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==The Cover Story - September 9, 2020== | ==The Cover Story - September 9, 2020== | ||
{{Main|https://www.kerrang.com/evanescence-why-amy-lee-is-done-being-silent Link to Kerrang! article}} | |||
Amy Lee doesn’t mince her words. That much becomes clear when, at the start of our interview, Kerrang! politely enquires as to whether we’re distracting her from anything important. | |||
“You are – I was writing some lyrics!” she exclaims. “Garbage media!” | |||
Our feelings would be hurt were it not for one crucial thing: her barbed comment is delivered with a huge grin. And an even bigger eruption of laughter. | |||
“It’s okay, I was kind of stuck anyway,” Amy smiles, reclining on a sofa in her Nashville home, nursing a cup of black tea. “I’m going to get back to it after this.” | |||
The song in question is the latest addition to Evanescence’s highly-anticipated upcoming album The Bitter Truth – their first record of all-new material since 2011’s self-titled release. It only seems fitting that we ask about what we’re interrupting. So brace yourselves for a world exclusive: the latest Evanescence song is called… | |||
“Pickle Mustard,” says Amy. | |||
Pickle Mustard? | |||
“It's a tentative title,” she deadpans. “I’m pretty sure that’s going to change.” | |||
The existence of, er, Pickle Mustard – alongside recent singles Wasted On You, The Game Is Over and latest release Use My Voice – is further proof that the protracted wait for Evanescence’s next outing is nearly over. Back in March, there were only four tracks completed, yet the group – completed by guitarists Jen Majura and Troy McLawhorn, bassist Tim McCord and drummer Will Hunt – have diligently worked around the small matter of a global pandemic to make huge strides with producer Nick Raskulinecz (Deftones, Foo Fighters, Alice In Chains). Just how close is it to being done? | |||
“Seventy per cent,” says Amy, her upward inflection making it sound more like a question than a concrete statement. “It’s hard to say because I’m still writing.” | |||
This is precisely why The Bitter Truth is yet to receive an official release date, Amy being reluctant to tether Evanescence to a fixed point in time when inspiration is still striking daily. Which it is. | |||
Amy Lee is feeling very “fuelled” right now. Take their rousing latest single for instance, in which she sings, ‘Gather your friends and wave your gun in my face, but I will use my voice.’ This is not a hollow sentiment. | |||
“The one thing this band has always been for me is a place where I can’t lie,” Amy explains. “I’ve ended up standing up to a lot of really hard things in my life after writing lyrics. I’ll write them, feel conviction and then, after we record, I feel like I have to follow through.” | |||
While Amy has long enjoyed a multi-platinum career using her voice – one of the most singular in rock – she’s learning to leverage its power in new ways in 2020, both on and off record. | |||
“A president who calls a press conference in the middle of a nationwide outcry, only to try to change the subject and not even mention the murder of George Floyd and the immeasurable injustices that came before it, on top of his threatening, racist tweet,” she vented back in May via Facebook. “My blood boils...” | |||
Previously, Amy never wanted to risk dividing the beautiful congregation of people she witnessed at Evanescence gigs along political faultlines, yet the fear started to linger that her silence could be mistaken for complicity. Hence, for the release of Use My Voice, Evanescence teamed up with HeadCount.org to promote voter registration in America, while the protest-centric video notably includes Amy staring out of a window bearing the reflection of the White House. It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots. | |||
“There’s a fight for democracy in the world,” she says. “I am full of a new sense of purpose. Who I am in this moment and what I say is going to matter to me for the rest of my life. I’m going to have to look back on this and go, ‘This is what you did or didn’t stand for.’ If this is a time when I was just quiet, I don’t think I’d ever be able to forgive myself. Not when there are millions of people following me.” | |||
While Amy has no regrets that she hasn’t been more outspoken previously (“It happened when it had to happen…”), she accepts that some Evanescence fans could feasibly become casualties of her convictions. Not that she actually regards her recent comments as being political in the first place. | |||
“This is so much bigger than policy,” she begins. “This is about freedom, this is about lies. We are coming from the spirit of love, not hate – this is not about hating somebody. This is about wanting love, freedom and justice for all the people who aren’t getting that. The most important thing is that everybody feels empowered to use their voice and not be afraid or think it doesn’t matter, won’t count or is going to be rigged. We all need to make our voices heard. That’s the solution here.” | |||
This, it turns out, is just the tip of the iceberg. | |||
“There have been a lot of things to affect me on a deep level over the past few years leading up to this,” says Amy. “I have plenty to say.” | |||
It’s time, then, for us to listen. | |||
The words not only reduced Amy Lee to tears; they shook her very core. They belonged to a statement written by Chanel Miller – the survivor of a 2015 sexual assault by her fellow Stanford University student Brock Turner. Miller first read them out loud in court at Turner’s sentencing. Trigger warning: what follows is her account of sexual trauma. | |||
“You don’t know me, but you’ve been inside me,” said Miller. “In newspapers, my name was ‘unconscious, intoxicated woman’. Ten syllables and nothing more than that. I had to force myself to relearn my real name, my identity, to relearn that this is not all that I am, that I am not just a drunk victim at a frat party found behind a dumpster.” | |||
Amy, so often prone to speaking in rapid-fire bursts, halts as she tries to summarise her admiration for Miller. She exhales deeply before she proceeds. | |||
“Some of the things they said in the case against her to let him off lit a huge fire in me,” she says. “But what lit the biggest fire wasn’t the negative, it was the positive. After he was let off with a very light sentence, she stood up and read her truth, her story, to her attacker. It was the most inspiring, powerful thing. It sparked something in me. I was so hit by the fact that the clear, simple, uncomplicated truth of her experience was stronger than any weapon they could have used against her. She used her voice. After all that time, struggle, money and fighting, the most powerful thing were the words she said. I literally took that statement, read it like three times, and then put pen to paper.” | |||
It was Miller who first inspired Amy to write Use Your Voice – the notion of someone’s words cutting through lies like a razor quickly became a galvanising one. | |||
“This is, in my heart, a battle of truth and love vs. lies and hate,” says Amy of how the song evolved to take on a broader personal meaning for her. “In my life, band, career and personal life, I’ve had to fight for my voice to be heard and not be ignored, or taken out of my mouth and put out of context. It’s very close to my heart that our voices matter and need to be heard.” | |||
Amy once told K! that when Evanescence first broke big in 2003, she was often left confused by the way she was treated in the music industry. At times it was hard to tell whether it was just because she was young, or specifically because she was a woman. It was something she didn’t always want to dwell upon. | |||
“I often shied away from some of those questions about ‘being a woman in the rock industry’,” she explains. “At some point I just got sick of hearing it, I didn’t want it to define me.” | |||
Yet Amy did bear the brunt of rock’s double standards, be it having her artistic capabilities called into question when Evanescence guitarist/co-founder/co-songwriter Ben Moody departed, being unfairly portrayed as a diva or ice queen in early interviews, or even having her image critiqued. | |||
“I felt – very literally – the pressure around me in the beginning to look my best, be a certain weight and be beautiful, be a goddess,” she reveals. “But at the same time, I had very strong feelings about the sexualisation part from the get-go.” | |||
Indeed, back in the early ‘00s, Amy was cognisant that, simply by virtue of being a woman in an otherwise male rock band, her image or gender might even distract attention away from her talent. | |||
“I could just feel that inner critic in me going, ‘Make sure they know you write the songs, that you play piano and you’re classically trained. Don’t be too pretty. Don’t be up there looking perfect. Don’t make that your first priority,’” reflects Amy. “I always wanted to be taken seriously and appreciated as a musician. Not as a ‘woman musician’, not as ‘the best female singer’, but ‘the best singer’.” | |||
Acutely self-aware as always, Amy catches herself here – her face screwing up into a wince as she realises how cocky this might sound. | |||
