Ben Platt and Brandy Clark on Their Haunting Duet, ‘Treehouse,’ a Joint Summer Tour, and How Platt’s ‘Honeymind’ Album Expands the Queer Americana Space
Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic For his new “Honeymind” album, singer and actor Ben Platt brought in an especially honeyed voice as a counterpart on one song, Brandy Clark.
He had written “Treehouse” in a writing session with Clark well before the album was being put together, and then he and producer Dave Cobb had the eureka (or as Platt puts it, “duh”) moment of realizing just how much more haunting it might sound as a duet with the co-writer, whose chops obviously don’t begin and end with songwriting prowess.
With “Honeymind,” Platt’s third solo album, he is moving more into a singer-songwriter space that can fairly be characterized as Americana (although he veers a little more toward the pop-anthemic on a tune like “All-American Queen”).
It’s representative of the type of music he grew up loving, apart from — or as an appropriate adjunct to — musical theater, two forms he sees as quite adjacent in their emphasis on intimacy and narrative.
