Walls Crumble, Ships Sink, Hannah Honeycutt’s Above EP delivers
Hannah Honeycutt’s Above EP features five original songs, including the title track which you might have read about in this publication. This collection of songs is remarkable for its composition and execution. Honeycutt’s beguiling style of writing fuses introspective, rhythmic, life-like lyrics with lilting melodies to create moments of incredible clarity of expression. The EP is filled with gentle wildness in its acoustic ambience of guitars, banjos, pianos, and hushed harmony vocals. It’s an enveloping, in-the-room sound, complete with the artifacts like piano hammers hitting notes and fingertips moving across guitar strings. The project possesses a remarkable artistic sense of itself from the words of the songs to the production decisions and every step in between with Honeycutt’s striking, songbird voice front and center.
1. Plaster
Talks about two people living different lives, with one trying to keep things together. The narrator has “nothing but time on my mind” but says to her partner “You got living on yours.” Moving on is a struggle, as she sings “still I can’t help but picture myself with you, no matter how hard I try not to.” The walls here, where each of their “ghosts” lives, are a complex metaphor. Bad plaster repairs appear to open up avenues for communication through the walls at first, but over time, the walls win and the “plaster spread too thin” is “not worth shit now.” Lovers speaking through walls is a timeless image for star-crossed romance fighting against circumstance. “Plaster” too, points towards heartbreak, with the repeated line in the chorus “maybe i’m a reckless mess, a hopeless romantic through and through, or maybe i just care more than you do,” Yet it doesn’t quite arrive, as the final line changes to “or maybe i’m just in love with you” in the last chorus.
The song’s relaxed accompaniment heightens the storytelling. Led by a softly strummed acoustic guitar, the chorus sees bass, banjo, electric piano, and harmony vocals join. The second verse is highlighted by electric guitar, percussion, and the subtlest of harmony vocals. The song employs lovely near silences after the line “so I’ll breathe in this familiar air again and I’ll try hard to exhale this time” and for the line “maybe I just care more than you do.”
2. Warm Car
“Warm Car” is a song about pushing a conversation from peripheries and pleasantries towards matters of the heart. It’s one side of a dialogue staged while “sitting in a warm car, talking around our cold hearts.” There’s potential, maybe even promise between the two but the status quo has them close but not quite together. “It’s hard not to fall to old routines,” Honeycutt sings in the second verse. The chorus of the song is a rhetorical question, “I know you’ve got your things - I’ve got mine too - but what about this thing between me and you?”
The playful major seventh chords and guitar strum give the thoughtful speaker an edge of confidence. The song is no less raw than “Plaster” yet the quality of the energy carries the story’s hopefulness in the humble bass groove, electric guitar chords, and ambient keys.
3. Lost at Sea
This song is about going down with the ship. Whatever tranquility may have existed is gone, as the lover’s eyes have now become storms and the song’s narrator is helpless against the tempest caused by this coldness and distance. The song’s metaphoric imagery is brilliant, and woven beautifully into the story with lines like “trapped beneath the devil and these deep hazel seas i’m in deep deep deep waters now.” There’s no abandoning the ship in the song, no lifeboats, no personal flotation devices, and no search and rescue. It’s “lungs are collapsing,” “body’s spazzing,” “light starts fading,” and “I’m resting deep.”
“Lost at Sea” begins with a bass register melody played on electric bass and acoustic guitar, which incorporates it in a series of deft descending arpeggios. The song has a marked ‘free time’ feel, in which some beats linger or even stand still, while others move by quickly. Honeycutt’s melody rises and falls like waves too. Some lines are short with long melodic melismas, others are almost bursting with words, all the while the instrumental accompaniment text paints the grim nautical metaphors of the poetry. Altogether the coordinated instrumental parts, the temporal suspense, the storytelling, and the vocal performance make it a standout track.
4. Brother Tree
“Brother Tree” is another clever piece of dialogic writing, this time with a tree representing grounded, ancient wisdom and diligence. In a sequence of beautiful questions and vivid snapshots, this song contemplates what it’s like to bear the marks of struggle, to be alone in a group, or to be tied to one place. Continuing, the narrator asks what it’s like to face the night alone and to reach blindly towards the light. The heart of the song is laid out in the bridge:
‘Cause you can teach me what i do not know
How to stay when I want to go
How to dance and not move your feet
How to trust what I cannot see
Oh brother tree, teach me how to be
This song’s soundscape may be the simplest of the EP instrumentally - carried only by Honeycutt’s acoustic guitar playing with incredibly subdued electric bass support - but the inclusion of crickets and a soft crackling fire creates a rich ambience for listeners with headphones or good earbuds.
5. Above
The EP’s closer, “Above,” is a remarkable song with gravity-defying vocals and beautiful naturalistic poetry. Instrumentally this number is set apart by the piano’s melodic accentuations punctuating the aural space above the guitar part.
The poetry is fragmented and vulnerable, with “used notes and tunes”, “roses”, and “weapons”. The speaker is floating above, disconnected perhaps from life, the lover, or even herself. The final verse’s haunting wish is “maybe i’ll come back soon as a dove or a goose, or a northern loon, waiting, hoping there’s more than floating.” These specific birds each seem to represent growth, closure, and healing from the pain the speaker has endured in the story. The dove brings peace, the goose travels high above the ground with the thin air offers little resistance allowing great distances to be covered, and the loon migrates alone longing to be reconnected with its mate when they both reach their destination. It’s a beautiful and fitting end to this stunning collection of songs.
Above was released on April 11, 2025.