“Well, not the best singer, but you know what I mean? Put that right!” she laughs. | |||
In so many different, frustrating ways, the even playing field Amy desired didn’t exist. ‘If we don’t talk about it, we keep on drowning in it,’ she sings at one point in Use My Voice. This sentiment is precisely what prompted her recent candid Facebook post in which she dissected women’s status in rock music compared to all the “tatted up riffmeisters”. | |||
“Honestly, women do get skipped over,” she confided. “We do get left out of the recap when it all boils down. It is harder to make it onto the cover or the radio.” | |||
“Me being gracious, humble, forgiving, and happy to have had all the incredible success is awesome, but it’s not helping any of the other women who can’t break down the door,” she says. “If I’m not honest about the fact that it wasn’t easy, and there are extra barriers, and there are just things about being a woman in the rock industry that aren’t even, then I’m doing a disservice to the other women, myself, and our future.” | |||
Far from a disservice, however, one of the most overlooked aspects of Evanescence’s impact on rock is, well, just how big an impact they actually had on the next generation of bands. Taylor Momsen was just a kid when her father bought her the band’s debut Fallen. | |||
“As a nine- or 10-year-old girl, I looked up to Amy,” Taylor tells K!. “And if you listen to the music that came after her you can easily hear the direct influence she had. There was just nothing like it, a beautiful dark female operatic singer with metal and pop elements. It was captivating.” | |||
A few years down the line, The Pretty Reckless’ first opening tour was provided by – you guessed it – Evanescence. Now, in 2020, Taylor, alongside Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale, Within Temptation’s Sharon den Adel and more, appears on the backing chorus of Use My Voice. | |||
“Whether she knows it or not, Amy had a huge influence on how I would handle my career from the time I met her,” reflects Taylor. | |||
Very much on the same page is Lzzy, who also appears on Use My Voice. As with the rest of the world, the Halestorm leader discovered Evanescence when Bring Me To Life had a vice grip on airwaves. At the time, Lzzy says she didn’t relate to “normal” girls – she even went through “interventions” at school because she insisted on wearing black and listening to Alice Cooper. | |||
“Amy embodied and represented all the girls that were just like me,” she explains. “She was, and is a voice, for our generation. Up until her, I had to reach back to my parent’s generation of women in rock for inspiration. When Amy broke the mould, I knew the door was wide open for all of us to walk through.” | |||
This is a legacy Amy is deeply proud of, and one she very much intends to build upon. She can barely hide her excitement as she talks about working with them on Use My Voice. | |||
“Feeling their support, their love and hearing their voices with me makes me stronger,” she beams. “The more of us there are, the more there will be. When I first went on tour, to a festival, on TV, there were no women. And now there are, both behind the scenes and onstage. That gives me hope.” | |||
Here are some things you might care to know about The Bitter Truth as it nears completion. While new lyrical inspiration has come to bear between the start of recording and the present, the basic premise for Evanescence’s new album remains the same. | |||
“It’s a rock record,” Amy affirms. “We wanted to showcase the strength, fun and power of the band. There’s no holding back. It’s heavy sonically, and it feels good to go heavy. Really good. But it’s not heavy for heavy’s sake.” | |||
Amy goes on to state that, despite now being three singles into the record, we “haven't heard all the sounds of the album yet”. She promises songs with “score-like drama” and “aggressive power”. Sometimes the unbridled energy sparked by the group reconvening after months of quarantine spawned utterly joyous “balls to the wall” moments. Double bass drumming is mentioned. Perhaps most exciting is Amy revealing there is an infusion of the “catty vibe” that defined classic single Call Me When You’re Sober. | |||
“That is definitely here, but taken to the next level,” she says with a glint in her eye. “I hope we can deliver everything the fans could expect, and more. The ‘and more’ is the most exciting part for me. The music that we make is just the sound of my feelings and there are a lot of big feelings, so it’s a strong sound.” | |||
Indeed, big feelings have been par for the course throughout Evanescence’s discography. | |||
“I know that we have touched lives,” Amy explains, pointing to the fans she has met around the world who have used Evanescence’s music to overcome grief, illness and tragedy. She can relate. | |||
“I am somebody who’s been through some very, very difficult moments, for my age at least,” she continues. “When we see somebody survive through the unimaginable, it gives us hope that we can, too. I do recognise that I’ve been that for other people, and I can’t tell you how much it means. It makes the most terrible parts of my life have a purpose. That is the closest I can come to reaching back in time to soothe myself. To take a terrible tragedy and use it to help someone else? For me, that has been the most healing thing. There are beautiful things that can come out of pain. That has become such a central focus for what Evanescence means to me.” | |||
Amy lost a sister when she was a child. In January 2018, her younger brother Robby, who battled severe epilepsy, passed away. | |||
Kerrang! wonders if his passing changed her perspective on life, and if both her grief and love for her brother will find expression on any new songs? | |||
“Of course, it’s the biggest thing on my heart,” Amy says. “Bigger than anything else. It changes your perspective. This is the second sibling I’ve lost. The first time I was six, so the processing was very different. That was more about fear; this time it was more about love and pain. The perspective is very valuable, but I’d rather not have it. I’d rather he be here more than anything. It definitely made me look at my life and zoom out at the much bigger existential picture. Asking those type of questions is something I’ve always done in our music, but it had been a while since it had been fresh. For me, thinking about my brother is part of my every day. I don’t know how much this relates to answering your question, but I have come to believe that when we lose somebody we love, we absorb a little piece of them. Like they become part of you.” | |||
What part of Robby is now part of you? | |||
“It’s from big things to little things…” says Amy, trailing off into silence before resuming her sentence. “I can feel myself saying things he would have said. My brother loved nature and animals in an almost Buddhist way. He wanted my parents’ house to be a sanctuary for all things.” | |||
Amy recalls one exchange with her brother that occurred when she was about to lay the smackdown on a wasp. | |||
“Come on, don’t kill it!” insisted Robby. “Just catch it and put it outside.” | |||
“Dude, it’s a wasp – I'm killing it,” Amy replied. “It’s horrible.” | |||
“I just don’t like to kill stuff. Can we just not kill anything?” he asked. “Let’s just be in a peaceful place – if you don’t bother it, it’s not going to bother you.” | |||
Amy takes another second to collect her thoughts. | |||
“And now I don’t kill bugs,” she grins. “It’s such a silly thing, but then again it’s not, because the sentiment is so righteous and pure. It makes me look at our existence in a different way. How different are we really from any other living creature on this planet? We need to take a step back from our self-importance. That is the biggest thing perspective-wise.” | |||
Will we hear that in the record? | |||
“I hope so,” she says. “I’m still writing a lot of lyrics, but it’s all just very deeply from the heart on all kinds of things.” | |||
Indeed, it seems the stage is very much set for Evanescence to deliver their most powerful album yet – the latest chapter in one of rock’s biggest success stories. There have been a lot of music biopics lately, from Straight Outta Compton to Rocket Man and The Dirt. What, we wonder, would make a good title for a film about Evanescence’s journey. For the first time, Amy is stumped. | |||
“How would I sum it up?” she hmms and ahs. “Part of our conversation has been about taking difficult things, big challenges and tragedy and making it your fuel. Taking a bunch of hardship and spinning it into something beautiful – how do you put that into a title? You’re the writer!” | |||
She may not have settled on a good title, but she summed up The Story Of Amy Lee perfectly. Amy Lee, who is done being silent. Amy Lee, who doesn’t kill wasps anymore. Amy Lee, who has a song called Pickle Mustard to get back to. | |||
''Words: George Garner'' | |||
==The Cover Story - March 10, 2021== | ==The Cover Story - March 10, 2021== | ||
{{Main|https://www.kerrang.com/i-needed-to-face-the-abyss-head-on-evanescences-bitter-truth-laid-bare Link to Kerrang! article}} | |||
