EVANESCENCE TRIVIA
Trivia
Two Japanese pressings were offered. The standard one, catalogue number TOCP-71195, cost 2,500 yen including tax and came with a bonus track, translated lyrics and sleeve notes. The deluxe edition, TOCP-71196, was 3,200 yen and added four further CD tracks and a DVD, that DVD carrying Japanese subtitles.
The February 2012 Japanese tour ran with two openers rather than one, divided by city. The promoter's announcements put Dazzle Vision on the Tokyo and Nagoya bills and Pay money To my Pain on the Yokohama and Osaka ones.
The deluxe edition manufactured for Japan alone pairs the album CD with a Blu-ray, and what sits on that disc is a concert: 73 minutes filmed in Amsterdam on 30 November 2022. Sony Music Japan spelled out both the date and the running time in its announcement on the day the album was released.
Tokyo had gone about five years without the band when they played Zepp Tokyo on 9 February 2012. BARKS, reporting on the night, records that the show opened with "What You Want", led in by the drumming of Will Hunt, who had joined since their last visit.
The Japanese dates were announced on the day Sanctuary came out, 5 June 2026: SGC HALL ARIAKE on 1 and 2 December, then Zepp Osaka Bayside on 4 December. Gekirock described the run as the band's first headline tour of Japan in roughly fourteen years.
Amy Lee has described the band's bassist Emma Anzai as half Japanese and half Australian, someone who spent her school years in Japan. She had not been back for years, so bringing her over to play there with the band in 2023 was, as Lee put it to Gekirock, really cool — for Anzai and for the rest of them.
When "My Immortal" reached the Grammys again, at the 47th ceremony in 2005, it was not entered on the rock side of the ballot. The Recording Academy files the nomination under Pop Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocals — the pop category rather than a rock one.
The Recording Academy's own listing for the 46th Grammy Awards puts two names against the Hard Rock Performance win for "Bring Me To Life": Evanescence, and Paul McCoy. The award is recorded jointly, not to the band by itself.
For the February 2012 Japanese shows the promoter billed a five-piece. Amy Lee is listed for vocals, piano, keyboards and harp; the two guitar slots go to Terry Balsamo and Troy McLawhorn, with Tim McCord on bass and Will Hunt on drums.
On the Synthesis Live tour a real orchestra sat on stage for every single show — the first time in the band's career that had been true of a whole run. The players were put together locally, city by city, and Susie Seiter conducted. The band's own timeline records it as what set that tour apart.
Before it was a single of the band's own, "Afterlife" was supplied to Devil May Cry, the Netflix animated series adapted from Capcom's action game; Sony Music Japan puts that hand-over in March 2025. The same announcement records where the song ended up: No. 1 on Billboard's Rock & Alternative Airplay chart, on the survey dated 19 July 2025.
Announcing the December 2026 Japanese dates on 5 June, the promoter Creativeman Productions described the run as the band's first headline tour of the country in roughly fourteen years, and presented it as timed to the release of Sanctuary.
Amy Lee's own entry on the band timeline puts more than three years into Sanctuary. She said that playing the finished record back end to end, with its release close at hand, was overwhelming, and that the making of it had been what carried her through a stretch she found unjust and beyond her power to change.
"Fight Like a Girl" was supplied for Ballerina: The World of John Wick, the film released in the summer of 2025, and served as its theme song. The Japanese CD of Sanctuary carries two bonus tracks, and this is one of them.
The 2016 collection Lost Whispers brought two new recordings with it. The title track had started life as an intro used on the band's 2009 tour, and "Even in Death" — a song reaching back to their earliest demos — was recorded afresh for the release.
Amy Lee guested on Poppy's single "End of You" alongside Courtney LaPlante. Sony Music Japan's own information page records that the track went to number one on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Airplay chart for the week dated 21 February 2026.
The concert captured on Anywhere But Home was played at Le Zenith in Paris on 25 May 2004. The band's own Bandcamp store spells the venue and the date out beside the title, so the record's origin in a single night is stated by the release itself rather than inferred.
Evanescence's November 2019 take on "The Chain" did not begin as a band project. It was made for the launch of the video game Gears 5, and the band's own timeline states that the recording was produced for the game's official trailer.
Evanescence issued a studio recording of "Across the Universe" in December 2021. The song had first been performed on the Synthesis Live tour as a tribute to Amy Lee's late brother, and the studio version was built out from that.
"Together Again" went out as a digital single on 22 January 2010 to support relief work after the Haiti earthquake, with the proceeds going to the United Nations Foundation. The song itself was not new. It had been written back in The Open Door period and was given a different purpose here.
Look at the sleeve of Fallen and only one member of Evanescence is on it: Amy Lee. Songfacts sets that detail directly beside its observation that she had quickly become the focal point of the group — no one else from the band appears on the cover at all.
On the Thursday morning of December 4, 2003, Amy Lee stood in Los Angeles and read out nominations for the 46th Grammy Awards. Five went through her hands, and one of the five was her own band. The person announcing the shortlist was standing on it.
Songfacts records an oddity from the night Evanescence collected Best New Artist for 2003. 50 Cent, who had lost in that category, came up onto the stage anyway and walked past the band while they were still accepting the award.
Ben Moody has put a date on his exit: the night of October 22, 2003, in the middle of a tour. In a statement issued in 2010 he wrote that Amy Lee had left no room for doubt about what she wanted that night, sending word that he should board a plane and not come back. That, he said, is why he rejects the widely held reading of his departure as a betrayal or an abandonment of the band.
There is a line about ownership in Ben Moody's account of leaving. Half of the Evanescence trademark and of the brand's property value was his, and he says he handed it to Amy Lee outright — no buyout asked for, no negotiation opened. He adds that the tour he walked away from did not lose a single date.
At the Grammy ceremony in early February 2004 Amy Lee ended up in the same room as Ben Moody. As she told it, he was seated directly behind her, in an outfit she thought ridiculous. She had braced herself for him to do something while she was on stage. He sat and watched, and no scene came of it.
Ben Moody, the band's co-founder, was gone by October 2003. Songfacts records that he walked out in the middle of a tour, at the point where Fallen was selling in the millions rather than at any commercial low. What his exit left behind was a band with only one member from the original line-up still in it: Amy Lee.
Over 141,000 copies of Fallen moved in its opening week, carrying it to No. 3 on the Billboard 200. The number that says more about the record, though, is 43: that is how many weeks it spent inside that chart's Top 10.
In Billboard's chart history the Hot 100 entry for "Bring Me to Life" is not filed under the band's name alone: the artist field reads Evanescence Featuring Paul McCoy. The song arrived on the chart dated 15 March 2003, hit its No. 5 peak on 7 June, and stayed on for 32 weeks in total.
Billboard's Billboard 200 history has Fallen entering the chart on 22 March 2003, peaking at No. 3 on 14 June and remaining there for 133 weeks. Nothing else in the band's catalogue on that same table comes anywhere near that run.
"Bring Me to Life" came out early in 2003 with 12 Stones singer Paul McCoy guesting on it, and its life since has run far past the formats it was released on. The song has been certified Diamond in the United States as a single, has passed a billion streams on Spotify, and has taken another billion views on YouTube.
The rap on "Bring Me To Life" was put to Josey Scott of Saliva before anyone else. Scott said years later, on The Metal Summit, that he was indeed asked to sing on the track but that the schedules got tangled and he never did it - so the part went to the singer from 12 Stones, Paul McCoy, instead.
Amy Lee has been plain about where the guest rap came from. Speaking to Metal Hammer, she said it was not the band's original plan but a concession they had to make for the label. What she adds is less often repeated: once it was going to happen, she wrote the part herself and took care over it with Paul McCoy of 12 Stones.
Amy Lee's account of the months before Fallen has the band's first label holding the album itself over them. Wind-up, she says, threatened not to release the debut at all unless a male voice was added to the lead single, "Bring Me To Life", to make it more palatable for radio - so the record's release hung on that one change.
What the label wanted went a good deal further than a single guest spot. Amy Lee has described being pushed to hold auditions and bring a male singer into the band full-time, to sing on most of the songs - the goal, as she puts it, being to turn the group into a female Linkin Park.
Turning the permanent male singer down came at a price. Amy Lee has said the label withdrew the band's funding and she ended up back at her parents' house - hard, by her account, after everything that had led up to it: the signing, leaving school, the move to Los Angeles.
The standoff over a male vocalist ended in a line drawn on paper: no permanent member, and the male voice confined to the one single that would introduce the band. Amy Lee has recalled what happened before that point - leaving California convinced the deal was dead, and driving the whole way back to Arkansas, because they had refused to hold auditions and hire a rapper.
The song that opened the door was an early version of "My Immortal". It caught the ear of Diana Meltzer, head of A&R at Wind-up Records, in 2001, at a moment when Amy Lee had only just enrolled at college to study music theory and composition. Three months into the course, the band were signed.
When Bring Me To Life went out as a single in its own right, Wind-up's staff had to work the phones and plead with radio programmers to give it a spin. Metal Hammer reports that the standard brush-off was that a woman at a piano did not belong on a rock station. The stations that did air it were promptly swamped with calls from listeners wanting to know what they had just heard.
Amy Lee has said the male guest vocal on Evanescence's debut single came from label pressure rather than from the band — but she draws a hard line between the decision and the man who carried it out. By her account Paul McCoy was the hero of the session, warm about it and fully committed, and she is unhappy that the version of the story she usually has time to tell leaves him sounding like the villain.
The rap in Bring Me To Life, handled by 12 Stones singer Paul McCoy, was not the band's idea: Louder describes it as a creative decision led by the label Evanescence were signed to at the time. The same piece adds two things about how it landed - nu metal still dominated rock radio when the single came out, and the rap is part of why listeners found it - and says audiences have long since accepted it as belonging to the song.
Amy Lee was 19 and had only just started studying theory composition at Middle Tennessee State University when Evanescence signed their first record deal. Rolling Stone notes that the step from duo to band came considerably later: several independent EPs and a move to a major label came first, and a few friends were brought in for the first full-length record, 2003's Fallen.
The Evanescence that actually recorded Fallen was three people plus hired hands. Amy Lee and Ben Moody were joined by David Hodges, who had come in during 1999 and worked as keyboard player, string arranger and co-writer. Everyone else on the album was a session musician, among them Josh Freese, later the drummer in Guns N' Roses and Foo Fighters.
Ben Moody's disappearance from Evanescence's 2003 European tour was abrupt. Rolling Stone recorded that his last appearance was the Stockholm date on October 21st and that he was absent for the four German shows which followed. The English magazine Rock Sound reported that he had flown home on a day off during that German run without saying anything to his bandmates.
Neither of the two people who wrote Fallen alongside Amy Lee was still in the band by the time it peaked. Songfacts notes that keyboard player David Hodges was out before the album was even released and that Ben Moody left in October 2003, part-way through the first tour. When "My Immortal" reached number 7 in the US in April 2004, more than a year after the album, Lee was the last of that lineup standing.
On the day Fallen came out, the room Evanescence headlined was the Engine Room in Houston, Texas, which held 200 people. Metal Hammer traces what came next: three months later they made their first UK appearance on the main stage of the inaugural Download festival, slotted between Stone Sour and Mudvayne, and a fortnight after that they returned to headline a sold-out show at the London Astoria.
Amy Lee has said Evanescence gave up performing the Bring Me To Life rap themselves a long time ago, and that in practice the part goes to whoever is on hand and suits it. On a tour with P.O.D., Sonny Sandoval came up to take it several times, and Paul McCoy, who sang it on the record, gets the call whenever the band find themselves in the same town as him.
Refusing to audition a male singer into the band full-time cost Evanescence its funding, and Amy Lee went back to living with her parents. A few weeks later the label rang back with a compromise. As Lee tells it, they had landed a placement in the film Daredevil and had pitched the song to the studio as a male-female pairing because of a fight scene. That reduced the guest vocal to a single track instead of a change to the band's identity.
A Super Deluxe Box Set followed in February 2024, sold through the band's own website and nowhere else. Its shadow-box packaging took its design from the cover of Amy Lee's songwriting journal, and inside sat a cassette of unreleased demos and voice notes that was exclusive to the box.
Twenty years on from Fallen, the band's founding guitarist Ben Moody set about reworking songs from the album and putting the results up on his own YouTube channel, one at a time. "Taking Over Me", posted in June 2024, was the sixth of them.
Asked in a 2004 interview whether she saw herself as goth or as an outsider, Amy Lee replied that the two words do not have to travel together. She had always been an outsider, she said, but she had not spent her time dressed in black or sitting in a corner hurting herself. What she remembered instead was making art in the hall through the lunch break, and leading the choir.
Amy Lee has said that her favourite thing ever written about Evanescence was a British put-down that compared the band to a goth Pikachu painted black. She thought the line had run in NME, though she was not sure of the outlet, and added that she had learned not to take reviews seriously.
The clip for "My Immortal" was directed by David Mould and shot in black and white in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona, with Amy Lee and Ben Moody trailing glumly around separate parts of the city. Fans read it afterwards as a hint at the trouble between the two, but Lee has since said that any link to the split was purely coincidental.
