditation on choices. “It’s a song that kind of wrote itself,” notes Platt. “I was fiddling around with some notes I had, trying to do an assignment for a ‘songwriter’s group’ I ‘belong to’—songwriter friends who come to drink at my house and pass around a guitar. The prompt was to write a song about a ‘lady of the night.’ I had some ideas in my head after a late night drive through downtown Asheville—not necessarily about a sex worker, just the way it felt to be out after the buses stopped running and most of the tourists were asleep or passed out. Somehow it turned itself into a song about a person, or a relationship, or a house, that is disintegrating slowly and needs to either be repaired or burned to the ground. I think at that point myself and the house I had lived in for many years were both at that point. I guess that’s pretty relatable…”

For this pair’s “Deep Blue Sea” entry, Platt selected a song with an arrangement that’s right in the Honeycutters’ wheelhouse, punctuating the lyric’s almost forlorn welcome to spring with wisps of pedal steel guitar, country acoustic guitar figures and evocative fiddle that echo a long line of the group’s releases.

“‘Another Winter Gone’ is a newer song of mine,” says Platt. “It was written in response to one of the first songs I ever wrote, ‘Marie.’ The latter is a song about a woman who can’t settle down; I wrote it when I was—21? 22?—and I felt a strong connection to that character (though I wrote it from the perspective of a partner she was leaving behind). In Spring of 2020 I found myself sitting on the front porch of the house I had recently bought with my husband, our six month old daughter sleeping inside, and I felt moved to revisit ‘Marie.’ We asked our friend Adrian Carter to play violin on this track and what he played brings me to tears every time I listen. Combined with Evan’s acoustic lead and Matt’s steel line this might be one of my favorite things we’ve ever recorded.”

Whether it’s with “Burn” or “Another Winter Gone”—or, for that matter, their immediate predecessors or the many The Devil/The Deep Blue Sea songs yet to come—listeners will find that, as tough as this past year of pandemic and quarantine has been, Amanda Anne Platt and the Honeycutters have come out the other side stronger than ever.