When it was finally finished, Amy Lee slipped outside of her house by herself. It was late; everyone inside was already fast asleep. She ventured out into the garden and climbed into the sanctuary of her son’s tree house – away from the world, away from all distraction. After months and months of gruelling writing and soul-searching, there was nothing more to change. Nothing more to be tweaked. Nothing left for Amy to do but lay on top of a sleeping bag, get her headphones – good headphones – and press play. As she looked up at the surrounding night sky and branches, she listened to The Bitter Truth, Evanescence’s first all-new studio album in a decade. | |||
“It was a perfect feeling,” reflects Amy today of that moment. “It was just satisfaction, true satisfaction.” | |||
She is recalling this experience from her parents’ home in Arkansas, where Amy and her son are visiting at the time of K!’s call. That she sounds in such high spirits is not only down to her being liberated from the pressure cooker of album deadlines, but also the fact that they’re snowed in. Like, really, really snowed in. And that means one thing. “We’re doing a lot of sledding,” she laughs. | |||
Loathe as we are to ever have to interrupt some well-earned rock star tobogganing, the imminent arrival of Evanescence’s excellent fourth album – and let the record show that Amy considers The Bitter Truth, not 2017’s record of orchestral re-workings Synthesis, their fourth album – trumps all other concerns. | |||
You might think you know everything about it by now. Recorded during the pandemic, and drip-released throughout, no other Evanescence album has been preceded by so many singles. Last year, Amy opened up about the power and poignancy of some of these tracks – how, for example, the testimony of Chanel Miller, the survivor of a 2015 sexual assault by her fellow Stanford University student Brock Turner, influenced her to write Use My Voice. But make no mistake: in sound and theme, the singles so far are just the tip of the iceberg. | |||
Amy conceived of The Bitter Truth as a journey. It begins with the compelling abstract noises of two-part opener Artifact/The Turn – the former the product of her “by myself in my hotel room on tour”, the latter a collaboration with Scott Kirkland of the Crystal Method. “I see the beginning of the album as starting from a Ground Zero place after a tragedy, and then, when the guitars come in, for me, that’s getting back up,” she explains. | |||
Which brings us neatly to Broken Pieces Shine: a stunning track that sees Evanescence – completed by guitarists Jen Majura and Troy McLawhorn, bassist Tim McCord and drummer Will Hunt – in world-beating form. It is also, arguably, the greatest song ever conceived during a spot of grocery shopping. | |||
“We were in Canada on a writing camp trip out in the woods in 2019,” recalls Amy, before noting how the hunter-gatherer duties in the band were split. “The men went to go get music stuff that we forgot, like a snare stand and whatever else, and the women went to the grocery store (laughs). On the way back, we were just showing each other ideas in the car on our phones, little pre-recorded demos and stuff. Jen had this really cool idea that turned into that chugging verse music. I just started rewinding it and singing on it over and over.” | |||
It may have started out life as a fun way to pass time in the car, but it has come to mean much, much more to its creator. | |||
“I see Broken Pieces Shine as an anthem for us and our fans,” says Amy. “From the beginning, I visualised us onstage in that ‘together moment’. It’s about letting yourself fall apart, letting those flaws become the things that we not only accept about ourselves, but also embrace. To be your true self rather than holding it in is truly freeing. We have things about us that we may see as flaws, but just change your perspective a little bit – our flaws can be our superpowers. That’s what makes us different. That’s what makes us unique.” | |||
It’s a song about the pain and beauty of survival, the wisdom bred from suffering, the grace that can be found in the acceptance of what is. In so many ways, Amy Lee has learned these lessons the hard way… | |||
"Thanks!” enthuses Amy Lee. “I don’t fit into metal categories for nothin’!” This is her response when Kerrang! observes that, on some of the lyrics on The Bitter Truth, Amy sounds like someone you really wouldn’t want to piss off. She had given us fair warning about this, of course – last year hinting that we would once again get a glimpse of the “catty vibe” that defined Evanescence’s classic single Call Me When You’re Sober. It’s just that on some of these new tracks, Amy comes across as someone who will, if you push her too far, not only stick the knife in and twist the blade, but also break it off at the handle. And then make you eat the handle. The aptly-named Take Cover, for example, sees her threaten to become ‘the bitch you make me out to be’ over rumbling blasts of bass and twisted riffs. It’s hard to tell what she’s out for in the song… is it justice or revenge? | |||
“Caaaaaaaaan’t it be both?” she laughs, elongating the can’t so much it almost morphs into a creaking sound. | |||
It’s one of many songs on The Bitter Truth in which Amy toys with both the illusion of fame and the people who have tried to gaslight her during her career. Recent single Yeah Right lit this particular fuse – it not only stunned with its deft move into Goldfrappian electro territory, but also its acid-tongued sarcasm. ‘Yeah, I’m a rock star,’ sings Amy over bubbling synth notes. ‘I’m a queen resurrected just as messed up as before.’ This is something dialled up to 11 on the ominous throb of Better Without You – a song that sees Amy deliver the lines: ‘’Cause this is my world, little girl you’d be lost on your own… I’ll do you a favour if you sign on the dotted line.’ | |||
It’s hard to read this and not think of the misogyny and double standards Amy Lee has spoken about encountering while traversing the alpha male-riddled rock world, both onstage and off. Be it recalling how she was told Bring Me To Life had to feature a male co-singer against her wishes, or revealing to K! last year how she felt the pressure to “look my best, be a certain weight and be beautiful”, she’s had no shortage of battles. | |||
Amy explains that she’s spent a good deal of time sifting through her past of late. She’s even gone so far to allocate some time to going through old audio and video that she had stashed away in her attic for years. Terrified they would be lost, she’s been converting old cassettes to digital. | |||
“It’s just making me zoom out and see my life as a whole,” she explains. “It’s been really, really fascinating, and jogged my memory about a lot of things. So that actually influenced me in some of this writing and seeing things from a new perspective, but also seeing them how they were.” | |||
So where does this leave a song like Better Without You? | |||
“The song is really hard…” she begins. “I can’t lie in the music. And over time, that’s become truer and truer. I’m peeling away more of the layers of imagery and really being specific at times just saying what I really need to get off my chest. Some of what I’m saying are things that I’m not comfortable breaking down and explaining, because I don’t want to bring up old drama. Better Without You is a difficult song to describe and go into detail about. And so is Yeah Right, actually.” | |||
Amy Lee is an extremely open interviewee: friendly, impassioned and intent on driving to the heart of a question, even when it hurts to do so. That said, there have still been times in K!’s interviews over the years where she’s referenced parts of her story that she didn’t wish to re-inhabit; parts of her life that she wanted to fence off to the world, and even herself. We wonder if we are finally hearing some of those untold stories now in the lyrics on The Bitter Truth? | |||
“You are,” she says. “Take Cover, Yeah Right and Better Without You all touch on some elements of my past that I am…” | |||
A brief pause. | |||
“I have moved on,” she continues. “But apparently there’s still some things that I needed to get off my chest.” | |||
Was that a surprise that those old feelings of anger were still there and came out this way? | |||
“Well, I should say this: the seeds of both Yeah Right and Take Cover, much of them were written, from a lyrical standpoint, a decade ago,” Amy replies. “So think about what was going on in 2010 and some of the stuff that was a little bit closer to the forefront of my mind. Better Without You, though, that’s real and in-the-moment. It’s not like there’s one big secret [person] to blame. Better Without You talks about all the obstacles along the way, moving from the past into the present time. I have different parts of the song that are assigned to different people and entities in my mind. But I don’t think calling people out when I’ve already defeated all my monsters along the way is really something I want to do.” | |||
Will these people know these songs are about them when they hear it? | |||
