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. Having the imprimatur of Cobb and Clark for the album, and the latter singer/composer for a summer tour, certainly doesn’t hurt as Platt expands beyond the devoted “Dear Evan Hanson” fan base to an audience not quite so strictly Broadway-bound.
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