Once "Bring Me To Life" took off, Amy Lee's biggest fear was that Evanescence would turn out to be a one-hit wonder. The song did not sound like the rest of Fallen, and she worried that listeners drawn in by it would reach the album and feel they had been handed a bait and switch.
"Breathe No More" was recorded during the sessions for the 2003 debut Fallen and then left off it. What surfaced first was a live rendition, on the 2004 concert album Anywhere But Home; the studio recording waited until 2005, when it was used in the film Elektra and on its soundtrack, before finally landing on the 2016 compilation Lost Whispers.
The first place the public met "Bring Me To Life" was a cinema rather than a record shop. It was used, along with "My Immortal", in the 2003 film Daredevil — in the scene where Jennifer Garner's Elektra readies herself to kill Ben Affleck's Daredevil.
Looking back at the end of 2003, with Fallen by then certified triple platinum, Amy Lee said she had never been abroad before that year. Her first video shoot took her to Romania and was a wild experience; the band crossed Europe three times, playing sold-out shows to large crowds. A year earlier, she said, none of it would have seemed possible.
One of the moments when the band's success became real to Amy Lee was hitting number one in the UK — she happened to be in the country at the time, and said it floored her. She had always thought their music suited the British market, while the people around her told her the UK was out of reach, or would take years. In the end, she said, Britain was with them from the start.
Amy Lee has said that putting out "Bring Me To Life" as the lead single was not her idea of the right move. Her own pick for the first single was "Going Under", and even once the arrangement was settled she tried once more to have that song go out ahead of it.
There is no guest male vocal on the demo of "Bring Me To Life" included with the anniversary edition: Paul McCoy is simply not on it. Where his rap sits in the bridge on the single, a blues-inflected guitar solo takes over instead. The demo also carries heavily processed vocals and synth textures that never made it as far as the released single.
Amy Lee has described how the engineer for the 20th-anniversary remaster was settled. Ted Jensen had mastered Fallen back in 2003, so she went to him and asked whether, two decades on, he thought he could do something he had not been able to do then. She then had Jensen and several other engineers each remaster "Bring Me To Life", listened to all of them without being told who had done which, and picked the one she preferred. It turned out to be his.
What the first pressing of Fallen carries as "My Immortal" is a rough demo. The band had knocked it together some years earlier on a MIDI keyboard at the Little Rock radio station where Amy Lee's father worked. Lee and Ben Moody both wanted the more finished recording on the album; Wind-Up Records would not have it, and the raw demo is what went into shops on 4 March 2003.
The "My Immortal" that came out as a single is not the recording on the album. It is a full-band take laid down during the Fallen sessions, and it carries extra string arrangements by the Canadian composer David Campbell, whose son is Beck.
Dave Fortman came to Fallen from the other side of the glass. He had played guitar in the 90s band Ugly Kid Joe, and when it broke up in 1997 he moved into production, working with Superjoint Ritual and Crowbar among others before agreeing to produce a debut album for an unknown band out of Arkansas called Evanescence.
Amy Lee would not give way on using a real orchestra for many of Fallen's songs, where an electronic substitute would have cost less. Dave Fortman has said none of them were going to back down on it. The players ended up being recorded in Seattle for a plain reason: there is no union there, which made the session cheaper.
The rapped section of "Bring Me To Life" was put there by the label, not chosen by the band. Speaking to Metal Hammer in 2023, Amy Lee said Evanescence gave up performing that part a long time ago and now bring it back only when there is somebody who fits the spot — Paul McCoy, or Sonny Sandoval of P.O.D.
Amy Lee has talked about a rule she held to on the first album's lyrics: no word that belonged only to the present day, "telephone" being the example she reaches for. The words had to sit just as easily whether heard 500 years earlier or 500 years later, because she wanted the band's music to be tied to no particular country or era. Later songs broke the rule, she admits, "Call Me When You're Sober" from 2006's The Open Door among them.
Speaking to the Grammy Awards' own website in 2021, Amy Lee singled out "My Immortal" as the one Evanescence song whose words are not hers. She helped a little, she said, but the lyric belongs to Ben Moody — and she added that she had not wanted to sing it, and that the words had never meant a great deal to her.
Amy Lee has said "Bring Me To Life" was written about the man she would go on to marry, before the two of them were married. She has described being caught in a long and badly abusive relationship and putting most of her effort into covering it up and appearing fine. Sitting down opposite Josh in a restaurant while her bandmates parked the car, she was asked to her face whether she was happy — and that is where the song began.
"Hello" looks at death through a child's eyes, and the child is Amy Lee herself. She was six when her three-year-old sister Bonnie died, and she was at school when she was told — which is where the song's schoolyard imagery comes from. What it records is what she felt at that moment, at an age when she could not yet fully grasp what death meant.
Ben Moody wrote the words to "My Immortal"; the piano part, and the bridge that finished the song off, are Amy Lee's. Cut at the last minute from the running order of the band's first EP in 1998, it did not reach listeners until the 2003 debut Fallen, by which time it had been reworked several times.
Ben Moody has maintained that the words of "My Immortal" are entirely invented rather than drawn from his own life. The song conjures a spirit, he accepts, but he insists it has nothing to do with God or religion. He wrote the lyric while he was still at high school.
"Tourniquet" did not start life as an Evanescence song. It is a reworking of "My Tourniquet", released in 2001 by the Christian death metal band Soul Embraced and written by their guitarist Rocky Gray. For the Fallen version Amy Lee supplied the melody and added a second verse, and the writing credit lists Gray next to Lee and her bandmates of the time, Ben Moody and David Hodges.
The chorus that repeats at the end of "Whisper" is not sung in English but in Latin. By Amy Lee's own translation, the two lines being called out there amount to save yourselves from danger and save yourselves from evil. The song sits on Evanescence's debut album, Fallen.
The hiatus started with a conversation Amy Lee opened herself. In the week the Open Door cycle finished, she told the rest of the band she wanted to stop for a while — and she has said she did not know at that point whether it meant the end, another record, or children. It had been nothing but Evanescence since she was 18, she needed to work herself out, and by her account the others took it well.
The Open Door entered the Billboard 200 at the top on 21 October 2006. Billboard's chart history gives that same date as the date of its peak, which means the album never climbed at all: its first week was its best week. It went on to spend 48 weeks on the chart.
Fallen had sold 14 million copies worldwide, and Amy Lee has been direct about the follow-up not matching that: The Open Door sold five million, and she has said she was happy with it. What she had set out to do, by her own account, was make an album better than the one before rather than one that sold more than it.
Amy Lee has said the writing went more comfortably with Terry Balsamo than it had with Ben Moody, and that songs such as "Snow White Queen" came out of that. Balsamo had joined the band after Moody — her co-founder and the co-writer of the debut — left it.
Amy Lee has put a plain reason on the 2007 step-back: she was 26 and needed to find out who she was as an adult. She had been doing Evanescence completely since she was a teenager, she has said, and needed to be Amy day to day rather than the band's lead singer.
May 2007 took two more members out of Evanescence: drummer Rocky Gray and rhythm guitarist John LeCompt. Both went to We Are The Fallen, where they joined Ben Moody — the co-founder who had left Evanescence before them.
"Tourniquet", on Fallen, was reworked from "My Tourniquet", a 2001 song by the Christian death metal band Soul Embraced, written by their guitarist Rocky Gray. Gray then joined Evanescence's touring party as their drummer from 2003, and on the 2006 album The Open Door he is credited as a full member of the band.
Asked how The Open Door stood against Fallen, Amy Lee has declined to call it the truer record — what had changed, she has said, was how much control she had. In her own framing, Fallen was about her pain and the second album was about the fight, with strength as the thing it turned on.
While making The Open Door, Amy Lee went looking for sounds rather than instruments, an interest she traces to Nine Inch Nails and to the slamming doors and dropped junk she loved in their records. She bought an old typewriter and built a loop out of it, and that loop grew into one of the album's songs. A favourite piece of Mozart went in as a sample too.
"Call Me When You're Sober", the lead single from The Open Door, is about Amy Lee's former boyfriend — Shaun Morgan, the singer of Seether. On the day the song was released, Morgan himself announced that he had checked into rehab, so the record and the announcement landed on the same date.
Seether's "Breakdown" has an origin its writer has spelled out himself: Shaun Morgan told Songfacts the song was prompted by Amy Lee, and by "Call Me When You're Sober" in particular. In the same conversation Morgan said he felt his private life had been discussed in the press.
The person behind "Call Me When You're Sober" was Amy Lee's former partner Shaun Morgan, who sings for Seether. The song tells the story from her side; Morgan gave his to Kerrang! on 19 July 2008. He accepted that there was truth in it, but said it was told with the melodrama of teenage poetry and that his half of it went missing. He rejected the picture of a man permanently drunk, saying his drinking was a way of getting through a relationship that was making him unhappy.
The Open Door track "Lacrymosa" is built on the Lacrimosa of Mozart's Requiem. The title comes from the same place as the music: the word itself denotes something related to sadness, so both what the song is called and what it is made of trace back to a single classical work.
Amy Lee wrote "Like You" about her younger sister, who died at the age of three when Lee herself was six. Lee has described the track as this album's "Hello" — the song that held the same place on the band's debut, Fallen — so the two records answer each other across the pair of titles.
Going through The Open Door track by track for VH1, Amy Lee said "Snow White Queen" was written from two vantage points at once — the stalker's and her own. She connected it to the imbalance her writing creates: the lyrics are intimate enough that listeners feel they know her, while she knows nothing whatever about them.
Amy Lee has said that "Lost In Paradise" reached the album at the urging of producer Nick Raskulinecz. She had written it alone; the moment he heard it he said they had to record the song, and the idea of putting the whole band on it was his. Lee admits that at first she did not see what he was after.
The strings on "What You Want" were arranged by David Campbell, who is Beck's father and whose other credits Songfacts lists as taking in Adam Lambert, Metallica and My Chemical Romance. He was not new to this band either — he had already worked with them on The Open Door.
Troy McLawhorn has described his return as a matter of timing. After the 2007 tour he assumed he was finished with Evanescence and had another band to keep him busy; when things there started going badly he phoned Amy Lee, and her answer was that she was ready to make another album.
The 2011 comeback show at the War Memorial Auditorium in Nashville was not built on the back catalogue alone. Beyond the single "What You Want", Metal Hammer counts three songs heard for the first time that night: "The Change", "Oceans" and "The Other Side", which closed the set.
Evanescence returned for the encore at Zepp Tokyo on 9 February 2012, on their first Japanese run in about five years, and Amy Lee introduced "Never Go Back" there. BARKS, reporting on the night, describes it as a song she wrote in response to the earthquake that had struck Japan. The performance began with her calling out to the room in Japanese: "Ganbare, Nippon."
The grimy club set in the "What You Want" video was not invented for the camera. Amy Lee has said it was built to stand in for the venues the band played at the start, naming Vino's in Little Rock, Arkansas, and describing the sweaty, dirty feel of those rooms as what they were after.
The idea behind the video came from outside the band. Amy Lee has recalled asking her sister Carrie, a writer, to sit in the recording studio, listen to the song a couple of times and simply describe what she saw. What Carrie described was New York, and running across the Brooklyn Bridge — and Lee knew at once that was the film.
Asked which record she would want to be remembered for, in a feature where she picked through the albums that shaped her, Amy Lee chose her own band's 2011 self-titled release. She set it against what came before: on the debut they were still kids trying things out, and she had written "My Immortal" at sixteen, while 2006's The Open Door was a departure of a kind. Growth, as she put it, makes you a better musician.
Amy Lee picked up the harp during the years away that followed The Open Door. She has been modest about how well she plays it, but she taught herself enough to use it and to write with it. The piano gave her a head start, she has said: the instrument is hard to play, yet it amounts to a grand piano stood upright rather than laid on its side.
Writing about the band's 2012 Japanese dates, BARKS stopped on a detail in the credits of the self-titled album: the songwriting was signed off to the group as a whole, as "All Song Written By Evanescence", which the outlet called the first band credit in Evanescence's history. The same piece noted that the frequent changes of personnel had at times seen the group derided as an Amy Lee project.
Terry Balsamo's guitar of choice had been an Ibanez for years, and he told Guitar World he still used them. The sessions for the self-titled album were the exception: the producer, by his account, kept asking him to reach for a Gibson instead.
Work on the third album did not run straight through. Metal Hammer's timeline marks February 2010 as the point where recording was put on hold, with the band changing producers. The record was finished, and released, on the far side of that pause.
"Lost In Paradise" was not written with the band in mind at all. Amy Lee has said she wrote it for herself, cut it at home as piano and voice, and assumed it would end up as a B-side somewhere. She sent the recording to Nick Raskulinecz, who came straight back saying they had to do the song; bringing the full band in was his idea, and she admits she did not see the point of it at first.
The same method landed quite differently depending on who was asked. By Troy McLawhorn's account, Amy Lee said she had never made an album this way, having built earlier Evanescence records with a single writing partner. For McLawhorn there was nothing unusual about it: working collectively was how he had always made albums with a band.