“I don’t know,” she ponders. “Probably. I’ve been seeing it like this: ‘If you think it’s about you, you’re right!’” | |||
Clearly these are songs that cut deep. And yet, there is one moment on The Bitter Truth that goes even deeper… | |||
Amy Lee still remembers the peculiar colour of the sky over Cape Canaveral on January 28, 1986. She was just five years old at the time. Somewhere in the world a picture still exists of her holding an icicle on that bracingly cold day; it was a big deal to young Amy, as she wasn’t used to seeing snow where she was from. | |||
Her family had travelled that day to see Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe board NASA’s Space Shuttle Challenger and blast off into outer space. They waited and waited for the countdown, yet there was no sign of lift-off. Tired of waiting, eventually the Lee family took a break to get some food. | |||
“When we came back, the sky was black,” says Amy, recalling the aftermath of the Challenger explosion that cost the lives of all astronauts onboard and which went down in history as the darkest day in the American space programme. “It had just happened and everybody was standing there looking up at the sky with their mouth open. My dad asked what happened and some guy was like, ‘It just blew up.’” | |||
This was not Amy’s only encounter with death in her adolescence. | |||
“As a young kid I had quite a few impactful moments,” she says. “Obviously, that one wasn’t anywhere near as impactful as losing my sister [when Amy was just a child]. But I was faced with trying to understand our mortality at a younger age than a lot of kids around me. It always made me feel a little bit different, just to have to understand and be aware that I could die; that that happens, and there’s no fair set amount of time that you are entitled to. I’ll never forget what the sky looked like that day.” | |||
The vocalist famously known for singing My Immortal has, then, from a young age, been acutely aware of the spectre of mortality. Last year, she told K! about the devastating loss of her younger brother Robby – who had battled severe epilepsy – in January 2018. His presence can be intuited on The Bitter Truth’s most astounding track Far From Heaven – a gorgeous piano ballad complete with swelling strings from composer (and Synthesis collaborator) David Campbell. Surprisingly, this, the emotional epicentre of the album almost didn’t make the record. When The Bitter Truth was originally finished, it was ballad deficient. And that was fine. | |||
“We were all just going, ‘Hey, you know what? Every album is different – we don’t have to have that [type of] song every time,’” recalls Amy of their thought process. | |||
Not only was she exhausted, time was also fast running out for any new songs to even make the deadline. | |||
“I was really struggling,” she says. “I wasn’t feeling full of aggression, and all the strength and power – and there’s so much of that on this album – I just didn’t have any left when we got to that point.” | |||
Only it turns out that she did. All Amy had to do was sit down at the piano. | |||
“Far From Heaven just came out,” she says. “It just needed to come out of me. That was the last thing on the album. It completed the puzzle.” | |||
Far From Heaven not only showcases the maturation of Evanescence’s sound, but in particular the power and nuance of Amy’s songwriting. Upon first listen it seems to address her late brother Robby, her voice freighted with emotion as she delivers piercing lines like, ‘What I wouldn’t give to be with you for one more night.’ And it is, she confirms, about him indirectly. Far From Heaven details a state of mourning that distorts both time and memory; the crosscurrents of grief that register not only as a permanent scar on the heart but also as a tremor in the soul. | |||
“It’s about questioning my faith,” explains Amy. “And it’s not like it’s the first time, but it’s just very raw, real and in the hardest way I ever have. Having to really look at it and wonder, ‘Is anybody out there?’ That’s a real question I’ve been asking over the past couple years, through everything, and I don’t have the answers. I never have had the answers. That’s the whole thing that makes belief belief. We just can believe, we don’t know. But it’s not just about that. That’s part of the reason it was so hard to write, I spent two or three weeks just stuck in this funk, like in this depression, trying to get it off my chest because it’s not the way that I feel all the time. But it is a feeling that I have that comes up in me regularly: wondering where the people are that I’ve lost, and thinking about time in a more fluid way.” | |||
There are no easy answers here. | |||
“I do believe love exists beyond life, part of that is connected, I think, to holding on to [lost loved ones] inside ourselves,” she continues. “It’s more than a memory. It was real, it really happened – what existed still exists. I’m talking about it, so it does. It is really deeply hard to talk about, not because it’s so painful for me, but because it’s very difficult to put into words. I just needed to face the abyss head on. That was one thing that was missing from the album. Honestly, part of me, in this time, has been facing the grief and darkness. And with all the hope, and joy and empowerment that I truly do feel – and so much of the album comes from that place – I just can’t gloss over and not also admit the other side… I talk about my siblings, because those are the obviously to the closest to me, but there’s been a lot of loss in my life, I’ve been through it plenty of times. I’m reminded every time with grief that there’s a choice you have to make for yourself between life and death; between getting up or not. You have to talk about the struggle of that.” | |||
It strikes K! that a song like this could be the kind an artist makes and either feels an enormous sense of catharsis, or one they write and never want to hear or play it again… | |||
“While writing it, I felt so low,” Amy admits. “I was just living in it without an out. When it was finished, I really loved it; it’s beautiful. Even when a song is openly dark and about pain, it can bring me joy. Sometimes you just need to say that hard thing you’ve been locking down inside, get it out, process it, and then move on to the next song.” | |||
This past Christmas, Amy played the album for her family. Her dad is, she says, “a music guy”. He was once in a band himself before he made the choice to pursue a family life, and explored a career in radio. He’s 10 years retired, but even now Amy says she’ll hear him doing voice work on TV for insurance companies (“You’d never know it’s him, but to me it’s like, ‘Dad!’”). | |||
“He does a lot of studying on artists and songwriting,” she says. “He’s that guy. So after every song we sit, break it down and talk about it.” | |||
What did he make of Far From Heaven? | |||
“That song,” says Amy, softly, “that song made him cry.” | |||
Were the album to end on this note, it would make for a very different record. As stands, The Bitter Truth ends on a note not of doubt, but of hope with Blind Belief. | |||
“I believe it’s in us as a human race to survive this time,” she says. “Absolutely, I believe we will get through this. But, of course, I don’t know for sure. Ending the album with Blind Belief was deliberate, particularly the line ‘love over all’, because that’s impossibly hard to say, especially when we’ve seen the evil that’s crept out of the dark corners in broad daylight in the last few years. Not that we’ve never seen that before, but it’s just been so in our face, especially as Americans. Even so, I believe we do need love over all. It should be simple, but it is complicated. The album is a journey through grief, among other things. The ending is reaching that seemingly impossible point of acceptance. Forgiveness, honour, remembrance and love over all. And when I come to the end of all those feelings – including the rage, the grief, all of that all mixed up – I feel released. I feel like I want to step into the future.” | |||
About the future, then. It’s taken a year of hard work to end a decade of waiting for Evanescence fans. Not to get greedy, but when will it be acceptable to ask Amy about another album after this one? | |||
“Ten years!” she says. “Just kidding. I mean, I already feel like I need to do something creative again.” | |||
For now it’s time for the world to experience what Amy Lee did that night she pressed play on The Bitter Truth in her son’s tree house. | |||
“We left nothing behind on this one, so I hope people like it,” she says. “And if they don’t? No regrets from me. I’ll tell you this: I put my whole self into it.” | |||
{{Evanescence}} | {{Evanescence}} | ||
[[Category:Related stuff]] | [[Category:Related stuff]] |
Latest revision as of 13:53, 28 April 2025

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Kerrang! is a British music webzine and quarterly magazine that primarily covers rock, punk and heavy metal music. Since 2017, the magazine has been published by Wasted Talent Ltd (the same company that owns electronic music publication Mixmag). The magazine was named onomatopoeically after the sound of a "guitar being struck with force".
