EVANESCENCE
AMY LEE
THE HAMMER INTERVIEW
Evanescence’s iconic frontwoman knows a little something about writing timeless anthems. So we weren’t surprised when Tenacious D demanded we interview her as part of their takeover
WORDS: DANNII LEIVERS
PRESS/TRAVIS SHINN
PICTURES: AMY LEE, HER MUM & TENACIOUS D
For Amy Lee, life was only ever going to go one of two ways. “My back-up plan was being Danny Elfman and my top plan was being a mega rock star superstar,” says Evanescence’s singer and prime mover with a laugh. Still, she adds, there was never any doubt in her mind one of those ambitions would eventually become a reality. “Manifesting is real!”
Now aged 41, the singer has achieved her dreams and more. Twenty years into her career, she’s a genuine icon, whose creative soul and steely self-confidence propelled her to superstardom when her band, Evanescence, broke through with 2003’s gothic juggernaut single, Bring Me To Life, at the height of the macho nu metal boom.
Evanescence’s 2003 debut album, Fallen, went on to sell a mind-boggling 17 million copies. Since then, the band she formed when she was only 13 years old in Little Rock, Arkansas has proved surprisingly resilient, releasing their fifth album, The Bitter Truth in 2021. In between, Amy has fulfilled her ambition of composing for a movie - her haunting work on sci-fi film Indigo Grey: The Passage won her a Moondance award for Best Score in 2015.
“When somebody tells me I can’t do something, I become super-intent on proving them wrong,” she explains today, as she prepares to look back over her life and career. “For every roadblock we hit – ‘you’re a female, you’re different, you don’t fit in a genre’ – instead of wanting to conform and make it easier for everybody, I felt those were our strengths. I didn’t want to blend in. I wanted to stand out.”
Stellar career aside, one of the reasons she’s talking to Metal Hammer today is because Tenacious D have requested her presence as part of their takeover of this issue. Handily, there’s a mutual love-in going on, and Amy guested with the band at last year’s Louder Than Life festival in Kentucky.