During the long gap between Evanescence's second and third albums, Amy Lee learned the concert harp. A handful of the songs on the self-titled record were written on it, and Songfacts names "My Heart Is Broken" as one of them — the instrument she took up while away from the band ended up supplying material for the album that followed.
Of Evanescence's own songs, "End Of The Dream" is one Amy Lee counts as a personal favourite. In her Songfacts interview she traced it to a remembered moment walking through a cemetery, thinking and feeling, and said the point of the song is that it is worth hurting rather than staying numb — a thing she has sung about before, she noted, but taken somewhere more personal here.
The position "Lost In Paradise" sets out is Amy Lee's own at the close of 2007: newly married to Josh Hartzler, two albums into the band's run, and having decided to step away from it. She told Kerrang! that her life since high school had been organised entirely around being the girl from Evanescence and everything that came with it, and that what she wanted instead was to settle, be married and live normally.
For all the title, "My Heart Is Broken" is not about a romance ending. Amy Lee told Kerrang! that a close friend of hers heads an organisation in New York which rescues victims of sex trafficking, that she and her husband got involved in the work, and that they came away moved and horrified by it. As she wrote, she put herself in that position: what it would be to be trapped, threatened, and unable to tell anyone what was happening.
The subject of "Never Go Back" is the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in 2011. Amy Lee told MTV News that the disaster came just as the band had got into pre-production, that none of them could look away from the coverage, and that they happened to be working on this very song at the time. She had been writing lyrics alone at night; the following day she came in and told the others she was turning it toward the tsunami. Writing about something outside herself, she noted, is not what she usually does.
Death is a subject Evanescence's songs keep returning to. Songfacts offers one strand of an explanation for it: Amy Lee lost her sister Bonnie, who was three years old, when she herself was six. The site presents that as part of the picture rather than the whole of it.
The Bitter Truth is counted as Evanescence's first record of all-new material since the 2011 self-titled album, and Synthesis is the reason the count skips over 2017: that album consisted largely of orchestral and electronic reworkings of existing songs, with two new tracks added to them.
Amy Lee has rejected the idea that the years following the 2011 self-titled album were spent idle: there was a year and a half of touring, she says, and then she had a baby. She has also described what the break was for — to make something she genuinely meant, she needed to stop feeling like a rock star and go back to being Amy.
According to Amy Lee, David Campbell — the man writing the full orchestral parts on Synthesis — had already written every string arrangement across the band's three previous albums. The album moved him from strings alone to a whole orchestra.
The violin solo on "Hi-Lo" was played by guest Lindsey Stirling, but the two parties were never in the same room. Amy Lee's account has the band working at Spaceway in Fort Worth while Stirling was in Los Angeles; Lee described what she had in mind, and Stirling worked her part up as a demo before recording it.
The pause that followed 2011's Evanescence had a legal dispute with the band's former label behind it. Amy Lee used the time for solo work, among it a children's album. When the band did return to the studio, what came out of it was Synthesis in 2017, their past songs reimagined with orchestral arrangements.
Amy Lee introduced the Synthesis Live run as the first time Evanescence had ever toured with an orchestra. The idea, she said, began with wanting to bring out the David Campbell arrangements and the programming that sat buried under the drums and guitars — which grew into redoing the songs outright with a full orchestra rather than strings alone.
Amy Lee has described where the Synthesis arrangements actually started: with the original master sessions for songs such as "Bring Me To Life". She pulled the recorded parts out of them, listened through again, then chopped the material up and made decisions about which sections needed to run longer, building a map for each song. The orchestra was only recorded once that groundwork was done.
"Hi-Lo", presented as one of the two new songs on Synthesis, had in fact been sitting in a drawer for around ten years. Amy Lee has explained that she first wrote it with producer Will "Science" Hunt while the band were working up material for their self-titled third album, that it was never quite finished, and that it simply never fitted any record — so she kept hold of it until the right home for it turned up.
Amy Lee spoke about the rap verse on "Bring Me To Life" again in 2017, describing it as something that had never belonged to the band's original idea or sound and as a compromise in a number of ways. She acknowledged that it was part of what got the song played on radio, but said that being able to take the track back to how it had first been conceived, on the Synthesis re-recording, was a good thing.
Amy Lee treats "Imperfection" as the most important song on Synthesis. She has explained that she wrote it for everyone who has been lost to suicide and depression and for those who could still be lost, and that she sings it not from the position of the person who is gone but from that of the one left behind — the person in the waiting room.
Asked why the record carries that name, Amy Lee put it as a choice between two states. Staying numb, lying to yourself and sitting inside a bubble means never learning what is actually there and never living it; she would take the truth instead, she said, however bitter it turns out to be.
The album's name was not coined for the sleeve. It comes from inside the words of "Wasted On You" — not the song's title but a phrase heard partway through it — and that song had already been released on its own before the album appeared.
The chorus of "Use My Voice" is carried by a group of women Amy Lee gathered for it: Lzzy Hale of Halestorm, Taylor Momsen of The Pretty Reckless, violinist Lindsey Stirling, Sharon den Adel of Within Temptation, Deena Jakoub of Veridia, Evanescence guitarist Jen Majura, Lee's two sisters Carrie South and Lori Lee Bulloch, and Amy McLawhorn, the wife of guitarist Troy McLawhorn.
Evanescence played "Wasted On You" on the 19 February 2021 edition of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, but not from one stage. The five members performed separately from four different places — California, Florida, Georgia and Germany — and what went out was those separate performances put together.
The Bitter Truth landed on Friday 26 March 2021, and the band launched something else alongside it: a graphic anthology series titled Echoes From the Void. Its first issue was built around stories that grew out of two songs on the record, "Better Without You" and "Wasted on You".
The "Use My Voice" video was directed by the filmmaker Eric Howell, whose short Strangers took the Best Drama award at the Santa Monica Film Festival. Amy Lee's connection with him ran back to 2015, the year she was approached to write the end title theme for the film Voice From The Stone.
P.R. Brown, who had already made the clips for "Imperfection", "Hi-Lo" and "The Chain", was the one who put the "Wasted On You" video together. The members could not be in the same place, so each of them filmed themselves on an iPhone — alone at home, and with their families — and Brown edited the separate reels into a single piece.
Work on The Bitter Truth with producer Nick Raskulinecz fell into two phases because of the pandemic. The first stretch was handled remotely, with the band apart, and it was only after negative Covid tests that they gathered at a studio in Nashville.
From August 2020 the members based in the United States travelled by tour bus to join Amy Lee in Nashville and push the rest of The Bitter Truth through. Guitarist Jen Majura was not among them — she remained in Germany while the work went on.
Putting every guest singer on "Use My Voice" into one room was out of the question in 2020, so Amy Lee set up a Zoom account to run it instead. By her account the singers lived all over the place, so most of them recorded their own parts, sent her the audio, and she piled the voices up herself.
"Wasted On You" was written before the coronavirus crisis and had not been earmarked for release ahead of the album at all. Once lockdown began, the words read differently, and Evanescence put the track out on 24 April 2020. Amy Lee's comment was that she had not set out to write about the situation everyone had ended up in, and yet that was exactly what the lyrics had turned into.
The decision to make another album came at the end of 2018, Amy Lee has said, and the writing started from there. She had learned to build the touring schedule so that a week could be set aside afterwards, somewhere rented, purely to write. One of those weeks was spent in woodland in Montreal, at a ski resort out of season in the summer, and it was there that "Broken Pieces Shine" and "Part Of Me" first took shape.
Asked by Metal Hammer what a newcomer should hear first, Amy Lee reached for none of Fallen, The Open Door or the self-titled album. She named "Broken Pieces Shine", from the then-current The Bitter Truth, saying it holds what the band are about both thematically and lyrically.
The two-part introductory track on The Bitter Truth, "Artifact/The Turn", was not entirely made in a studio. Amy Lee wrote and recorded the "Artifact" half of it in a hotel room while the band were touring in 2019, and its words stand as a tribute to her brother, who had died in 2018.
The first spark for "Use My Voice" was a document rather than a riff. Amy Lee has said she began writing the song after reading the impact statement that Chanel Miller, who had been assaulted on the Stanford campus, stood up and read out at the end of the trial. The song took a long time to finish.
"Wasted On You" started with words and a melody instead of a track. Stuck in her writing at the end of 2019, Amy Lee set herself a rule: finish the lyric and the chorus out on her back porch before going anywhere near the home studio. She reckons that is why the song opens on its chorus.
Asked whether "Who Will You Follow" was written about anyone in particular, Amy Lee moved from the song to what the album's name means. Sanctuary, she said, is not somewhere to hide from a chaotic, surreal and violent time; what it offers shelter from is the lies that insist the time is not what it is. She described the record as a sanctuary of truth, and of community.
Evanescence had been turning up on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Airplay chart since May 2003, when "Bring Me To Life" stopped at No. 11, and their best showing across the years after that was "Call Me When You're Sober" at No. 5 in 2006. The first No. 1 took until the chart dated 5 July 2025, when "Afterlife" reached the top — 22 years after that first entry.
Amy Lee has described how "Afterlife" found her. Alex Seaver, who was doing score work on Devil May Cry, already had the song under way and got in touch, reminding her that the two had worked on a Lindsey Stirling track together during the pandemic. She put vocals on it, the whole exchange ran through email, and by the time she spoke about the song she had still never met him in person.
Spiritbox, Poppy, Nova Twins and K.Flay all travelled with Evanescence on the world tour that opened in June 2026 — a touring party of women. Speaking to Metal Hammer, Amy Lee described working with other female artists in recent years as a deliberate choice, and recalled that in the band's early days she was frequently the only woman on a bill.
"Afterlife" came out on 27 March 2025, issued through Netflix. An alternate version of the song was written into the animated series Devil May Cry, where it recurs rather than appearing once, and the soundtrack album for the series followed on 3 April.
The clip for "Afterlife" was made by Jason Lester, a director whose credits include Hozier and Maren Morris. According to Songfacts, the shoot took place in a historic house in Tennessee that is reputed to be haunted.
Amy Lee has described the making of Sanctuary as scattered rather than settled in one room. The creative sessions with Zakk Cervini and Jordan Fish were done in Los Angeles, she says, while some of the recording happened at Nick Raskulinecz's house in Nashville — a pattern that, by her account, ran for about three years around touring.
Word that a new Evanescence album was due the following year came out on the radio. In December 2025, ahead of the band's set at KROQ's Almost Acoustic Christmas, DJ Kevin Ryder asked Amy Lee when the record was coming; she answered next year, and when he put spring to her, she let it stand.
Backstage at the 2025 Louder Than Life festival, Amy Lee told Loudwire that the band had a lot of songs in progress and were aiming to put the new album out at the beginning of the following year. She then pulled herself up: by "beginning", she said, she did not mean January — early 2026.
Asked whether "Who Will You Follow" had been written about someone in particular, Amy Lee said the song is aimed at a situation rather than a person. Its centre, she explained, is the question of what is real, and the effort to break through the lies. She described a constant flood of information from people with a stake in what listeners believe, until, in her own words, "truth is for sale."
One song on Sanctuary is about a relationship, though Amy Lee has not said which track it is. She traces the writing back to a spell of going through audio from an old handheld recorder and footage from the Fallen years. She has also closed off one obvious reading: the song, she confirmed, is not about Seether's Shaun Morgan, who was the subject of the 2006 single "Call Me When You're Sober".
Amy Lee's credits reach outside her own singing. She scored the science-fiction film Indigo Grey: The Passage, and that work took a Moondance award for Best Score in 2015 — a detail Metal Hammer picked up while looking back over twenty years of Evanescence.
John LeCompt's telling was that the call came from Amy Lee herself, on the day he was let go. He described himself as finished and upset about it, and said there was no loyalty in the band at all.
By the middle of 2005 Ben Moody said he had not spoken to Amy Lee once since walking out of the band in 2003, though he added that his door was open and that he still thought well of her. The two had been a couple back in high school, long before Evanescence broke through.
Amy Lee has said that when Evanescence and Halestorm agreed to tour together in 2012, she and Lzzy Hale had still never met face to face. The first meeting came on the opening day of the run, at what she remembers as a joint press session or meet-and-greet.
The Wagakki Band connection started in the audience. In 2018 the group's singer Yuko Suzuhana and guitarist Machiya went to see Evanescence play in Los Angeles, and the contact that grew from it led to Amy Lee guesting at the Japanese band's orchestral concert at Osaka-jo Hall on 16 February 2020. In the run-up the two acts were writing a song together for the occasion, announced for its first performance that night.
Yuko Suzuhana traces the collaboration back roughly two years before it appeared. Amy Lee had seen concert footage of Wagakki Band and asked to meet, so Suzuhana travelled to Los Angeles, where the two promised each other they would work together some day. About eighteen months on, with Lee guesting at the band's Osaka-jo Hall show, the pair went into a studio and built the outline of the song.
September 2025 brought "End Of You", which put Amy Lee alongside Spiritbox vocalist Courtney LaPlante and Poppy, with Jordan Fish producing. Most of it was assembled remotely, the three singers trading ideas online. The starting point was a visit by Poppy and Fish to Lee's Nashville studio, where Lee, Poppy and Fish sat on the floor and worked the track out, and Lee recorded her vocal on the spot.