Kerrang! was first published on 6 June 1981 as a one-off "Heavy Metal Special" from the now-defunct Sounds newspaper. Due to the popularity of the issue, the magazine became a monthly publication, before transitioning into a weekly in 1987. Initially devoted to the new wave of British heavy metal and the rise of hard rock acts, Kerrang!'s musical emphasis has changed several times, focusing on grunge, nu metal, post-hardcore, emo and other alternative rock and metal genres over the course of its forty-year publication history. In 2001, it became the best-selling British music weekly, overtaking NME.
After publishing a total of 1,818 issues, Kerrang! ceased publication of their weekly magazine in March 2020 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, whilst continuing as an online publication featuring digital "cover stories". In December 2021, the print edition of Kerrang! was revived, and is now published on a quarterly basis.
Evanescence has featured on the cover and been interviewed for the magazine dozens of times.
Issue 1717 - April 11, 2018
The Cover Story - September 9, 2020
Main article: [Link to Kerrang! article]
Amy Lee doesn’t mince her words. That much becomes clear when, at the start of our interview, Kerrang! politely enquires as to whether we’re distracting her from anything important.
“You are – I was writing some lyrics!” she exclaims. “Garbage media!”
Our feelings would be hurt were it not for one crucial thing: her barbed comment is delivered with a huge grin. And an even bigger eruption of laughter.
“It’s okay, I was kind of stuck anyway,” Amy smiles, reclining on a sofa in her Nashville home, nursing a cup of black tea. “I’m going to get back to it after this.”
The song in question is the latest addition to Evanescence’s highly-anticipated upcoming album The Bitter Truth – their first record of all-new material since 2011’s self-titled release. It only seems fitting that we ask about what we’re interrupting. So brace yourselves for a world exclusive: the latest Evanescence song is called…
“Pickle Mustard,” says Amy.
Pickle Mustard?
“It's a tentative title,” she deadpans. “I’m pretty sure that’s going to change.”
The existence of, er, Pickle Mustard – alongside recent singles Wasted On You, The Game Is Over and latest release Use My Voice – is further proof that the protracted wait for Evanescence’s next outing is nearly over. Back in March, there were only four tracks completed, yet the group – completed by guitarists Jen Majura and Troy McLawhorn, bassist Tim McCord and drummer Will Hunt – have diligently worked around the small matter of a global pandemic to make huge strides with producer Nick Raskulinecz (Deftones, Foo Fighters, Alice In Chains). Just how close is it to being done?
“Seventy per cent,” says Amy, her upward inflection making it sound more like a question than a concrete statement. “It’s hard to say because I’m still writing.”
This is precisely why The Bitter Truth is yet to receive an official release date, Amy being reluctant to tether Evanescence to a fixed point in time when inspiration is still striking daily. Which it is.
Amy Lee is feeling very “fuelled” right now. Take their rousing latest single for instance, in which she sings, ‘Gather your friends and wave your gun in my face, but I will use my voice.’ This is not a hollow sentiment.
“The one thing this band has always been for me is a place where I can’t lie,” Amy explains. “I’ve ended up standing up to a lot of really hard things in my life after writing lyrics. I’ll write them, feel conviction and then, after we record, I feel like I have to follow through.”
While Amy has long enjoyed a multi-platinum career using her voice – one of the most singular in rock – she’s learning to leverage its power in new ways in 2020, both on and off record.
“A president who calls a press conference in the middle of a nationwide outcry, only to try to change the subject and not even mention the murder of George Floyd and the immeasurable injustices that came before it, on top of his threatening, racist tweet,” she vented back in May via Facebook. “My blood boils...”
Previously, Amy never wanted to risk dividing the beautiful congregation of people she witnessed at Evanescence gigs along political faultlines, yet the fear started to linger that her silence could be mistaken for complicity. Hence, for the release of Use My Voice, Evanescence teamed up with HeadCount.org to promote voter registration in America, while the protest-centric video notably includes Amy staring out of a window bearing the reflection of the White House. It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots.
“There’s a fight for democracy in the world,” she says. “I am full of a new sense of purpose. Who I am in this moment and what I say is going to matter to me for the rest of my life. I’m going to have to look back on this and go, ‘This is what you did or didn’t stand for.’ If this is a time when I was just quiet, I don’t think I’d ever be able to forgive myself. Not when there are millions of people following me.”
While Amy has no regrets that she hasn’t been more outspoken previously (“It happened when it had to happen…”), she accepts that some Evanescence fans could feasibly become casualties of her convictions. Not that she actually regards her recent comments as being political in the first place.
“This is so much bigger than policy,” she begins. “This is about freedom, this is about lies. We are coming from the spirit of love, not hate – this is not about hating somebody. This is about wanting love, freedom and justice for all the people who aren’t getting that. The most important thing is that everybody feels empowered to use their voice and not be afraid or think it doesn’t matter, won’t count or is going to be rigged. We all need to make our voices heard. That’s the solution here.”
This, it turns out, is just the tip of the iceberg.
“There have been a lot of things to affect me on a deep level over the past few years leading up to this,” says Amy. “I have plenty to say.”
It’s time, then, for us to listen.
The words not only reduced Amy Lee to tears; they shook her very core. They belonged to a statement written by Chanel Miller – the survivor of a 2015 sexual assault by her fellow Stanford University student Brock Turner. Miller first read them out loud in court at Turner’s sentencing. Trigger warning: what follows is her account of sexual trauma.
“You don’t know me, but you’ve been inside me,” said Miller. “In newspapers, my name was ‘unconscious, intoxicated woman’. Ten syllables and nothing more than that. I had to force myself to relearn my real name, my identity, to relearn that this is not all that I am, that I am not just a drunk victim at a frat party found behind a dumpster.”
Amy, so often prone to speaking in rapid-fire bursts, halts as she tries to summarise her admiration for Miller. She exhales deeply before she proceeds.
“Some of the things they said in the case against her to let him off lit a huge fire in me,” she says. “But what lit the biggest fire wasn’t the negative, it was the positive. After he was let off with a very light sentence, she stood up and read her truth, her story, to her attacker. It was the most inspiring, powerful thing. It sparked something in me. I was so hit by the fact that the clear, simple, uncomplicated truth of her experience was stronger than any weapon they could have used against her. She used her voice. After all that time, struggle, money and fighting, the most powerful thing were the words she said. I literally took that statement, read it like three times, and then put pen to paper.”
It was Miller who first inspired Amy to write Use Your Voice – the notion of someone’s words cutting through lies like a razor quickly became a galvanising one.
“This is, in my heart, a battle of truth and love vs. lies and hate,” says Amy of how the song evolved to take on a broader personal meaning for her. “In my life, band, career and personal life, I’ve had to fight for my voice to be heard and not be ignored, or taken out of my mouth and put out of context. It’s very close to my heart that our voices matter and need to be heard.”
Amy once told K! that when Evanescence first broke big in 2003, she was often left confused by the way she was treated in the music industry. At times it was hard to tell whether it was just because she was young, or specifically because she was a woman. It was something she didn’t always want to dwell upon.
“I often shied away from some of those questions about ‘being a woman in the rock industry’,” she explains. “At some point I just got sick of hearing it, I didn’t want it to define me.”
