{"id":4330,"date":"2011-11-13T22:49:50","date_gmt":"2011-11-14T05:49:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/?p=4330"},"modified":"2011-11-28T15:09:52","modified_gmt":"2011-11-28T22:09:52","slug":"evanescence-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/2011\/11\/evanescence-2\/","title":{"rendered":"EVANESCENCE"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>EVANESCENCE <\/strong><\/h2>\n

Amy Lee wanted to go it alone\u2014but needed her band to bring the pain<\/strong><\/h2>\n

After forming in Arkansas in the mid-1990s, the members of Evanescence watched in amazement as their 2003 debut full-length album, Fallen<\/em>, sold 17 million copies worldwide on the strength of hits like \u201cBring Me to Life\u201d and \u201cMy Immortal.\u201d Three years later the follow-up, The Open Door<\/em>, racked up another 5 million. After such a whirlwind ride, bandleader Amy Lee needed a moment to take stock. \u201cI wanted to do my own thing for a while,\u201d says Lee. \u201cI wanted to break away from Evanescence and find myself as an adult. I had been consumed by being \u2018the girl from Evanescence\u2019\u00a0for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eventually she resumed writing songs and went into the studio, but soon realized that something was missing: the rest of Evanescence. \u201cAt first it was very much me and a lot of stuff I\u2019d been working on alone,\u201d Lee says. \u201cBut I got to a point where I felt that this needed to be a band effort, that we needed to hammer this out together.\u201d Lee gathered guitarists Terry Balsamo and Troy McLawhorn, bass player Tim McCord and drummer Will Hunt, and together the quintet did something Evanescence had never done before: They wrote together as a group. It was potentially intimidating for a songwriter who was used to working on her own, but the collaboration went smoothly\u2014one big reason the resulting album is dubbed simply Evanescence<\/em>. \u201cThat was the final reason,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was about my love for it, what it means to me and the struggle that it is sometimes. I can\u2019t escape it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why did the band take a break?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2007 I got married and went straight back on tour for The Open Door<\/em>. When\u00a0we finished the tour, I wanted to try something new. I definitely needed a\u00a0break. I was living in New York and started playing the harp, cooking for friends, making friends who weren\u2019t involved in my work\u2014it kept me sane and grounded. But writing\u00a0music is a real part of who I am, and I started again, although not necessarily for Evanescence. Slowly it became this record, which is Evanescence completely. Having a chance to step away for a minute let me\u00a0explore some new directions and bring that into our new sound.<\/p>\n

How did it sound without the band?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It just wasn\u2019t right. I was about halfway through figuring out what I wanted the record to be, and I had a bunch of songs and was really excited. It was more ethereal, more programming-based, more synthetic and cool\u2014a lot of the elements that are still a big part of this record. But it fell apart. Things weren\u2019t sounding right, I didn\u2019t know why and it was really hard for me. Now that I\u2019m over a year away from it, I can look back and say, \u201cI\u2019m so glad that happened.\u201d We kept working and I got some clarity on what I wanted to do next, which was to get the band involved. I felt pretty lost for a while, but I knew that we were doing the right thing, because it kept getting better.<\/p>\n

What had been lacking?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The music was missing the pain. Going back and working more was difficult. There wasn\u2019t a giant struggle up to that point, so finally there was something for me to lament. These songs on the record are searching and soulful, deeper and harder. That was a big part of what filled out the record and made it so great and meaningful to all of us now. It felt like we had to go through something, to overcome something.<\/p>\n

Is pain necessary to the process?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I want to say no. I want to believe I can make music my whole life and be happy and not need bad experiences to write great songs. I think you can write songs without being upset. But at the same time, on every Evanescence record that I\u2019ve made there had to be something hard going on for those deepest tracks to happen. I don\u2019t want that to be true, but there it is.<\/p>\n

How was writing with the band?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Better than I ever hoped. The way I normally write is very intimate. I do a lot of it alone, or it\u2019s me and one other person creating in a really intimate way. To have everybody at their instruments, it\u2019s like, \u201cOK, go!\u201d There\u2019s a lot more pressure. It\u2019s scarier, because everybody gets to hear you suck. But you get past it quickly. It\u2019s a cool feeling when everybody starts playing together and working on something and it begins to grow. It works so well because the musicians in this group are really talented. It\u2019s harder when there\u2019s somebody who can\u2019t keep up or doesn\u2019t get the music that we\u2019re trying to make, but we all had a similar vision for the idea of what we want Evanescence to be.<\/p>\n

And that is?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s always been passionate, of course, and on the dark side much of the time. But now that we have a history, you can hear how the band has grown. Even between Fallen<\/em> and The Open Door<\/em> there were different influences, different things about the band and me that came through over the years. Now it\u2019s about not being afraid of doing what I want to do, even if it\u2019s a guilty pleasure.<\/p>\n

For instance? <\/strong><\/p>\n

[Lead single] \u201cWhat You Want\u201d is a good example. The vocal style on the verse is just fun. Years ago I never would have been confident enough to do that. I would have thought, \u201cThat\u2019s stupid.\u201d It\u2019s heavier than a lot of our music, but the vocals are fun and snappy and it gives it this cool dynamic. So part of the new direction is trusting myself and not being afraid to have fun with things like that on a musical level. The depth of our music is a huge part of what Evanescence is, but now there are moments of clarity and light. It\u2019s not all dark in a sad way. I think \u201cWhat You Want\u201d sounds badass, but I don\u2019t ever hear it and feel those emotions in \u201cBring Me to Life,\u201d for example, where I\u2019m dying inside. There\u2019s definitely plenty of that on the record, but the best of what Evanescence is to me is the passion, the depth, the meaning. What we\u2019re adding now is creative and musical maturity.<\/p>\n

What accounts for that maturity?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m older now. We all are. I remember being young and writing Fallen<\/em>, and during that time I was still figuring out who I was and what our sound was. I\u2019m almost 30 now. We were writing songs like \u201cBring Me to Life\u201d and \u201cMy Immortal\u201d when I was 15 through 18. I\u2019ve been playing music ever since, and I\u2019ve only gotten more confident and hopefully better. I used to put all kinds of restrictions on myself: I didn\u2019t sing with very much vibrato because I thought that wasn\u2019t cool. I was afraid to sing off-key, and everything had to be hard all the time. Now there\u2019s a lot more looseness and fun going on.\u00a0I\u2019m not so afraid.<\/p>\n

\u2013Eric R. Danton<\/p>\n

\n

\u2018I don\u2019t want to believe I need bad experiences to write great songs, but there it is.\u2019 <\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n<\/strong><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

EVANESCENCE Amy Lee wanted to go it alone\u2014but needed her band to bring the pain After forming in Arkansas in the mid-1990s, the members of Evanescence watched in amazement as their 2003 debut full-length album, Fallen, sold 17 million copies worldwide on the strength of hits like \u201cBring Me to Life\u201d and \u201cMy Immortal.\u201d Three […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[2806,970,2615],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4330"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4330"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4333,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4330\/revisions\/4333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}