Amy Lee recorded a version of the Everly Brothers' "Love Hurts" with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics. What stayed with her, she says, was how fast Stewart committed: a handful of guitar takes and the part was done, where her own instinct had been to keep stacking tracks until something worked. Stack far enough, she took from it, and a part loses the one quality that made it distinctive.
Lzzy Hale of Halestorm remembers the first day the two bands toured together. Amy Lee came into her dressing room to say she loved "Break In" from Halestorm's 2012 album The Strange Case Of... but that nobody was singing the harmony line with her — and asked whether she could do it. Hale offered her the lead instead. Lee wanted the harmony.
Ben Moody's route back into music was a phone call from producer Don Gilmore, who wanted him to play guitar on Avril Lavigne's second album, Under My Skin. He and Lavigne hit it off straight away, and the two ended up writing "Nobody's Home" together.
Amy Lee was six when her younger sister Bonnie died of an illness that was never identified. In a Louder interview, Lee said it changed the way she looked at the world, and that she spent long stretches on her own being creative — poetry, drawing, music — trying to put down something she could not otherwise say. Asked directly whether that fed into her starting Evanescence at 13, she said the band came out of that period.
The two founders met at a Christian youth camp in Little Rock, Arkansas, the state the Lee family had moved to. When is not told the same way everywhere: Metal Hammer places the meeting in 1994, with Lee at 13 and Ben Moody a year older, while Songfacts gives 1996 and has Moody at 14 and Lee at 13. Both accounts agree that songwriting between the two started from there.
The earliest memory Amy Lee gives for deciding she had to be a musician is watching the film Amadeus at around nine and becoming fixated on Mozart. What she wanted at that point, she has said, was to be a composer — not to sing in a rock band.
Korn and Evanescence opened their joint North American tour in Denver on 16 August 2022, and Amy Lee came out at the end of Korn's set that night to sing "Freak On A Leash" with them. The tour went on to play 18 North American cities, running until 16 September.
May 2025 put Amy Lee in the studio for two songs on the soundtrack to Ballerina, the John Wick spin-off. One was "Hand That Feeds" with Halsey, produced by Jordan Fish; the other was "Fight Like A Girl", featuring K.Flay and produced by film composer Tyler Bates.
In January 2014 Amy Lee took Evanescence's long-time record company to court. Her suit against Wind-up Records sought 1.5 million dollars that she said was owed to the band in royalties, and it went further, alleging that the label had damaged the band by swapping out the promoters working with it.
Origin, the band's first full-length, surfaced in November 2000 as a demo they put out themselves and sold at their own shows. Two months later, in January 2001, Wind-Up Records signed Evanescence after hearing "My Immortal".
By Amy Lee's account, the first thing she put to Emma Anzai was whether she would play guitar, and the answer came straight back: Anzai is a bass player. Lee took the idea to Tim McCord instead, and he was glad of it — guitar was the instrument he had started out on.
We Are The Fallen, which Ben Moody assembled in 2009, put three Evanescence alumni in one band: Moody and John LeCompt on guitars, with Rocky Gray on drums. Carly Smithson, known from American Idol, sang, and Marty O'Brien played bass.
The line-up unveiled on 23 May 2022 was a swap as much as an arrival. Tim McCord, sixteen years the band's bassist, moved across to guitar — the instrument he had originally played — while Emma Anzai of Sick Puppies came in on bass. The reshaped band took the stage together for the first time in Athens on 5 June.
The statement Evanescence put out on 21 May 2022 presented the parting with guitarist Jen Majura as a decision to go their separate ways. A few hours later Majura gave her own version of it: the decision had not been hers. She added that she held nothing against anyone and would carry the past few years with her as good memories.
Jen Majura has said her name reached the band through two friends: Alex Skolnick of Testament and Dave Eggar, a cellist working in New York. Then an e-mail turned up, and three days after it she was on a plane to New York to meet Amy Lee.
Majura has said she was never asked to audition. Amy Lee told her to leave the guitar behind and come and eat instead. Another guitarist Lee had on her list, Majura learned, was Nita Strauss, who plays with Alice Cooper.
On 10 June 2025 Jen Majura announced on social media that she was stepping away from the music industry, at least for the time being. Among the reasons she gave were developments around AI and a change in society. To close the chapter she released four songs written more than a decade earlier with the guitarist Dennis Hormes — old demo recordings she had come across while clearing things off her computer.
Jen Majura told the story on Ola Englund's programme Coffee With Ola, roughly three weeks after the news came out in June 2022. She was cleaning her apartment when the phone rang. A suitcase she had already started to pack was standing there, because she had been due to head out on tour two weeks later.
When Jen Majura's departure was announced in May 2022, Evanescence rearranged itself rather than filling the same chair. Tim McCord, who had been playing bass, returned to guitar, and the vacant bass spot went to Emma Anzai of the Australian band Sick Puppies. The reshuffled line-up played its first concert in early June.
Jen Majura joined Evanescence in 2015 and parted with the band in 2022. She did not leave the reason to guesswork: Majura stated publicly that going was not her decision, and said she was hurt and still unclear about what had happened. Amy Lee kept her own comments on it brief in later interviews.
Ben Moody's exit from Evanescence came halfway through a European tour in 2003, and he has never rejoined. Looking back on those months for Rolling Stone, Amy Lee described wishing again and again that she could simply be at home: there was no other woman anywhere near her, and she felt isolated both within the band and out on tour.
The biggest headline show of Evanescence's career to that point was played at Allianz Parque, a football stadium in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in front of 40,000 people — the scale Blabbermouth put on it in a June 2025 report.
The reshaped Evanescence faced an audience for the first time on Sunday 5 June 2022, in Athens, Greece. The concert opened the band's spring/summer European tour and was its first live appearance with the new line-up, Emma Anzai of Sick Puppies on bass; Blabbermouth reported it the next day.
Evanescence supported Metallica in November 2025 on the Australian and New Zealand dates of the M72 tour. Amy Lee has said the headliners let her put the band's grand piano out in the Snake Pit, so that the handful of moments she spends at the keyboard were played with the audience all around her.
Early on the band hardly played out at all, and what they did play was a handful of quiet acoustic shows. Their first proper plugged-in gig came on 2 January 1999, at a Little Rock bar called Vinos — under a month after Amy Lee's seventeenth birthday.
Asked about the soundtracks she grew up on, Amy Lee has pointed to Alanis Morissette's "Uninvited", from the 1998 City of Angels soundtrack, as the place where the idea for her own band took shape: cinematic strings sitting inside contemporary rock. In the same conversation she gave a nod to the soundtrack for The Crow.
Amy Lee has told the story of her father, John Lee, turning up on the American amateur talent show The Gong Show and winning it with the Eagles' "Desperado". She puts the appearance at somewhere around 1979 or 1980, says he was genuinely good, and adds that the clip can still be turned up online.
Asked by Metal Hammer to name the first album she ever bought, Amy Lee did not reach for a rock record. Her answer was The California Raisins Sing The Hit Songs, from 1987 — claymation raisins covering The Four Tops and others. It was a big thing in the 80s, she said, and she was five years old at the time.
Amy Lee has looked back on the start of her career as a stretch that cost her a great deal, because she kept having to establish that she was the songwriter. The assumption around her, by her account, was that a woman at the front of a band was there to sing and that the writing was being handled by a man out of view. Her rule now, she says, is to work only where the respect runs both ways.
Bring Me To Life got Evanescence filed under both goth and nu metal, and the two tags have followed them ever since. Amy Lee has never identified with either. She has said she was an alt-rock kid in ripped-up jeans, that the word goth applied to their music is "stupid", and that she hates the word.
The video for "Fight Like A Girl" was directed by Chad Stahelski, the film-maker behind the John Wick pictures. Songfacts records that it was his debut as a director of music videos.
Dream Too Much started life as a present. Amy Lee had written four or five songs to give her father for his 60th birthday, and that was as far as it was meant to go. It became a full children's album only after Amazon came to her with the idea of making one, and she agreed.
Amy Lee's first song of her own, "A Single Tear", was written to satisfy a middle-school English assignment. Singing it in front of the class was more than she could face, so she recorded it instead — in a breezeway at the school, chosen because the acoustics there were good.
"Fight Like a Girl" exists because somebody asked for it. Tyler Bates, the composer on the John Wick films, went to Amy Lee for a song for the spin-off Ballerina, and the finished track is the one that runs over the film's end credits.
The song at the centre of Ben Moody's solo record is called "10/22", after the night in 2003 when he abruptly walked out of the band he had co-founded. Moody has said that while he was writing it he assumed he was addressing Amy Lee, and that only on listening back some time later did he conclude the song was aimed at himself.
Two configurations of Sanctuary were prepared for Japan. One is a standard CD, SICX-30277, at 2,970 yen; the other is a limited-production deluxe edition pairing a CD with a Blu-ray, SICX-30275~6, at 5,940 yen and made for Japan alone. Both were cut as Blu-spec CD2 discs and shipped with commentary, printed lyrics and Japanese translations.
The Japanese CD of Sanctuary runs to fourteen tracks rather than twelve, with two bonus cuts appended to the end of the running order. Track 13 is a solo performance mix of "Forever Without You", which Sony Music Japan's listing marks as exclusive to the Japanese pressing, and track 14 is "Fight Like a Girl" with K.Flay.
"Sakura Rising" came out of Amy Lee working with the Japanese group Wagakki Band, setting traditional Japanese instruments against symphonic rock. Her official site describes it as a song written across languages and continents, about unity and resilience in uncertain times.
When Ben Moody's departure was reported in November 2003, the diary around it was already filled in some way ahead. Rolling Stone laid out a US run opening on 21 November at Rillito Park in Tucson, Arizona and continuing into mid-December, with Australia and Japan to follow in January.
Sanctuary reached vinyl on 4 September 2026, released worldwide on that date. Japan did not get a single pressing of it: four different vinyl configurations went on sale there at once, as the Japanese outlet Gekirock reported the same day.
WOWOW built a special programme, "Artist Special SUMMER SONIC 2023", around eight sets picked from the festival's Tokyo site, and Evanescence were one of the eight. It went out on 5 November 2023, the DAY-2 block containing their set starting at 21:00. The footage had been shot on 19 and 20 August at ZOZO Marine Stadium and Makuhari Messe in Chiba.
The 20th-anniversary edition of Fallen was announced in September 2023 and appeared in four shapes at once: 2-LP, 2-CD, digital and a Super Deluxe box. What went in alongside the original record was archival rather than newly written — photographs nobody had seen, a foreword in handwriting, B-sides, further recordings, and demos and voice notes that had never been released. The band's own site presents that last group as a way into how the material was first put together.
Evanescence left the 46th Grammy Awards with two trophies, for Best New Artist and for Hard Rock Performance. The categories that got away were both album awards: the Recording Academy's listing has Fallen down as a nominee for Album Of The Year and for Best Rock Album, and it took neither.
Look up Evanescence in the RIAA's Gold & Platinum database and the Fallen row carries a certification date of 30 November 2022 with Craft Recordings in the label column. The single entries sitting on the same list - "Bring Me To Life", "My Immortal" - still read Wind-Up Records, so the album and the singles are filed under two different label names.
The RIAA entry for the single "My Immortal" is dated 31 January 2019, credited to Wind-Up Records - more than fifteen years after Fallen appeared. The band's certification dates are not clustered around the releases themselves at all: the rows the database shows run from 2004 all the way to 2026.
Sorted newest first, the top row of Evanescence's RIAA listing is not a recent release. It is the single "Bring Me To Life", certified on 25 June 2026 under Wind-Up Records - meaning the most recent certification on the band's file belongs to a song from their debut album.
On the music-video gallery of Evanescence's own website, the "Bring Me To Life" clip is listed with a featured credit: ft. Paul McCoy. The guest vocal is not an outside footnote attached by someone else - it is part of the title the band uses for the video itself.
Four separate takes of "Bring Me To Life" sit on the deluxe reissue. Track 2 is the remastered album version; track 17 is a demo; track 18 comes from a 2003 AOL Session; and track 20 is a live performance recorded for Triple M's Garage Session in 2020.
"My Immortal" appears four times on the same deluxe reissue as well. Track 4 is the remastered album take, track 12 a Band Version, track 16 a Strings Version, and the set closes at track 21 with a live recording made at the O2 Arena in 2022.
Fallen reached shops on 4 March 2003, but its songs were not all written for it. The band's own timeline describes the record as having been assembled out of material Amy Lee and Ben Moody had been writing over the preceding years. The singles it names as coming from the album include "Bring Me to Life", "Going Under" and "My Immortal".
On the Recording Academy's own list of Evanescence entries, the newest line is a nomination rather than a win: "Sweet Sacrifice", from The Open Door, in the Hard Rock Performance category at the 50th Annual Grammy Awards, filed under 2008. The band had taken Best New Artist and Hard Rock Performance at the 46th ceremony; the page carries nothing dated after the Sweet Sacrifice entry.
The Open Door came out on 25 September 2006 after eighteen months of writing. The band's own timeline records that Amy Lee held full creative control over the direction the album took, and describes the finished record as reaching beyond the sound the group had had until then.