Yet Amy did bear the brunt of rock’s double standards, be it having her artistic capabilities called into question when Evanescence guitarist/co-founder/co-songwriter Ben Moody departed, being unfairly portrayed as a diva or ice queen in early interviews, or even having her image critiqued.
“I felt – very literally – the pressure around me in the beginning to look my best, be a certain weight and be beautiful, be a goddess,” she reveals. “But at the same time, I had very strong feelings about the sexualisation part from the get-go.”
Indeed, back in the early ‘00s, Amy was cognisant that, simply by virtue of being a woman in an otherwise male rock band, her image or gender might even distract attention away from her talent.
“I could just feel that inner critic in me going, ‘Make sure they know you write the songs, that you play piano and you’re classically trained. Don’t be too pretty. Don’t be up there looking perfect. Don’t make that your first priority,’” reflects Amy. “I always wanted to be taken seriously and appreciated as a musician. Not as a ‘woman musician’, not as ‘the best female singer’, but ‘the best singer’.”
Acutely self-aware as always, Amy catches herself here – her face screwing up into a wince as she realises how cocky this might sound.
“Well, not the best singer, but you know what I mean? Put that right!” she laughs.
In so many different, frustrating ways, the even playing field Amy desired didn’t exist. ‘If we don’t talk about it, we keep on drowning in it,’ she sings at one point in Use My Voice. This sentiment is precisely what prompted her recent candid Facebook post in which she dissected women’s status in rock music compared to all the “tatted up riffmeisters”.
“Honestly, women do get skipped over,” she confided. “We do get left out of the recap when it all boils down. It is harder to make it onto the cover or the radio.”
“Me being gracious, humble, forgiving, and happy to have had all the incredible success is awesome, but it’s not helping any of the other women who can’t break down the door,” she says. “If I’m not honest about the fact that it wasn’t easy, and there are extra barriers, and there are just things about being a woman in the rock industry that aren’t even, then I’m doing a disservice to the other women, myself, and our future.”
Far from a disservice, however, one of the most overlooked aspects of Evanescence’s impact on rock is, well, just how big an impact they actually had on the next generation of bands. Taylor Momsen was just a kid when her father bought her the band’s debut Fallen.
“As a nine- or 10-year-old girl, I looked up to Amy,” Taylor tells K!. “And if you listen to the music that came after her you can easily hear the direct influence she had. There was just nothing like it, a beautiful dark female operatic singer with metal and pop elements. It was captivating.”
A few years down the line, The Pretty Reckless’ first opening tour was provided by – you guessed it – Evanescence. Now, in 2020, Taylor, alongside Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale, Within Temptation’s Sharon den Adel and more, appears on the backing chorus of Use My Voice.
“Whether she knows it or not, Amy had a huge influence on how I would handle my career from the time I met her,” reflects Taylor.
Very much on the same page is Lzzy, who also appears on Use My Voice. As with the rest of the world, the Halestorm leader discovered Evanescence when Bring Me To Life had a vice grip on airwaves. At the time, Lzzy says she didn’t relate to “normal” girls – she even went through “interventions” at school because she insisted on wearing black and listening to Alice Cooper.
“Amy embodied and represented all the girls that were just like me,” she explains. “She was, and is a voice, for our generation. Up until her, I had to reach back to my parent’s generation of women in rock for inspiration. When Amy broke the mould, I knew the door was wide open for all of us to walk through.”
This is a legacy Amy is deeply proud of, and one she very much intends to build upon. She can barely hide her excitement as she talks about working with them on Use My Voice.
“Feeling their support, their love and hearing their voices with me makes me stronger,” she beams. “The more of us there are, the more there will be. When I first went on tour, to a festival, on TV, there were no women. And now there are, both behind the scenes and onstage. That gives me hope.”
Here are some things you might care to know about The Bitter Truth as it nears completion. While new lyrical inspiration has come to bear between the start of recording and the present, the basic premise for Evanescence’s new album remains the same.
“It’s a rock record,” Amy affirms. “We wanted to showcase the strength, fun and power of the band. There’s no holding back. It’s heavy sonically, and it feels good to go heavy. Really good. But it’s not heavy for heavy’s sake.”
Amy goes on to state that, despite now being three singles into the record, we “haven't heard all the sounds of the album yet”. She promises songs with “score-like drama” and “aggressive power”. Sometimes the unbridled energy sparked by the group reconvening after months of quarantine spawned utterly joyous “balls to the wall” moments. Double bass drumming is mentioned. Perhaps most exciting is Amy revealing there is an infusion of the “catty vibe” that defined classic single Call Me When You’re Sober.
“That is definitely here, but taken to the next level,” she says with a glint in her eye. “I hope we can deliver everything the fans could expect, and more. The ‘and more’ is the most exciting part for me. The music that we make is just the sound of my feelings and there are a lot of big feelings, so it’s a strong sound.”
Indeed, big feelings have been par for the course throughout Evanescence’s discography.
“I know that we have touched lives,” Amy explains, pointing to the fans she has met around the world who have used Evanescence’s music to overcome grief, illness and tragedy. She can relate.
“I am somebody who’s been through some very, very difficult moments, for my age at least,” she continues. “When we see somebody survive through the unimaginable, it gives us hope that we can, too. I do recognise that I’ve been that for other people, and I can’t tell you how much it means. It makes the most terrible parts of my life have a purpose. That is the closest I can come to reaching back in time to soothe myself. To take a terrible tragedy and use it to help someone else? For me, that has been the most healing thing. There are beautiful things that can come out of pain. That has become such a central focus for what Evanescence means to me.”
Amy lost a sister when she was a child. In January 2018, her younger brother Robby, who battled severe epilepsy, passed away.
Kerrang! wonders if his passing changed her perspective on life, and if both her grief and love for her brother will find expression on any new songs?
“Of course, it’s the biggest thing on my heart,” Amy says. “Bigger than anything else. It changes your perspective. This is the second sibling I’ve lost. The first time I was six, so the processing was very different. That was more about fear; this time it was more about love and pain. The perspective is very valuable, but I’d rather not have it. I’d rather he be here more than anything. It definitely made me look at my life and zoom out at the much bigger existential picture. Asking those type of questions is something I’ve always done in our music, but it had been a while since it had been fresh. For me, thinking about my brother is part of my every day. I don’t know how much this relates to answering your question, but I have come to believe that when we lose somebody we love, we absorb a little piece of them. Like they become part of you.”
What part of Robby is now part of you?
“It’s from big things to little things…” says Amy, trailing off into silence before resuming her sentence. “I can feel myself saying things he would have said. My brother loved nature and animals in an almost Buddhist way. He wanted my parents’ house to be a sanctuary for all things.”
Amy recalls one exchange with her brother that occurred when she was about to lay the smackdown on a wasp.
“Come on, don’t kill it!” insisted Robby. “Just catch it and put it outside.”
“Dude, it’s a wasp – I'm killing it,” Amy replied. “It’s horrible.”
“I just don’t like to kill stuff. Can we just not kill anything?” he asked. “Let’s just be in a peaceful place – if you don’t bother it, it’s not going to bother you.”
Amy takes another second to collect her thoughts.
“And now I don’t kill bugs,” she grins. “It’s such a silly thing, but then again it’s not, because the sentiment is so righteous and pure. It makes me look at our existence in a different way. How different are we really from any other living creature on this planet? We need to take a step back from our self-importance. That is the biggest thing perspective-wise.”
Will we hear that in the record?
“I hope so,” she says. “I’m still writing a lot of lyrics, but it’s all just very deeply from the heart on all kinds of things.”
