Amy Lee is a 21st-century metal icon. Blessed with true talent and a genuinely unique, sincere perspective, the young girl who started Evanescence back in 1995 and found fame with 2003’s mega-hit Bring Me To Life has turned her band into superstars. Talking to Hammer over Zoom, she’s as warm and friendly a personality as you’d wish to encounter, and it’s not long before we realise that her list of achievements is so vast – taking in No.1s, collaborations and orchestral work – it’s near-impossible to squeeze everything she’s learned into a single hour.
BEING PART OF A BAND IS A BEAUTIFUL THING
“There’s a lot of new fire now we’ve found Emma [Anzai, bassist]. It’s like it was the universe telling us what Evanescence should be. I’ve found as I’ve gotten older to let the universe do that; you have to let go of your own plans. It certainly gives you a new energy when you’re in this new, positive space. We really have something special, we feel like brothers and sisters, and we have good memories of all of our bandmembers.”
YOU CAN’T CHANGE PEOPLE’S IDEAS OF WHO YOU ARE
“I don’t get frustrated by negative representations of me, because they’re just that – perceptions. One of the things that I’ve got better at doing over the years is tuning out people’s misperceptions. People don’t know all the details of how things work and what we’ve been through, so I can’t get angry if they have a certain idea of me because they just don’t know. I’ve been fighting for this band since I was a teenager, and I couldn’t do it on my own, but I am the leader and the people that I work with love that I’m a leader. And I love their input. Mutual respect between bandmembers is crucial.”
NOTHING COMPARES TO PLAYING LIVE
“We’ve been back since November of last year, and after not having live music for a while, being able to share that release, that beautiful thing that we all share when there are thousands of people in a room, that is such a release for my heart. It wouldn’t be if I was just singing into the dark, so I’m grateful for what I do on a level that I couldn’t have been when we were first out.”
NEVER LET MONEY DICTATE YOUR ART
“You can’t measure success in numbers and money. I really believe that if you’re speaking from the heart and you put your whole heart into it, it’s going to connect to people. The problem is people try and make money and try and survive, but it traps you. Commerce is the enemy of art, and in this day and age I feel like everybody is trying to sell me something, and I hate it, it makes me not believe.”
I’VE SURPASSED MY OWN WILDEST EXPECTATIONS
“When I was a kid, I never could have seen this band going this far, and my dreams were huge! When I think about being 40 and seeing what we have become… I could never have seen that. I could only see my ideas and my musical vision; I didn’t see where that could have taken me. But you have to embrace life and the beautiful madness of creation.”
BRING ME TO LIFE IS MUCH BIGGER THAN JUST ME
“Bring Me To Life is such a timeless part of my life. When I look back and think about the creation of the song, I thought it was great… but I didn’t think it was any better than any of the other songs on the album. I guess that’s why people can’t replicate a hit, it’s not a mathematical formula! That song just connected with people. It was just this veiled confession of feeling in love with my now husband when we weren’t even together. It was a time I felt seen by somebody, when I’d never felt like I’d been seen by anybody. Twenty years later, there are people who have connected with that song in a similar way, and we are all part of that journey together now.”
SONGS CAN BE ABOUT WHATEVER YOU WANT THEM TO BE
“People think they know what Call Me When You’re Sober is about… I do generally write about the people around me, but I also write [so] different situations in my life can be applied [to songs later]. As it has been through the years, when I sing it now, I’m not thinking about a boyfriend from 15 years ago… I’m thinking about now. And that’s got to be true of music in general.”
LEARN FROM THE BEST
“I recently did a song with Dave Stewart from Eurythmics. We did a cover of [The Everly Brothers’] Love Hurts. Something cool I learnt from Dave was that he comes from an era where you really have to make choices. I came through being really inspired by that 90s wall of guitars, like Smashing Pumpkins; we throw so many combinations and tracks at the wall until we find something cool. Dave would see that he needed a guitar and quickly find that knack of finding that sound – three guitar tracks, one take of two of them, and three takes of the third one, and it was done! You can stack and stack and stack, but then you start to lose the unique quality that is just that one thing. If you make the choice, you hear it.”
BROADEN YOUR HORIZONS AS FAR AND WIDE AS YOU CAN
“I really love contrast. I think that you can hear that in our music. So with a lot of the artists that I love, in the same vein as us, it’s hard to find someone I want to collaborate with. It’s when you find the biggest differences that you find the new colour. What that would be next, I don’t know; I have an open mind. My true favourite thing that came out of the pandemic was this comic called Bo Burnham. He’s a genius! Evanescence and comedy… it doesn’t seem like it would work, but it might work for Amy Lee! How cool for him to be so real on such a profound level. If he wasn’t, it wouldn’t be so funny.”
I’D DO ANYTHING TO WORK WITH TIM BURTON
“I love Tim Burton, but I’ve never been able to meet him. I got to meet Danny Elfman – he had me come over to his house. As a musician I’m a fan of both of them. I wanted to learn more about Danny’s process! I would love to meet Tim Burton, but there would have to be a reason, there would need to be the right project, the right film. That would be a moment where you could just print up the tombstone. It’s his contrast; everything is like a cartoon, the colours are like a dream of life, like a painting that’s come to life. But, in addition, there is this part that is grief, or pain, or something really messed up that seems to come from a child’s perspective. Which, having been through grief as a child, I really relate to.”
CHANNEL YOUR GRIEF INTO SOMETHING POSITIVE…
“When you’re hurting, you grab on to anything that helps. That’s why addiction is so high in people who are grieving. Music has been that addiction for me, a positive addiction, when you feel something so strong that it has to come out of your body. Sing it, paint it, express it. Art for me is always the way to get those things out, I don’t feel the same just talking about it.”
… AND ALLOW YOURSELF TO FEEL
“My sister died when I was six, and it was just me and my parents again, and in that moment, I went into a mode of wanting to protect my parents’ hearts. I didn’t allow myself a lot of outward grief, I didn’t want to add to their pain. So, my inner voice – the time I spent with myself and the things that I would create – became this very dear friend to me. It was only years later that I realised I could take those things and turn them into something healing.”
THERE’S NOTHING LIKE BEING PART OF AN ORCHESTRA
“I love working with all different musicians and artists, the classical world works in so many different ways. It’s strict; they’re on a schedule and if you go over, it’s over. It’s terrifying, but exciting! You’re working with these high-level musicians who have done their work, they can read music, and it just feels like a tightrope – at any moment it could come crashing down. You’re not tied down to a click track, you’re working to the movements of the conductor’s baton. The energy created by the focus makes it so gratifying when the sound comes out. So many pieces, so many people, all creating one tiny fraction, making something so much bigger than myself… it’s really special.”