The band's own timeline treats the self-titled record as an ending as much as a return. It notes the No. 1 debut on the Billboard 200 and the other US charts it topped, and calls the album the closing chapter of their years with Wind-up Records — the last thing they put out through that label.
Work on the self-titled album began in 2009 and was later taken apart and rebuilt with producer Nick Raskulinecz. The band's own timeline describes what came out of that as their first fully collaborative record, written by the whole line-up together instead of being organised around one creative voice.
Synthesis, released on 10 November 2017, puts newly recorded versions of older Evanescence material alongside two songs written for it — "Imperfection" and "Hi-Lo" — and a set of instrumental pieces. The band's own timeline credits David Campbell with arranging and conducting the album, and Amy Lee with producing it.
The Bitter Truth entered the Billboard 200 at No. 11. The band's own site credits it with top-five placings on several other US charts — Independent, Alternative, Hard Rock and Rock Albums among them — and with top-ten entries in a number of markets outside the United States.
Sanctuary did not reach every format on one day. The band's own site listed the digital and CD editions as already out, while vinyl was still taking preorders against a 4 September date. Measured from the 5 June release, that left close to three months before the album could be had on vinyl.
Ave Mujica was booked as support for the December 2026 Japanese shows, and not for part of the run but for every date on it. Creativeman Productions, the promoter, put the announcement out on 17 July 2026 — the day before general ticket sales opened.
Japan learned of the headline shows on the same day Sanctuary went on sale worldwide, 5 June 2026. Sony Music Japan's announcement laid out two Tokyo nights at SGC HALL ARIAKE, on 1 and 2 December, and a single Osaka date at Zepp Osaka Bayside on 4 December.
"Who Will You Follow" was given a video directed by Jensen Noen. Sony Music Japan's announcement of 15 May 2026 set the premiere for midnight on 16 May and said the film deals with technology, misinformation and the weight of digital culture.
Sony Music Japan's album announcement, dated 10 April 2026, also laid out where the road work would start: the world tour was to open on 11 June in West Palm Beach, Florida, less than a week after Sanctuary went on sale on 5 June.
The advance single from Sanctuary, "Who Will You Follow", went out on 10 April 2026, with a lyric video posted the same day. Sony Music Japan credits the song to the band together with Zakk Cervini and Jordan Fish, who produced it as well; the album itself was set for 5 June.
Three producers share Sanctuary between them, as listed by Sony Music Japan on the day of release: Zakk Cervini, whose work takes in Bad Omens and Spiritbox; Jordan Fish, associated with Bring Me The Horizon and Architects; and Nick Raskulinecz, known for Deftones, Korn, Foo Fighters and Rush.
Where Sanctuary falls in the discography depends on who is counting. Announcing the worldwide release of 5 June 2026, Sony Music Japan called it the band's sixth studio album; Louder, Metal Hammer's site, introduced the same record as album number five.
Amy Lee has described Sanctuary as a record more than three years in the making. Playing the finished album back in one sitting, shortly before its release, she said she was proud of every second of it. She has also described the work itself as an outlet during a stretch when a great deal felt wrong and beyond her control, and as somewhere to keep hope alive through music and the connections around it.
Recover, Vol. 1 is an EP of cover versions issued under Amy Lee's own name rather than Evanescence's. One of the songs on it is Portishead's "It's a Fire", and her official timeline files that recording as part of the EP.
Dream Too Much is a children's record, and Amy Lee made it with her own family. Motherhood was the starting point, and the running order mixes newly written songs with reworkings of existing ones — meant, her official timeline says, for adults as much as for children.
The Recording Academy keeps a page for every artist on the Grammy site. The one for Evanescence puts the band at two wins from six nominations — a count published by the body that hands the awards out, not assembled by an outside tally.
Search the RIAA's certification database for Evanescence and Anywhere But Home comes up twice, both entries dated 17 December 2004 and both credited to Wind-Up Records. One is filed under the ALBUM format, the other as a VIDEO LONGFORM.
"End of You" is billed to three singers rather than one: Poppy, Amy Lee and Courtney LaPlante. Lee's official site lists the official music video under exactly that three-way credit.
"Hand That Feeds" turns up in Amy Lee's official video gallery as a duet credited to Halsey and to her. The listing ties the song to the film The World of John Wick: Ballerina, named alongside the title in the official video's own billing.
Amy Lee's official video gallery carries "Love Hurts" under a joint credit with Dave Stewart, not as an Evanescence song. It sits in the same short run of listings as her work with Poppy and with Halsey — the part of her site where the things made outside the band are gathered.
"Hand That Feeds" is a song Amy Lee made with Halsey for the film Ballerina. Her official timeline sets it out as a piece built on piano and electronic textures, written to carry the tension of the film while still standing up on its own.
Amy Lee's first solo album was not a conventional songwriting record. Aftermath was composed as the soundtrack to the film War Story, made together with Dave Eggar and Chuck Palmer, and layers orchestral writing over electronic and atmospheric textures — a step away from ordinary songwriting, as her own site puts it.
The version of Within Temptation's "The Reckoning" that Amy Lee sings on is a live recording rather than a studio take: it was captured during the Worlds Collide Tour, and her own site lists it that way among her collaborations.
Amy Lee appears as a guest on Korn's MTV Unplugged: Korn, performing "Freak on a Leash" with the band. The unplugged setting left the original's force behind, the song having been re-scored for acoustic playing with orchestral players added. Her official site lists the track among her collaborations.
Lost Whispers went out digitally on 9 December 2016, during the stretch in which the band was working independently after its departure from Wind-up Records. The collection gathers B-sides, outtakes and bonus tracks reaching from the early years up to 2011's Evanescence, and it also introduced two new recordings.
Look the band up in the RIAA's Gold & Platinum database and the certifications come back under two different labels. Fallen and the self-titled Evanescence are listed with Craft Recordings, while The Open Door, Anywhere But Home and the certified singles "Bring Me To Life", "My Immortal" and "Call Me When You're Sober" still carry Wind-Up Records.
"Afterlife" was recorded for Devil May Cry, and the band took it onto the stage of The Game Awards. Their own site hosts the footage of that performance and identifies the song there as the one recorded for Devil May Cry.
Anywhere But Home, out on 23 November 2004, is built around a concert at Le Zénith in Paris played during the Fallen tour. The band's timeline notes that the release also carried songs that had not been issued before, among them "Missing", "Breathe No More" and "Farther Away".
Four of the videos kept in Amy Lee's official media gallery are her readings of other people's songs, and each is listed with the artist it came from: Chris Isaak's "Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing", Led Zeppelin's "Going To California", U2's "With or Without You" and Portishead's "It's A Fire".
The band's own media gallery holds an official music video for "The Chain", and the way it is listed there states where the song came from: the game Gears 5. The tie-in is spelled out by Evanescence themselves rather than by anyone else, and the entry sits in the run of related videos beside "Bring Me To Life".
"Sally's Song" comes from the film The Nightmare Before Christmas. Amy Lee's official timeline describes her cover of it as a recording that uses harp and a pared-down instrumental setting.
"Fight Like A Girl" carries four writing credits — Amy Lee, K.Flay, Dylan Eiland and the composer Tyler Bates, who also produced it. The band's timeline lists the track as their collaboration with K.Flay and says it was created for Ballerina, a film set within the world of John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum.
The Evanescence cover of "The Chain" appeared in November 2019 and was recorded in Nashville, according to the band's own timeline. The same entry describes the video released alongside it as lit in red.
Asked what she counted as the band's breakthrough moment, Amy Lee pointed to being at the MTV Video Music Awards. She had watched the ceremony on television every year, which made standing inside it strange. She recalled the thought that everyone in the room knew who Evanescence were — and then took it back herself: a few of them did, and most of them did not.
At the 2004 Grammys the Best New Artist award went to Evanescence, ahead of a field that included 50 Cent and Sean Paul. In Album of the Year the result ran the other way: Fallen was nominated and lost to OutKast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below.
In December 2003, weeks after Ben Moody had gone, E! got Amy Lee's account of where the band stood. It was healthier than it had been, she said; everyone was happy, Moody among them; and Evanescence was still growing, still turning into something else. Moody's own telling of those same months, set down in 2010, does not read as a description of the same band.
Ben Moody set out his side of it in a long statement in 2010. Both of them, he said, resented watching the friendship come apart, and that resentment hardened into hostility and open disagreement until the air around the band could go off at any moment. By the time Evanescence left to tour Fallen, on his account, there was nothing between him and Amy Lee left to save.
Ben Moody has named the moment he decided, and it is one night: October 22, 2003. Everything arrived in his head at once, he said — either he left, or Evanescence ceased to exist. In the way he tells it there was no third option available to him.
Speaking in February 2004, Amy Lee said she did not expect to work with Ben Moody again. She left one opening in the answer: there were older songs she still liked, and playing those, she said, might be the moment he came to mind.
Ben Moody's exit came in October 2003, six months after Fallen had been released, and creative differences were the reason given at the time. The story he told later is not that one: in 2010 Moody admitted that he had tried to force Amy Lee out of the band the two of them had founded together.
Rolling Stone passed on a report from the British magazine Rock Sound: on a day off during the German dates, Ben Moody went home without saying anything to the rest of the band. Amy Lee's reply to the magazine was that you do not do that to your band, and would not do it to friends or family either.
Paul McCoy of 12 Stones sings on the album take of "Bring Me to Life". In the United States the song reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100; in Britain it went one better, becoming the first Evanescence single to top the chart.
"Bring Me to Life" did not rise evenly across American radio. It went to No. 1 on Alternative Airplay, yet its best showing on the Mainstream Rock chart was No. 11. On the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 it crossed over as far as No. 5.
Diamond is the RIAA's tier for ten million units moved in the United States, and in December 2022 it was reported that Fallen had got there. The threshold counts American activity only, so the figure is not the album's worldwide total.
Fallen reached stores on 4 March 2003. Gold — 500,000 units — followed on 8 April, and platinum, at a million, barely a fortnight after that on 21 April. Before the same calendar year was out the album had gone past triple platinum.
"My Immortal" appeared on the Hot 100 dated 10 January 2004 and took three months to reach its peak of No. 7, on 10 April. Billboard's own history logs the run at 32 weeks — precisely the length "Bring Me to Life" had managed before it.
The American diamond award accounts for ten million units at home, and Fallen travelled well past that mark. Louder, the Metal Hammer title, puts the album's worldwide sales above 17 million. That number is the magazine's own reporting rather than a certification.
In a long statement of his own, Ben Moody set out the band's origins as a story of three people rather than two: himself, Amy Lee, and David Hodges, whom he describes as the missing piece they found early on. By the time the group went out on the road behind Fallen, Moody writes, Hodges had already parted ways with them.
Paul McCoy, the voice on the rap section of "Bring Me To Life" and a face in the video too, came out of 12 Stones. That band had already put out its self-titled debut in 2002, released by Wind-Up Records - the label Evanescence were on at the time. The guest was found in-house.
Looking back on the Fallen period for Metal Hammer, Amy Lee weighed her words and declined to describe it as a happy time. She remembers feeling insecure and still working things out, and frustrated - having to fight for everything she wanted, and being treated like a child.
Commercial success did not settle the question of who wrote the songs. Amy Lee has said she was still arguing, for far too long after Fallen, that she could write her own material - the industry habit at the time being to tell newer artists they needed songwriters - and that earning respect as a creator rather than as the frontwoman took years more.
When Ben Moody stopped appearing on Evanescence's European dates, their label Wind-Up gave almost nothing away. Rolling Stone reported that a spokesperson would confirm only that Moody was not on the tour at that point — declining to say why, declining to name whoever was covering for him, and declining to comment on whether he would be back for the US run due to open on November 21st.
Two EPs came before Fallen. The first was self-titled and was issued in 1998 by a local label, Bigwig; a second, Sound Asleep, followed the year after. Songs from both of them would later turn up on Fallen.
Ben Moody's departure in late 2003 left the line-up with a single founder in it. From that point on Amy Lee was the only original member of Evanescence, and the change came while Fallen was still selling.
Fallen was remastered for its twentieth anniversary in 2023, and Amy Lee — by then the only original member left in the band — told the Japanese magazine Gekirock that she had been closely involved in the work. Her starting point was to go back to Ted Jensen, who had mastered the record the first time, and ask him whether twenty years of newer technology would let him reach something that had been out of range before.
Ben Moody's exit from Evanescence came in October 2003, in the middle of the band's European tour. By February 2004, BARKS reported, he had taken a place on Avril Lavigne's production team — the same piece noting that Evanescence had just won Best New Artist at that year's Grammy Awards.
With Fallen selling, the label wanted Evanescence out on the road to capitalise on it, so a touring band was assembled around Amy Lee and Ben Moody: John LeCompt on guitar, Rocky Gray on drums and Will Boyd on bass were brought in to back the pair.
Evanescence carried on as a quintet after Moody dropped out, and Rolling Stone spelled out what that meant: the European dates then under way, with a run of English shows still ahead of them, were the first the band had ever played without him. The label would not say who was standing in.