Indeed, it seems the stage is very much set for Evanescence to deliver their most powerful album yet – the latest chapter in one of rock’s biggest success stories. There have been a lot of music biopics lately, from Straight Outta Compton to Rocket Man and The Dirt. What, we wonder, would make a good title for a film about Evanescence’s journey. For the first time, Amy is stumped.
“How would I sum it up?” she hmms and ahs. “Part of our conversation has been about taking difficult things, big challenges and tragedy and making it your fuel. Taking a bunch of hardship and spinning it into something beautiful – how do you put that into a title? You’re the writer!”
She may not have settled on a good title, but she summed up The Story Of Amy Lee perfectly. Amy Lee, who is done being silent. Amy Lee, who doesn’t kill wasps anymore. Amy Lee, who has a song called Pickle Mustard to get back to.
Words: George Garner
The Cover Story - March 10, 2021
Main article: [Link to Kerrang! article]
When it was finally finished, Amy Lee slipped outside of her house by herself. It was late; everyone inside was already fast asleep. She ventured out into the garden and climbed into the sanctuary of her son’s tree house – away from the world, away from all distraction. After months and months of gruelling writing and soul-searching, there was nothing more to change. Nothing more to be tweaked. Nothing left for Amy to do but lay on top of a sleeping bag, get her headphones – good headphones – and press play. As she looked up at the surrounding night sky and branches, she listened to The Bitter Truth, Evanescence’s first all-new studio album in a decade.
“It was a perfect feeling,” reflects Amy today of that moment. “It was just satisfaction, true satisfaction.”
She is recalling this experience from her parents’ home in Arkansas, where Amy and her son are visiting at the time of K!’s call. That she sounds in such high spirits is not only down to her being liberated from the pressure cooker of album deadlines, but also the fact that they’re snowed in. Like, really, really snowed in. And that means one thing. “We’re doing a lot of sledding,” she laughs.
Loathe as we are to ever have to interrupt some well-earned rock star tobogganing, the imminent arrival of Evanescence’s excellent fourth album – and let the record show that Amy considers The Bitter Truth, not 2017’s record of orchestral re-workings Synthesis, their fourth album – trumps all other concerns.
You might think you know everything about it by now. Recorded during the pandemic, and drip-released throughout, no other Evanescence album has been preceded by so many singles. Last year, Amy opened up about the power and poignancy of some of these tracks – how, for example, the testimony of Chanel Miller, the survivor of a 2015 sexual assault by her fellow Stanford University student Brock Turner, influenced her to write Use My Voice. But make no mistake: in sound and theme, the singles so far are just the tip of the iceberg.
Amy conceived of The Bitter Truth as a journey. It begins with the compelling abstract noises of two-part opener Artifact/The Turn – the former the product of her “by myself in my hotel room on tour”, the latter a collaboration with Scott Kirkland of the Crystal Method. “I see the beginning of the album as starting from a Ground Zero place after a tragedy, and then, when the guitars come in, for me, that’s getting back up,” she explains.
Which brings us neatly to Broken Pieces Shine: a stunning track that sees Evanescence – completed by guitarists Jen Majura and Troy McLawhorn, bassist Tim McCord and drummer Will Hunt – in world-beating form. It is also, arguably, the greatest song ever conceived during a spot of grocery shopping.
“We were in Canada on a writing camp trip out in the woods in 2019,” recalls Amy, before noting how the hunter-gatherer duties in the band were split. “The men went to go get music stuff that we forgot, like a snare stand and whatever else, and the women went to the grocery store (laughs). On the way back, we were just showing each other ideas in the car on our phones, little pre-recorded demos and stuff. Jen had this really cool idea that turned into that chugging verse music. I just started rewinding it and singing on it over and over.”
It may have started out life as a fun way to pass time in the car, but it has come to mean much, much more to its creator.
“I see Broken Pieces Shine as an anthem for us and our fans,” says Amy. “From the beginning, I visualised us onstage in that ‘together moment’. It’s about letting yourself fall apart, letting those flaws become the things that we not only accept about ourselves, but also embrace. To be your true self rather than holding it in is truly freeing. We have things about us that we may see as flaws, but just change your perspective a little bit – our flaws can be our superpowers. That’s what makes us different. That’s what makes us unique.”
It’s a song about the pain and beauty of survival, the wisdom bred from suffering, the grace that can be found in the acceptance of what is. In so many ways, Amy Lee has learned these lessons the hard way…
"Thanks!” enthuses Amy Lee. “I don’t fit into metal categories for nothin’!” This is her response when Kerrang! observes that, on some of the lyrics on The Bitter Truth, Amy sounds like someone you really wouldn’t want to piss off. She had given us fair warning about this, of course – last year hinting that we would once again get a glimpse of the “catty vibe” that defined Evanescence’s classic single Call Me When You’re Sober. It’s just that on some of these new tracks, Amy comes across as someone who will, if you push her too far, not only stick the knife in and twist the blade, but also break it off at the handle. And then make you eat the handle. The aptly-named Take Cover, for example, sees her threaten to become ‘the bitch you make me out to be’ over rumbling blasts of bass and twisted riffs. It’s hard to tell what she’s out for in the song… is it justice or revenge?
“Caaaaaaaaan’t it be both?” she laughs, elongating the can’t so much it almost morphs into a creaking sound.
It’s one of many songs on The Bitter Truth in which Amy toys with both the illusion of fame and the people who have tried to gaslight her during her career. Recent single Yeah Right lit this particular fuse – it not only stunned with its deft move into Goldfrappian electro territory, but also its acid-tongued sarcasm. ‘Yeah, I’m a rock star,’ sings Amy over bubbling synth notes. ‘I’m a queen resurrected just as messed up as before.’ This is something dialled up to 11 on the ominous throb of Better Without You – a song that sees Amy deliver the lines: ‘’Cause this is my world, little girl you’d be lost on your own… I’ll do you a favour if you sign on the dotted line.’
It’s hard to read this and not think of the misogyny and double standards Amy Lee has spoken about encountering while traversing the alpha male-riddled rock world, both onstage and off. Be it recalling how she was told Bring Me To Life had to feature a male co-singer against her wishes, or revealing to K! last year how she felt the pressure to “look my best, be a certain weight and be beautiful”, she’s had no shortage of battles.
Amy explains that she’s spent a good deal of time sifting through her past of late. She’s even gone so far to allocate some time to going through old audio and video that she had stashed away in her attic for years. Terrified they would be lost, she’s been converting old cassettes to digital.
“It’s just making me zoom out and see my life as a whole,” she explains. “It’s been really, really fascinating, and jogged my memory about a lot of things. So that actually influenced me in some of this writing and seeing things from a new perspective, but also seeing them how they were.”
So where does this leave a song like Better Without You?
“The song is really hard…” she begins. “I can’t lie in the music. And over time, that’s become truer and truer. I’m peeling away more of the layers of imagery and really being specific at times just saying what I really need to get off my chest. Some of what I’m saying are things that I’m not comfortable breaking down and explaining, because I don’t want to bring up old drama. Better Without You is a difficult song to describe and go into detail about. And so is Yeah Right, actually.”
Amy Lee is an extremely open interviewee: friendly, impassioned and intent on driving to the heart of a question, even when it hurts to do so. That said, there have still been times in K!’s interviews over the years where she’s referenced parts of her story that she didn’t wish to re-inhabit; parts of her life that she wanted to fence off to the world, and even herself. We wonder if we are finally hearing some of those untold stories now in the lyrics on The Bitter Truth?
“You are,” she says. “Take Cover, Yeah Right and Better Without You all touch on some elements of my past that I am…”
A brief pause.
“I have moved on,” she continues. “But apparently there’s still some things that I needed to get off my chest.”
