Amy Lee can still recall the specific scene in the Academy Award-winning 1984 film, Amadeus, about the life of Wolfgang Mozart, that informed her perspective of music: The composer plays the piano upside down, his hands crossed in a vampire-like fashion. “I saw the movie Amadeus when I was eight and decided it was my destiny to be a composer,” Lee tells American Songwriter of aspiring to be a “crazy, mad genius classical composer,” going so far as to recreate the scene.
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“My first thought about being someone who made music was by watching a movie about Mozart,” she adds. “I was super inspired at a young age by this beautiful, extreme personality that was reckless and wild and thinking of things for the first time and breaking rules.”
The young Lee was so eager to learn piano that her grandparents gifted her lessons for her birthday, and she mastered the instrument over the course of nine years. “I was so grateful and excited to play, I had it in my heart that I wanted to,” she says.
She coupled her piano lessons with the school choir and soon started making her own music on the side. Lee was raised in a household where music was playing all the time. Her father was a musician who worked in radio, his job keeping them on the move. Lee was born and raised in South Florida before they moved to Illinois and then settled in Arkansas when she was 12. As she entered adolescence, Lee was exploring grunge and alternative music, particularly Nirvana. She was at a friend’s house watching MTV when the video for Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box”came on and she quickly became “obsessed” with the song and an avid fan of the band, along with Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden.
“A lot of the darker side of the alternative and grunge scene big-time spoke to me,” she says. The lyrics of grunge songs spoke to the angst she was feeling at that time as a budding teenager who was trying to find her place each time her family moved, which led to a feeling of loneliness that she channeled into music. “I think that having to be in that place and find all this really amazing music at the same time that spoke to my heart is part of what really made me spend so much of my time, instead of trying to make more friends, at home and in my room and playing on my keyboard in the middle of the night and trying to be inventive like all those artists that I love, and eventually meeting other musicians and forming a band and being a part of a world that we were creating instead of the one around me,” Lee explains of how the blend of classical and grunge music impacted her.
The course of her life altered when she was 13 and met guitarist Ben Moody at a Christian youth camp in Arkansas, the two bonded over their mutual passion for music. Lee’s expertise on the piano coupled with Moody’s guitar playing led to the origins of Evanescence. At the time, Lee was a 13-year-old who was “feeling all the feelings” as an outsider living in Little Rock and was starting to dig deeper into film scores like Edward Scissorhands and sci-fi thriller Donnie Darko.
“There’s all these really beautiful film scores that I was into, but then also starting to really dive into this feeling of grunge and alternative. Ben was the one who was into metal, but he shared that same love for film,” she explains of the origins of Evanescence. “Having the combo of that heaviness that he could harness and then mine coming from that other place, that really was the beginning of the whole vision for the thing. The combination of those two things in my heart still is very much at the core of what I love and what the sound of the band was based on.”
At the time she met Moody, Lee was also a burgeoning songwriter, taking her “dramatic journal entries” and pairing them with her piano melodies. “It’s hard to think of myself as a songwriter at 13, it’s embarrassing,” she says, joking that looking at her songs from back then is like “looking at a terrible old diary.” “But the heart was there, and you have to start putting yourself out there and seeing what it sounds like to find out who you are as a songwriter,” she observes. “It was very innocent and very much just scraping at everything and trying to find my voice.”
Her voice as a songwriter was shaped by hardship. When Lee was six years old, her three-year-old sister died from an unknown illness. The devastating loss, coupled with the challenge of constantly moving to new locations, informed the melancholy nature of her songwriting.
“We have so many feelings when we’re coming of age, maybe me more than some,” she says. “I had been through some things, and interestingly enough, moving at that time was one of the things that was painful.”
Her pain shows up in “Hello,” a deep cut on Evanescence’s blockbuster debut album Fallen, that she wrote in honor of her sister. The song is short but sweet, Lee’s gentle piano playing and stirring voice accompanying piercing lyrics like, If I smile and don’t believe / Soon I know I’ll wake from this dream / Don’t try to fix me I’m not broken / Hello I’m the lie living for you so you can hide. She cites her sister’s death as her “darkest hour” at that point in her life and that the writing process helped her grieve.
“As an artist, when you let yourself break walls down and see what it sounds like, it has been a really beautiful thing in my life throughout so many more experiences since then,” she explains of writing “Hello,” which she compares to a “good therapy session.”