The guitarist who took over from Ben Moody in Evanescence was Terry Balsamo, who had previously played in the band Cold. Songfacts records the handover on the same page that dates Moody's departure to October 2003, while the band were still touring behind Fallen.
Amy Lee has described 2023, the twentieth year of Fallen, as a year that closed a circle. It was also the year, she says, in which Evanescence played the biggest headline show of their career, in São Paulo — a bigger show, by her account, and in front of more people than the band could draw when the album was new.
The US run Evanescence had lined up for 21 November to 7 December 2003 was pushed back to late February and early March of 2004. When BARKS reported the change that December, only two replacement dates had been settled, with the rest of the schedule still to come, and the band's own site said tickets bought for the original shows would be honoured on the new ones.
Evanescence marked twenty years of Fallen with an Australian tour that opened on 24 August 2023 at the Riverstage in Brisbane. Blabbermouth put the run at five dates and noted that it was the band's first Australian tour since 2018, when they had played there with local symphony orchestras.
The Brisbane show was billed on twenty years of Fallen, but the album was not performed in sequence. The running order Blabbermouth took from Setlist.fm has six songs run together as a single medley — "Haunted", "My Last Breath", "Cloud Nine", "Everybody's Fool", "Weight Of The World" and "Whisper" — and the night opened instead with "Broken Pieces Shine".
Moody's health had already cost Evanescence shows before he walked away. Rolling Stone reported that he was taken ill during a gig in Spain in June 2003 — dehydration, according to what was said at the time — and that the band were forced to cancel a number of German dates as a result.
The 20th-anniversary edition of Fallen was overseen in every respect by Amy Lee. Its artwork was reimagined, and every physical format carries photographs from the album's era that had not been published before, together with a foreword written out by Lee in her own hand.
Which colour of the anniversary double vinyl a buyer could get depended on where they shopped. The plain black 2-LP went out to everyone; Blue Smoke was Target's, White and Purple Marble belonged to Barnes & Noble, Pink and Black Marble went to independent shops, and a Black & Silver blend was sold only through the band's own site. The 2-LP, 2-CD and digital editions all appeared on 17 November 2023.
"My Immortal" was not new when Daredevil carried it to a wide audience in 2003: the song had already appeared on various EPs and demos the band put out earlier. Songfacts draws a line between the two songs the film used — "Bring Me To Life" was first heard there, while "My Immortal" arrived with a history behind it.
Chris Daughtry recorded a version of "Bring Me To Life" for the soundtrack of The Passion, the live musical Fox broadcast in 2016 built around the last days of Jesus. Daughtry played Judas Iscariot in it.
The video for "Everybody's Fool" opens with Amy Lee shooting a commercial in a blond wig and makeup, and goes on to run her through a succession of fabricated looks that have nothing to do with her own style. Songfacts credits the clip to director Philipp Stölz.
The costumes seen in the video for "Going Under" were designed by Amy Lee herself. Songfacts records that alongside the credit for the clip's director, the German film-maker Philipp Stoelzl.
"Hello" was released on Fallen and stayed there: Songfacts records that no music video was made for it and that it never became part of the band's live set. The same page adds that plenty of listeners nonetheless took the song personally.
When "My Immortal" was issued as a single on 8 December 2003, the recording behind it was not the sparse take that had gone onto the first pressing of Fallen but a full-band version of the song. The single reached the Top 10 in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and a number of European countries.
Ten bonus tracks ride alongside the original album on the 20th-anniversary edition of Fallen. Three of them are rare B-sides — "Breathe No More", "Farther Away" and "Missing" — and six had never been issued in any form before. Among those six are a newly unearthed strings version of "My Immortal" and a 2002 demo of "Bring Me To Life".
The producer of the band's first few albums, Dave Fortman, took part in the remastering work for the anniversary edition. Amy Lee, who says she was closely involved in the remaster herself, has spoken of how much it meant to have him there for it.
Dave Fortman's estimate for what Fallen cost to make is around $250,000. That is real money today, but at a point when seven-figure album budgets were not unusual it counted as restrained — Korn's Untouchables, from 2002, was reported to have cost $4 million.
Nobody was expecting much of Fallen when it appeared on 4 March 2003. Dave Fortman has said that gold certification — 500,000 copies — would have left everyone involved happy. In the event the album shifted more than 140,000 copies in its opening week alone and reached No.7 on the US Billboard chart.
October 2023 brought a demo version of "Bring Me To Life" from the band. The song had been the lead single from their debut Fallen, and the rap on the finished recording was something Evanescence added under pressure from their label. None of it is on the demo, which is the song as it stood beforehand.
Several recordings of "My Immortal" exist. The earliest is an outtake from the 1998 Evanescence EP with nothing on it but Lee's voice and a piano. In 2000 the song turned up again on Origin, a set the group put together to serve as a demo; that one has backing vocals from David Hodges of the band.
Why did the rap matter so much at the time? Amy Lee's answer is that "Bring Me to Life" was the band's first single and she wanted people to understand who Evanescence were. Having got past that point, she says, the rap does not make her angry any more.
Amy Lee has put the whole opening verse of "Bring Me To Life" down to one exchange with a man she had met only three or four times. Josh was no more than a friend at that point, she told Sonic Seducer, and the moment left her feeling that somebody had seen straight through a front she believed she was keeping up — and the verse came out of that. He became her husband years later.
"Everybody's Fool" was aimed outward when Lee wrote it, but by the time the band came to shoot its video she had turned it around. Amy Lee has explained that she played the clip as though the song were about her, because the gap between the person an audience watches on a large stage and the person actually standing up there was something she could recognise in herself.
Some of the songs Amy Lee and Ben Moody wrote in their earliest period together, before Evanescence existed as a band, survived all the way onto the 2003 debut Fallen — "Imaginary", "Whisper" and "My Immortal" among them. Lee has described what the two of them were doing back then as closer to an electronic duo than to a group.
Amy Lee has said she has grown out of "Everybody's Fool" a little, while stressing that there is no song of hers she hates. She wrote it as a teenager, drawing on high school and addressing it above all to her younger sisters, who were then deep in a boyband and pop phase; what she wanted to tell them was that the surface is not the thing that counts.
In a 2016 interview Amy Lee reflected on the odd position of having written her best-known songs while still at high school: at 34 she was still singing about whatever had preoccupied her back then. Looking at it again, she felt she had come across as preachy about someone else's life, and said that what she understands better now is that you never know what is going on inside anybody.
The writing credit on "Going Under" carries three names: Amy Lee alongside Ben Moody and David Hodges, both bandmates of hers at the time. Neither was still in Evanescence by 2004 — Hodges left before Fallen came out, and Moody walked out in the middle of the band's 2003 tour.
Amy Lee has described the words of "Going Under" as being about coming out of a bad relationship. What she says she set down is the moment at the end of your rope, when it becomes clear that something has to change and that you cannot carry on living inside the situation you are in. She does not identify the other person.
Billboard's Hot 100 history for Evanescence has "Call Me When You're Sober" arriving on 2 September 2006 and reaching No. 10 the week after, on 9 September, which is where it stopped. It stayed on the chart 22 weeks. It is the third entry in that history to reach the top ten, and nothing listed after it has climbed that high.
"Snow White Queen" is credited to Lee and Terry Balsamo, and the credit itself marks a change in the band. Balsamo came in after co-founder Ben Moody left; on the 2003 debut Fallen, Evanescence had been three people — Lee, Moody and David Hodges — whereas by The Open Door, Lee was working with Balsamo and three other members.
Halfway through 2007, Amy Lee married and became Amy Hartzler. The ceremony was held in her parents' garden, and both the wedding and the honeymoon were fitted into a break in the middle of the touring — private life going into whatever gaps the band's commitments left.
Marc Webb directed the video for "Call Me When You're Sober", which retells Little Red Riding Hood in modern dress. Lee has explained the choice as a matter of balance: the song states its case so plainly that the film was left free to go somewhere far less literal.
"All That I'm Living For" takes the band itself as its subject. It began with Amy Lee realising one day that between writing for Evanescence and touring with it, the band accounted for very nearly all of her time — a love/hate relationship, in her own description.
By 2016, Amy Lee was describing "Call Me When You're Sober" to Songfacts in wider terms: less a song aimed at one man than a song about a relationship ending, and about reaching the point where you are finally willing to stand your ground. She called that the more difficult route, because it means walking out into something you cannot see. Singing it on stage now, she said, takes her to different places than it once did.
Amy Lee spent much of the writing of The Open Door inside difficult situations, and by the time the album was finished she had taken herself out of them — which, she told VH1, is not an easy thing to do and takes some nerve. What came afterwards was new to her: for the first time she felt she could build a song on feeling well rather than badly, having never once worked that way before.
Behind "Good Enough" is Josh Hartzler, the man Amy Lee married in 2007. In the song she is braced for some bad turn to arrive and prove that the two of them were never meant to be together — a fear that sits alongside her refusal to let him go and her disbelief that she is good enough for him.
Amy Lee traced "Snow White Queen" back to frightening experiences when she spoke to Rock Sound for its 88th issue. A stalker was behind them, and she told the magazine there were many nights she could not go home and had to sleep in a hotel instead.
Billboard's chart history credits the 2011 self-titled album with just two Hot 100 entries, and neither one lasted. "What You Want" arrived on 27 August 2011 at No. 68 and "Lost In Paradise" on 29 October at No. 99; in both cases the entry date is also the peak date, and both are logged with a single week on the chart.
The self-titled album went straight in at the top: Billboard's chart history dates its Billboard 200 debut to 29 October 2011 at No. 1, with the same date logged as the peak date. The same row credits the album with 27 weeks on that chart.
Songfacts places the writing of "What You Want" at Amy Lee's own house in New York. She was not working on it alone: bassist Tim McCord and guitarist Terry Balsamo were there with her, and the three of them put the song together.
Guitar World's October 2011 interview sets down the line-up around the self-titled album and, unusually, separates the two guitar roles: Terry Balsamo is named as lead guitarist and Troy McLawhorn as rhythm guitarist, alongside Amy Lee, bassist Tim McCord and drummer Will Hunt.
Will Hunt did not go quiet while Evanescence were inactive. Metal Hammer lists six acts he drummed for in that gap: Black Label Society, Static-X, Hollywood Undead, Mötley Crüe, Methods Of Mayhem and Staind.
The first Evanescence concert in two years took place on 17 August 2011 at the War Memorial Auditorium in Nashville — the same building, Loudwire notes, in which the self-titled album had been recorded. Three days after it, on 20 August, they appeared at the Canadian edition of Rock on the Range in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
BARKS ended its account of the Zepp Tokyo night with what the band said once they were off stage: Amy Lee and the other members told the writer backstage that it had been the best show of their lives. The site thought enough of the line to run it as the headline of the review.
Asked what he was taking on the road in 2011, Troy McLawhorn named two guitars to Guitar World: a PRS baritone and a seven-string Gibson Flying V, a model he described as having only just come out.
In August 2011, ahead of the album, Amy Lee played five of its songs to a room of about thirty people at a listening event in Toronto: "What You Want", "The Change", "The Other Side", "My Heart Is Broken" and "Lost in Paradise".
Evanescence's self-titled third album was led off by "What You Want", which arrived in the summer of 2011. It was the first single the band had issued in four years. The one before it was "Good Enough", and nothing had followed it in that format in the meantime.
The clip for "What You Want" was shot in Brooklyn, New York on 30 July 2011 under director Meiert Avis, whose credits also take in U2, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. It works as a biography of the band, running from their early days through to the point where they reconvened after the hiatus.
As of July 2011 the self-titled third album was reported to be in progress at Blackbird Studio in Nashville, with Nick Raskulinecz — Rush, Foo Fighters, Trivium — producing and an 11 October release through Wind-Up Records already announced. A piece published the following month named a different room in the same city, the War Memorial Auditorium, as where the record was made, so two accounts of the location sit side by side.
Guitar World's piece from October 2011, published just after the record came out, does not hand the self-titled album to a single producer. It names Steve Lillywhite alongside Nick Raskulinecz as the people who produced it.
Amy Lee has described two ways of working on the self-titled album. Some of it came out of writing sessions with just her, Terry Balsamo and Tim McCord; the rest came from the whole band sitting in a circle with their instruments and jamming until an idea worth keeping turned up.
More than five months of studio work went into the self-titled album with Nick Raskulinecz at the desk. He had spent the preceding years producing Alice In Chains, Rush and Deftones. Metal Hammer put the length of the sessions down to the band having finally settled.
The electronic shading on "End Of The Dream" traces back to Amy Lee's own listening. Speaking to Rolling Stone, she recalled falling for MGMT's first record and a long-standing fondness for Portishead and Massive Attack, and said she had at last found the point where that kind of thing and Evanescence could be put together.
Troy McLawhorn told Gibson.com that the self-titled album leaned on the group far more than earlier Evanescence records had. The band shut themselves in a rehearsal room and worked the ideas they had into songs there, and what he wanted to hold on to was the rawness of everyone playing in the same room — something he credited producer Nick Raskulinecz with carrying through into the recording.
Guitarist Terry Balsamo picked "Sick" as his own favourite track on the 2011 self-titled album when he spoke to Spin. His reason was its place in the sequence of writing: it was one of the first songs done for the record, and the heavy direction it set is the one the rest of the album then followed.