Was that a surprise that those old feelings of anger were still there and came out this way?
“Well, I should say this: the seeds of both Yeah Right and Take Cover, much of them were written, from a lyrical standpoint, a decade ago,” Amy replies. “So think about what was going on in 2010 and some of the stuff that was a little bit closer to the forefront of my mind. Better Without You, though, that’s real and in-the-moment. It’s not like there’s one big secret [person] to blame. Better Without You talks about all the obstacles along the way, moving from the past into the present time. I have different parts of the song that are assigned to different people and entities in my mind. But I don’t think calling people out when I’ve already defeated all my monsters along the way is really something I want to do.”
Will these people know these songs are about them when they hear it?
“I don’t know,” she ponders. “Probably. I’ve been seeing it like this: ‘If you think it’s about you, you’re right!’”
Clearly these are songs that cut deep. And yet, there is one moment on The Bitter Truth that goes even deeper…
Amy Lee still remembers the peculiar colour of the sky over Cape Canaveral on January 28, 1986. She was just five years old at the time. Somewhere in the world a picture still exists of her holding an icicle on that bracingly cold day; it was a big deal to young Amy, as she wasn’t used to seeing snow where she was from.
Her family had travelled that day to see Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe board NASA’s Space Shuttle Challenger and blast off into outer space. They waited and waited for the countdown, yet there was no sign of lift-off. Tired of waiting, eventually the Lee family took a break to get some food.
“When we came back, the sky was black,” says Amy, recalling the aftermath of the Challenger explosion that cost the lives of all astronauts onboard and which went down in history as the darkest day in the American space programme. “It had just happened and everybody was standing there looking up at the sky with their mouth open. My dad asked what happened and some guy was like, ‘It just blew up.’”
This was not Amy’s only encounter with death in her adolescence.
“As a young kid I had quite a few impactful moments,” she says. “Obviously, that one wasn’t anywhere near as impactful as losing my sister [when Amy was just a child]. But I was faced with trying to understand our mortality at a younger age than a lot of kids around me. It always made me feel a little bit different, just to have to understand and be aware that I could die; that that happens, and there’s no fair set amount of time that you are entitled to. I’ll never forget what the sky looked like that day.”
The vocalist famously known for singing My Immortal has, then, from a young age, been acutely aware of the spectre of mortality. Last year, she told K! about the devastating loss of her younger brother Robby – who had battled severe epilepsy – in January 2018. His presence can be intuited on The Bitter Truth’s most astounding track Far From Heaven – a gorgeous piano ballad complete with swelling strings from composer (and Synthesis collaborator) David Campbell. Surprisingly, this, the emotional epicentre of the album almost didn’t make the record. When The Bitter Truth was originally finished, it was ballad deficient. And that was fine.
“We were all just going, ‘Hey, you know what? Every album is different – we don’t have to have that [type of] song every time,’” recalls Amy of their thought process.
Not only was she exhausted, time was also fast running out for any new songs to even make the deadline.
“I was really struggling,” she says. “I wasn’t feeling full of aggression, and all the strength and power – and there’s so much of that on this album – I just didn’t have any left when we got to that point.”
Only it turns out that she did. All Amy had to do was sit down at the piano.
“Far From Heaven just came out,” she says. “It just needed to come out of me. That was the last thing on the album. It completed the puzzle.”
Far From Heaven not only showcases the maturation of Evanescence’s sound, but in particular the power and nuance of Amy’s songwriting. Upon first listen it seems to address her late brother Robby, her voice freighted with emotion as she delivers piercing lines like, ‘What I wouldn’t give to be with you for one more night.’ And it is, she confirms, about him indirectly. Far From Heaven details a state of mourning that distorts both time and memory; the crosscurrents of grief that register not only as a permanent scar on the heart but also as a tremor in the soul.
“It’s about questioning my faith,” explains Amy. “And it’s not like it’s the first time, but it’s just very raw, real and in the hardest way I ever have. Having to really look at it and wonder, ‘Is anybody out there?’ That’s a real question I’ve been asking over the past couple years, through everything, and I don’t have the answers. I never have had the answers. That’s the whole thing that makes belief belief. We just can believe, we don’t know. But it’s not just about that. That’s part of the reason it was so hard to write, I spent two or three weeks just stuck in this funk, like in this depression, trying to get it off my chest because it’s not the way that I feel all the time. But it is a feeling that I have that comes up in me regularly: wondering where the people are that I’ve lost, and thinking about time in a more fluid way.”
There are no easy answers here.
“I do believe love exists beyond life, part of that is connected, I think, to holding on to [lost loved ones] inside ourselves,” she continues. “It’s more than a memory. It was real, it really happened – what existed still exists. I’m talking about it, so it does. It is really deeply hard to talk about, not because it’s so painful for me, but because it’s very difficult to put into words. I just needed to face the abyss head on. That was one thing that was missing from the album. Honestly, part of me, in this time, has been facing the grief and darkness. And with all the hope, and joy and empowerment that I truly do feel – and so much of the album comes from that place – I just can’t gloss over and not also admit the other side… I talk about my siblings, because those are the obviously to the closest to me, but there’s been a lot of loss in my life, I’ve been through it plenty of times. I’m reminded every time with grief that there’s a choice you have to make for yourself between life and death; between getting up or not. You have to talk about the struggle of that.”
It strikes K! that a song like this could be the kind an artist makes and either feels an enormous sense of catharsis, or one they write and never want to hear or play it again…
“While writing it, I felt so low,” Amy admits. “I was just living in it without an out. When it was finished, I really loved it; it’s beautiful. Even when a song is openly dark and about pain, it can bring me joy. Sometimes you just need to say that hard thing you’ve been locking down inside, get it out, process it, and then move on to the next song.”
This past Christmas, Amy played the album for her family. Her dad is, she says, “a music guy”. He was once in a band himself before he made the choice to pursue a family life, and explored a career in radio. He’s 10 years retired, but even now Amy says she’ll hear him doing voice work on TV for insurance companies (“You’d never know it’s him, but to me it’s like, ‘Dad!’”).
“He does a lot of studying on artists and songwriting,” she says. “He’s that guy. So after every song we sit, break it down and talk about it.”
What did he make of Far From Heaven?
“That song,” says Amy, softly, “that song made him cry.”
Were the album to end on this note, it would make for a very different record. As stands, The Bitter Truth ends on a note not of doubt, but of hope with Blind Belief.
“I believe it’s in us as a human race to survive this time,” she says. “Absolutely, I believe we will get through this. But, of course, I don’t know for sure. Ending the album with Blind Belief was deliberate, particularly the line ‘love over all’, because that’s impossibly hard to say, especially when we’ve seen the evil that’s crept out of the dark corners in broad daylight in the last few years. Not that we’ve never seen that before, but it’s just been so in our face, especially as Americans. Even so, I believe we do need love over all. It should be simple, but it is complicated. The album is a journey through grief, among other things. The ending is reaching that seemingly impossible point of acceptance. Forgiveness, honour, remembrance and love over all. And when I come to the end of all those feelings – including the rage, the grief, all of that all mixed up – I feel released. I feel like I want to step into the future.”
About the future, then. It’s taken a year of hard work to end a decade of waiting for Evanescence fans. Not to get greedy, but when will it be acceptable to ask Amy about another album after this one?
“Ten years!” she says. “Just kidding. I mean, I already feel like I need to do something creative again.”
For now it’s time for the world to experience what Amy Lee did that night she pressed play on The Bitter Truth in her son’s tree house.
“We left nothing behind on this one, so I hope people like it,” she says. “And if they don’t? No regrets from me. I’ll tell you this: I put my whole self into it.”
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