“Being able to talk about it and not be afraid and recognize when the words come out that it’s there, it’s human and there’s nothing wrong with you… The ability to know how to pop the cork and just let it flow and see the beauty in that and not think, ‘This is terrible and depressing and no one’s going to want to hear it,’ you start to hear the hope in it and you start to hear the things in yourself that are fighting, and that’s why we start making music because we don’t want to be alone,” she adds. “We want to express it, we want to share it with somebody, and you end up finding so much beauty and hope and connection and reason through that. It has been something that’s a really beautiful thing in my life.”
That dark songwriting is what shaped Fallen, Evanescence’s debut album released in March 2003. All 12 tracks were co-written by a combination of Lee, Moody, and producer David Hodges. The album was a worldwide success, spawning four hits “Bring Me to Life,” “Going Under,” “My Immortal” and “Everybody’s Fool.”
“Bring Me to Life” earned Evanescence the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance in 2004, when they were also named Best New Artist. With more than 17 million copies sold worldwide, Fallen is one of the best-selling albums of the 21st century. Lee admits that she wasn’t surprised that the album was such a massive success, fully embracing the optimism that she could reach the ambitious heights she was aiming for. “You have to dream big, and you have to see the possibility that it could go that well, and we did,” she said. “I absolutely believed that it was possible that it would be a mega-hit. You have to be excited about it, and you have to love it and you have to pour everything into it just like that — and we did.”
In honor of Fallen’s 20th anniversary, Lee and team have been working with the album’s original mastering engineer, Ted Jensen, to create a remastered version, set for release on November 17 that features old acoustic recordings from a live radio event and a brand new version of “My Immortal.”
Lee explains how the label insisted they release the piano-heavy version on the album, while the band fought to release another rendition that features the full band alongside an orchestra. The revamped version takes composer David Campbell’sstring section and removes the band, allowing the strings to stand in the spotlight. Fans will also get to hear old demos, with Lee hand-selecting the “rarest or weirdest” of each, along with voice notes recorded when she was writing the lyrics, the warped tape bringing fans deep into the creation process.
“I wanted to make something that was worth having,” she says of her approach to the 20th anniversary edition. “I’ve always taken a bit of a stand against selling our fans the same thing twice. I don’t like redoing something unless you’re really going to give them something that they don’t already have. We’ve been working on stuff that I think is really beautiful and special.”
She says the re-release serves as a “celebration of life” for the songs that made them known around the world and gave them a “tight-knit community” of passionate fans. “A lot of it’s about them, not us or me, it’s their experiences. That album has been the soundtrack to a lot of people’s lives,” she observes of how Fallen tracks have been used at weddings and funerals, in addition to helping people with heartache and healing.
Over the years, Lee has felt the impact of sharing her own pain through music and how it connects with countless others who have experienced the same emotions. “The thing that speaks to me very deeply is when people say that it helped them through a loss, something that was impossibly difficult,” Lee reflects. “There are times when a song is what I need to listen to over and over again and feel like I am understood in a way that’s beyond words that I can communicate, and we have had a lot of people talk to us in that way. That’s amazing.”
But perhaps one of the strongest threads that binds Evanescence with its loyal fanbase is creating a deep sense of community among those who identify as outsiders. She notes that even though Fallen was wildly popular, it went against the grain at the time of its release. “We were number one and all that, but it wasn’t for being the cool kids. It was for being the different ones, and I think that there’s a very tight-knit, beautiful family culture with our fans that has to do with being the underdog and embracing being different, embracing being hurt, and choosing to keep being exactly who you are,” she says of the album being “counterculture.” “It’s such a pleasure to be able to share in our music that has been around for a long time with people, as well as the new songs that speak more to who we are today,” she adds. “It feels like a big homecoming. Every show feels like a big celebration of life and all that everybody in the audience we’ve seen and been through together.”
Reflecting on the past 20 years, Lee says that she’s operating in a state of gratitude for all that she’s experienced and is letting go of any past turmoil. “I spent a lot of time fighting in the beginning, and when you spend a lot of your energy doing that, I think sometimes the good stuff can pass you by,” she observes. “There are a lot of times throughout the last 20 years you’re like, ‘Okay, maybe that was it, it was great.’ And then it just keeps coming back around stronger than ever and I’m just very grateful. It’s so much bigger than me, it’s so much bigger than us.”
Main image by Travis Shinn