Troy McLawhorn told Spin that "The Change" opened a door for Evanescence toward writing that leans on groove. He described a restrained verse with something close to a reggae feel giving way to a large chorus, and a bridge that turns into rock with an edge of metal to it. Had the band sat down intending to write to those parameters, he added, the song would never have happened.
Amy Lee has said that "The Other Side" came together with the band rather than on her own, and that the lyric was the hard part. Speaking to MTV News, she explained that the big, dramatic chorus existed first, while the verses had turned playful and driven by groove — which left her working out how to keep singing about death over them.
Amy Lee laid out the thinking behind "End Of The Dream" for Spin: the song comes from recognising that a life is not forever and has to be lived while it lasts, pain included. Hurting, in her account, is evidence of being alive — and being so afraid of it that you avoid it is a way of missing out on living altogether.
What Amy Lee sings about on "The Other Side", from the 2011 self-titled album, is death. Songfacts notes this is a subject she had gone back to more than once already, naming "My Immortal", "Even In Death" and "Hello" as the earlier instances.
Synthesis was assembled from two kinds of material: two songs written for it, and older favourites taken back into the studio and recorded again with a live orchestra and electronica behind them. The orchestral arranging was David Campbell's work.
For Synthesis the band went back to the demo stage of its best-known songs and built them up again from there. What resulted is an orchestral and electronic reworking of the catalogue, with instrumental passages and two new tracks set among the older material.
Most of Synthesis is the band's catalogue remade with orchestra; only two songs on it are new, "Imperfection" and "Hi-Lo". David Campbell wrote the orchestrations, and it was "Imperfection" that went out as the album's first single.
Billboard's chart history has Synthesis entering the Billboard 200 dated 2 December 2017 at No. 8, which is where it peaked. Its entry week was also its peak week, and the album is listed with a run of just two weeks on the chart.
Being a composer, Amy Lee has said, was what she originally wanted — as a schoolgirl she spent almost all her free time making music, headphones on at the keyboard into the early hours. That is why she found working with David Campbell and the trained musicians around him on Synthesis so worthwhile.
Violinist Lindsey Stirling appears as a guest on "Hi-Lo" from the 2017 album Synthesis. The connection did not end with the recording: in 2018 she went out on tour with Evanescence.
Every Synthesis Live ticket came bundled with a download of the album, which had not yet been released. Buyers were also sent songs from it ahead of release, starting on 18 August 2017 with the newly recorded version of "Bring Me To Life".
The North American tour behind Synthesis was laid out as close to thirty dates, opening in October and finishing on 19 December, more than two months later. The album itself was due on 10 November through Sony, so the run began before the record was out and carried on for over a month after it.
The making of Synthesis was documented in a series of webisodes called Inside Synthesis, each covering a piece of the work. The second instalment was given over entirely to how the single "Imperfection" came together.
Amy Lee remarked on 17 October 2017 that she had just seen the final edit of the "Imperfection" video. It appeared three days after that, on 20 October — roughly three weeks before Synthesis itself was due on 10 November.
In the stretch leading up to Synthesis, Amy Lee put out music under her own name as well. A solo single, "Love Exists", arrived in February 2017; a second solo song, "Speak To Me", went onto the soundtrack of the supernatural thriller Voice From The Stone, which opened on 28 April that year.
When the Synthesis Live tour was announced in August 2017, the album it was named after had not been finished. Blabbermouth reported that the band would be in the studio for the rest of that month, naming Will "Science" Hunt as producer — a different man from the Evanescence drummer of the same name — and David Campbell as the orchestral arranger and composer. Two brand-new songs were already known to be joining the reworked catalogue material on the record.
The rap section of "Bring Me To Life" gradually disappeared from Evanescence's live set, and the version cut for Synthesis leaves it out entirely. Speaking about that rap-less recording, Amy Lee made the point that the take history remembers is usually the one made when a song has only just been written and the band is still learning it — and that after years of performing this one on stage she was able to make different vocal choices for the new version.
"Hi-Lo" started out as nothing more than a working title for the song. Amy Lee chose not to replace it once the track was finished, so the name used during the sessions became the one on the album. It was taken from a line of the lyric.
Amy Lee has admitted that the words to "Imperfection", one of the two songs written fresh for Synthesis, held her up for a long time. There was, as she put it, a lifetime of work to live up to, and she was unsure both of what she wanted to say and of how to make it good enough.
Amy Lee has traced the title The Bitter Truth back to what she was feeling as the words of the album began to take shape. A theme of disillusionment ran through them, she said: growing up and finding that fairy tales are not real, and that nobody else is in charge, so the deciding, the finding out and the self-protection all fall to you.
In May 2020 violinist Lindsey Stirling had Amy Lee as a guest on her #StringSessions series, and the video she put out shows the two of them playing the then-new Evanescence song "Wasted On You" together. Stirling had trailed it on 15 May, saying Lee would be the next guest.
Deena Jakoub, a friend of Amy Lee's of many years, is a co-writer of "Use My Voice". Lee has said she was stuck on the chorus when Jakoub came over, that Jakoub had an idea for it straight away, and that the two of them then worked it out on the spot, singing and shouting their way around the room until the melody was there.
Amy Lee counts Halestorm's Lzzy Hale and Veridia's Deena Jakoub among her friends, and all three of them are based in Nashville. NME points to that shared home city as the reason Lee was able to call on the pair to help finish "Use My Voice", a single from The Bitter Truth.
The Bitter Truth came out on BMG, and it was the band's first album made up entirely of new songs in ten years. Four singles were taken from it: "Use My Voice", "The Game Is Over", "Wasted On You" and "Better Without You".
None of the band's earlier records had been made by the line-up that was in place in 2020, so The Bitter Truth was that group's first Evanescence album. After the self-titled record the band stopped while a legal dispute with their former label ran its course, Lee spent the time on solo projects, and the return, 2017's Synthesis, was old songs rebuilt with orchestral arrangements rather than a new set.
By the time The Bitter Truth arrived in 2021, Amy Lee was the last founding member left in Evanescence. Reviewing the album, Metal Hammer described her as both the band's sole remaining founder and the creative force behind it.
The Evanescence and Halestorm tour opened on Friday 5 November 2021 in Portland, Oregon. From there the two bands were routed through arenas across the country, with the run set to close in the Northeast just before the holidays. Live Nation produced it.
The opening slot on the 2021 Evanescence and Halestorm tour changed hands halfway through. Plush took the first leg, and Lilith Czar opened the shows on the second. Both bookings were public by July 2021.
The touring behind The Bitter Truth took Evanescence to The O2 in London late in 2022. Those dates were a co-headline run shared with Within Temptation, the two bands billed alongside each other, and NME spoke to Amy Lee before that London show.
"Use My Voice" was the third song from The Bitter Truth to be put out ahead of the album, following "Wasted On You" and then "The Game Is Over". When it appeared in August 2020 the album itself was still unreleased.
Evanescence shot the video for "The Game Is Over" themselves, on iPhones, working with P.R. Brown, the director they turn to regularly. It was filmed during the COVID-19 lockdown, and the finished clip leans heavily on visual effects to picture what the pandemic had done to people emotionally.
The single "Use My Voice" was timed to open a voter registration drive of the same name. Evanescence ran it with the organisation HeadCount, urging US citizens to register, to check whether their existing registration still stood, and — with the pandemic on — to look into the remote voting options available to them.
Amy Lee has described the band's first writing sessions for The Bitter Truth as aimed almost entirely at what was raw and heavy. They had just come off Synthesis, she said, and were impatient to get down a document of how they sounded as a group.
Asked about Billie Eilish around the time of The Bitter Truth, Amy Lee said that what she valued was not the darkness of the style so much as the fact that Eilish was being nothing other than herself. She added that she saw a good deal of her own younger self in her.
Amy Lee has admitted that she does not, for the most part, listen to rock, while making clear that this is not for want of liking it. The one record she named was the then-new Bring Me the Horizon album, which she called her favourite new rock album in a good while.
The Bitter Truth was fed out to listeners for the best part of a year before the album itself arrived. Five singles came first — "Wasted on You" in April 2020, then "The Game Is Over", "Use My Voice", "Yeah Right" and "Better Without You" — and only after all of them did the record follow.
Amy Lee has explained why the follow-up to The Bitter Truth was so long in coming. The band had been on the road consistently since that 2021 album, she said: doing well meant more kept coming their way, there was the Muse tour and another European tour, and in the end she was the one who said they had to start making new material.
The Bitter Truth, out early in 2021, was Evanescence's fifth album, and Nick Raskulinecz produced it. He had held the same job ten years before, on the band's self-titled record of 2011.
"Wasted on You" appeared in April 2020 as the lead single from The Bitter Truth, at a point when the album itself was still very much unfinished. In November that year the work was still going on, and the release was then reported as due early in 2021.
By Amy Lee's account, the band went on recording this music right up to the point where the studio was no longer open to them. After that the process changed shape entirely: files went back and forth, the rest was settled over the phone, and the work was finished with everyone in a different place.
Rather than hold out until every song was ready, Amy Lee decided the band should start recording. They went in with producer Nick Raskulinecz before heading out on tour and put down four songs they felt good about. Some of the writing had been done at Lee's own house in Nashville, where the members came and stayed for a while.
Speaking in 2021, Amy Lee looked back on the lockdown year: 2020 went into writing the album remotely, and it was the autumn before the members could work in one place again — Jen Majura excepted, since she still had to join them virtually. On that footing, Lee said, the record was finished before the year was out.
In 2020 the voting organisation HeadCount used "Use My Voice" in a campaign to get people to the polls. Consequence's review of The Bitter Truth picked the song out as a sign that the album reaches into social subjects further than the band's introspective reputation would suggest, and traced it back to the assault of Chanel Miller.
Amy Lee has framed The Bitter Truth by where it starts: at the ground zero of a tragedy, as she puts it. What the album is actually about, she says, is the journey of getting back up from there.
"Use My Voice" was written in response to the 2016 Brock Turner sexual assault case, and it had already been out as a single through 2020 by the time the album arrived. Reviewing The Bitter Truth in March 2021, Metal Hammer wrote that the storming of the Capitol had given the song a new meaning.
Amy Lee has described "The Game Is Over" as a song about being worn out by pretence — the disguises people put on so that everyone around them stays comfortable, and the distance between what is felt inside and the version that is let out to stay within what counts as socially acceptable.
"The Game Is Over" did not come from Amy Lee working alone. She has described sitting in a circle with the rest of the band in their rehearsal space with nothing but bass, guitars, drums and a voice, the song coming to life as they played — and opening her eyes to find everyone else's still closed.
The ballad "Far From Heaven" came late in the writing sessions for The Bitter Truth. Amy Lee has described one feeling she kept returning to and could not leave unsaid — grief, and the work of coming out the other side of it — and that is what the song became.
The album and its first single landed together: news of Sanctuary arrived with "Who Will You Follow" attached, and a release date of 5 June 2026. It closed a five-year gap after 2021's The Bitter Truth, and Consequence counted it as the band's sixth proper studio album.
Billboard's Hard Rock Songs chart had never been led by this band until "Who Will You Follow" reached its top. The Sanctuary lead single stood at No. 1 on the Rock & Alternative Airplay chart as well.
Rock & Alternative Airplay was the second Billboard chart "Afterlife" led, and there too it was a first for the band. Nothing they had released since "What You Want", which stopped at No. 11 in 2011, had climbed higher on it.
The writing and the production of "Who Will You Follow" were shared by Zakk Cervini and Jordan Fish. Cervini's credits run through Bad Omens and Spiritbox, Fish's through Poppy and Architects, and Bring Me The Horizon records sit on both lists.
The credit on "Afterlife" is a shared one. Amy Lee wrote the song with Alex Seaver, a producer and songwriter who works under the name Mako, and production was handled by Nick Raskulinecz together with Seaver.
Two things filled the stretch before Sanctuary arrived, by Metal Hammer's account: a support run with Metallica, and Amy Lee stepping outside her own band to share the single "End Of You" with Poppy and Courtney LaPlante.
Evanescence tied their 2026 world tour to a donation, working with PLUS1 so that one dollar, one pound or one euro from every ticket sold would reach organisations delivering humanitarian aid and medical relief around the world. Blabbermouth carried the arrangement in its report of the album announcement.
By the time Sanctuary was announced, the 2026 world tour was already on the calendar. Its North American leg was due to open in June with Spiritbox and Nova Twins along for it, and before any of that the band had a festival booking: Sick New World in Las Vegas on 25 April 2026.
December 2025 brought the announcement of a UK and European tour, which NME noted as the band's first visit to those countries since 2022. Poppy, Nova Twins and K.Flay were billed with them, and the opening night was set for 8 September at the First Direct Bank Arena in Leeds — some nine months after the run was made public.
Their 2026 diary was bracketed by two editions of the same festival. Sick New World in Las Vegas came first, on 25 April. A fuller headline run then opened on 11 June in West Palm Beach, Florida, and worked across North America into early August. After that the band crossed to the UK and Europe for September and October dates, before returning to the States that autumn for the Texas edition of Sick New World.
The video for "Tell Me When You've Had Enough" went up at 00:45 Japan time on 5 September 2026. Gekirock reported that it draws heavily on live footage shot during the band's North American tour earlier that same year, and it landed three days before the European leg opened in Leeds.
The announcement of Sanctuary came in April 2026, with 5 June named as the release date. It is the sixth studio album to carry the band's name, and the lead single "Who Will You Follow" went out in the same moment.
Sanctuary did not reach shops in one piece. As announced in April 2026, the digital release, the standard CD, the deluxe CD and a limited-edition box set were all set for 5 June, while the double vinyl edition was scheduled on its own for 4 September.
More than five years separate Sanctuary from The Bitter Truth, the 2021 record that preceded it. Reporting the announcement, Britain's Distorted Sound also set out how the album divides: material co-written and produced by Zakk Cervini and Jordan Fish sits beside further tracks produced by Nick Raskulinecz.
Amy Lee has said that "Afterlife" was the first time Evanescence had been back in a studio recording since The Bitter Truth. In the same conversation, published in March 2025, she said the band were already deep in the creative process on the album to come.
By Amy Lee's account, three producers worked on Sanctuary. One was Nick Raskulinecz, a long-standing collaborator with whom the band cut several tracks; the other was a new pairing, Zakk Cervini with Jordan Fish, formerly of Bring Me The Horizon. Working as that team, Lee said, brought a fresh energy she found hard to explain.
The singing is one of the last things Evanescence put down. Amy Lee has described a working method with no fixed order to it: while a track is still being assembled she already holds the scraps of lyric and the point the song is driving at, and the vocal waits until almost everything else is in place.
"Afterlife", one of the tracks on Sanctuary, was written for Netflix's adaptation of Devil May Cry. Reviewing the album, Metal Hammer picked the song out for the turn its closing stretch takes towards doom.
In June 2008 the National Music Publishers' Association handed Amy Lee its Songwriter Icon Award — recognition from the publishing side of the business, for the writing rather than the singing. Metal Hammer's timeline of the band files it under that month.
Two members left Evanescence at the start of May 2007, and the account of how came from one of them. Guitarist John LeCompt said he had been fired, and said in the same breath that drummer Rocky Gray had quit of his own accord. NME reported that the pair's exit set speculation running about the band's future.
LeCompt also set out his side on his own blog. By his account the call from Amy Lee reached his mobile at around half past three the previous afternoon, and it came with no warning and no discussion of where he stood with the band.
Speaking in 2005, Ben Moody said he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He had held off asking for help, wary of the stigma, and drank and took drugs instead; after he left Evanescence things got worse still, and he decided in the end to go into rehab.
Amy Lee's 2016 children's record Dream Too Much carries a co-writing credit for her father, John Lee, on three of its songs: "Little Bird", "The End of the Book" and "If You're a Star". Loudwire treated the album as the point where he resurfaced musically in the 2010s.
K.Flay guests on the Evanescence single "Fight Like A Girl", and the pairing carried over to the stage: she was announced as the opening act for the band's UK dates on the 2026 run, and as support for their Red Rocks Amphitheatre show as well.
Amy Lee has described where the Wagakki Band collaboration started. They asked her over to Osaka to appear with them at a symphonic concert, and it was during that stay that both sides landed on the idea of trying to write something together.
Asked whether the three singers on "End Of You" might take it on the road together, Amy Lee was doubtful a full tour could be fitted around everyone's schedules. She was firmer about the smaller version of the idea: they are set on engineering some situation in which the song can be played live.
After leaving Evanescence, Ben Moody resurfaced as a duet partner: "Everything Burns" with Anastacia went out as the first single from the Fantastic Four soundtrack. Rolling Stone, writing in July 2005, was still introducing him as the band's co-founder, with a solo debut due that autumn.
Not long after the Lavigne sessions, Ben Moody found himself writing for Kelly Clarkson's Breakaway. Two songs came out of that work, "Because of You" and "Addicted" — the run Rolling Stone laid out in 2005 when it caught up with him after Evanescence.
By Ben Moody's own telling, the nerve to cut a solo album came from Avril Lavigne and Kelly Clarkson. He had never sung before, and says the two of them simply told him to buck up and get it done — so he did.
David Hodges left Evanescence four months before Fallen came out, and Ben Moody walked away in October 2003, in the middle of a tour. The two later worked together again, writing and producing Kelly Clarkson's hit "Because Of You".
Amy Lee's father spent thirty years working as a radio DJ, which kept the family on the move. She has said she is not really from anywhere in particular, having lived across a string of states. After all that moving, the family settled in Arkansas.
The band's first rush — clubs to arenas inside a couple of months — was not all excitement, Amy Lee has said. Behind it her brother Robby was ill, being out on her own was frightening, and in a lot of ways she felt alone through it. Robby died in 2018 following complications with epilepsy.
Rolling Stone's 2006 review of The Open Door pauses on where the pair came from: Amy Lee met guitarist Ben Moody at a Christian summer camp, and what she happened to be singing when they met was a Meat Loaf ballad.
Evanescence did not start out as a band. Rolling Stone describes it beginning in 1995 as a duo — Amy Lee with guitarist Ben Moody — the year after the two met, aged 13, at a Christian youth camp in Little Rock. The line-up has changed considerably since then.
Amy Lee's way in was Motown, by her own account. Classical music came next, and with it the piano lessons she asked for. Then grunge arrived, and she went as deep into the radio rock of the day as any American teenager — Nirvana, Soundgarden, Tori Amos, Beck.
Evanescence headlined the second stage at Download in 2023. Once their own set was done, Amy Lee took a golf buggy across to the main stage and joined that night's headliners Bring Me The Horizon for their collaboration "One Day The Only Butterflies Left…" and for "Nihilist Blues".
Outside the band, Amy Lee and classical composer Dave Eggar released Aftermath in August 2014, the score to the independent film War Story.
Ben Moody's solo release You Can't Regret What You Don't Remember came out in November 2011 on FNR Records, a label he owned himself. When Loudwire wrote about him in January 2013, it was still being described as his most recent solo record.
Amy Lee dates her friendship with Emma Anzai to 2007. Sick Puppies were the opening act on an Evanescence tour that year, and Lee has said the two spent enough time around each other on that run for the acquaintance to deepen into a real friendship.
Amy Lee has said the notion of being in a band with Emma Anzai had been with her for a long time, though what she imagined back then was a side band rather than Evanescence itself. Eventually, she says, a point came when it all worked out and the idea turned into the real thing.
For Emma Anzai the offer arrived out of nowhere. She has said the call came once Tim McCord had shifted from bass to guitar and the band needed a bassist, and that she said yes. Her memory of Amy Lee reached back thirteen or fourteen years, to the tour the two acts had shared.
Jen Majura came into Evanescence in August 2015, taking over from Terry Balsamo. A guitarist based in Germany, she has described herself as a half-Asian living there. She was 38 by the time she left the band in 2022.
Jen Majura already had a catalogue of her own by the time she left Evanescence in 2022: two solo albums, Jen Majura from 2014 and InZENity from 2017. Asked what came next in an interview published shortly after her exit, Majura said her plan was to start writing a third one.
Ben Moody's work did not stop when he walked out of Evanescence in 2003. He built a second career writing for pop and rock acts, and the credits Loudwire lists include Avril Lavigne, Kelly Clarkson, Daughtry and Celine Dion — a run of names well outside the band he had co-founded.
We Are the Fallen, the band Ben Moody put together after his exit, drew more than one alumnus: as reported in August 2010, two other former Evanescence members were in the line-up alongside him. Its debut album, Tear the World Down, had come out that May.
In 2007 Amy Lee put Evanescence on hold. Guitar World, looking back across the five years that led there, counted two studio albums that had gone multi-platinum, one live release, touring done over and over, and more than one change of personnel — the weight of work the pause came at the end of.
Guitar World observed in 2011 that Kiss had been an early influence on both of the band's guitarists at the time. Terry Balsamo named Ace Frehley among the players who made him want a guitar; Troy McLawhorn's answer went the other way, saying he had first wanted to be a drummer and had been a big Peter Criss fan as a kid.
By the closing weeks of 2022 Emma Anzai was Evanescence's bassist, and Amy Lee told Metal Hammer that November that finding her had lit a new fire under the band — a line offered about the shape the group had settled into after a year of changes.
Emma Anzai was not a stranger when she took over on bass in 2022. Amy Lee told NME that the two had known each other for years and put their first meeting at around 2005 or 2006, calling Anzai a good friend and an excellent musician who slotted in as though she had always been there — an acquaintance of some seventeen years turned into a band membership.
Guitarist John LeCompt already knew where his energy was going after leaving Evanescence, as NME reported in May 2007. LeCompt said he was putting all of it into Machina, the new band he had started with drummer Rocky Gray.
Reporting on the band's line-up in May 2007, NME set the news against what had already happened: guitarist Ben Moody had gone in 2003, and bassist Will Boyd had left in July 2006. Both departures were cited to the Daily News in Los Angeles.
Amy Lee took her son along on the Metallica stadium run. He was eleven, an age she reckons is just right for falling for metal, and she has described watching him get pulled in as a light rain began during "Nothing Else Matters".
The support billing for the 2026 World Tour was split by territory. Spiritbox and Nova Twins were announced as the openers for the North American leg. On the UK and European leg, Poppy came in as special guest, with Nova Twins opening the shows held outside the UK.
In September 2024 a nine-date Canadian run with Halestorm was on the books. It was routed to open at Rogers Arena in Vancouver on 15 October, then work east through Kelowna, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Montreal, Quebec City and Ottawa, finishing at Budweiser Gardens in London, Ontario on 29 October.
Korn and Evanescence shared one North American tour in the summer of 2022. It opened in Denver on 16 August, and as BARKS reported it two days later the joint run was set for 18 cities across North America and booked through 16 September — about a month from the first night to the last.
By December 2022 the following year was already filling up: Download plus a booked tour with Muse. Amy Lee has said the Muse dates were not something she went out looking for — but that when it is Muse doing the asking, the answer is a different matter.
"Take Cover" belongs to no album; Songfacts files it simply under 2016. It reached a stage for the first time on the short run of shows the band played that autumn, mounted ahead of their vinyl box set The Ultimate Collection. Amy Lee has said the song was an old one that had been sitting unused, pulled back out because what the audience kept asking for was something new.
Before the radio years — about three decades of them — Amy Lee's father had a band. She has described it as a rock group called The Hard Luck Band, playing covers alongside its own material, with her father out front as singer and guitarist.
"Afterlife" started life as the band's contribution to Netflix's animated take on the Devil May Cry games. In December 2025 they handed it to the British synthwave act Gunship, who remixed it, and the song went out a second time in that form.
The same Metal Hammer questionnaire drew four more answers out of Amy Lee. Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral was the album she wishes she had made, Bjork's Vespertine the one that broke her heart, and Nirvana's In Utero her pick for best sleeve. Asked which record defines metal for her, she named Pantera's Cowboys From Hell.
Speaking to the radio station 89 FM A Rádio Rock in September 2024, Amy Lee placed the successor to The Bitter Truth at the stage of piling up ideas rather than making a record. The band had been creating a lot but were not deep into it yet, she said; they would get serious in November, when they were due in the studio for what she called round one.
As of July 2005 Ben Moody was producing his own solo debut himself, with Jay Baumgartner co-producing a handful of tracks. Godhead's Jason Miller had been recruited to play guitar and to sing lead vocals on a few of the songs, and the line-up as it stood was completed by drummer Lance Garvin, bassist Marty O'Brien and guitarist Michael "Fish" Herring.
"Missing" reached listeners in 2004 on Anywhere But Home, a live album, and it is the only studio recording on the whole set. The writing had been done well before that — by Amy Lee with co-founder Ben Moody and with David Hodges, who joined in 1999 — and both men were out of the band by the time the record was issued.
"Take Cover" was new to audiences on the short 2016 tour, but it was not newly written. Amy Lee told TeamRock the band had it sitting in the bank and dusted it off because a new song was the one thing fans always asked for. On the road it turned into one of their favourite moments of the night.
Evanescence put out two new songs over the course of 2025 — "Afterlife" and "Fight Like a Girl". Loudwire named both when it took stock of the band's year that September, counting Lee's work with singers from other bands separately from them.
Ballerina's soundtrack carries two Amy Lee songs rather than one. "Hand That Feeds", made with Halsey, came first; "Fight Like a Girl", used over the end credits, followed it. Songfacts frames the earlier track as Lee's own contribution to the film rather than a band credit.
By Amy Lee's own account, "Sakura Rising" began with an invitation to appear at a Wagakki Band symphonic concert in Osaka, and the lyric writing carried on long after she had flown home: she and Yuko Suzuhana traded words between them, each checking what she had made of the other's lines. COVID-19 spread while that was still going on, and Lee says the two of them ended up putting down a situation they were both living inside — each from her own side of it, each in her own language.
Asked what "Missing" is about, Amy Lee told Vampire Freaks that for her the song was entirely about running away. She did not close the question there, though: it is poetry, she added, so listeners should take from it whatever they can.