Amy Lee’s Fallen into grace
Don’t cry for Amy Lee.
Not that most people would, mind you, considering her band Evanescence was the breakout pop music story of the past two years, selling more than 15 million copies of its debut Fallen, and earning a pair of Grammys along the way.
But in the midst of that, Lee’s bandmate and longtime friend Ben Moody left the group — part way through a European tour — he helped form with her in Little Rock, Arkansas almost a decade ago.
The last time the pair spoke was when they accepted the best new artist Grammy this past February.
Again, weep not for Lee and what she may have lost.
“It’s not like you think,” the vocalist says, from her recently purchased home. “I don’t know how to put it because I don’t want to hurt anybody.
“It’s not that we were best friends and then all of a sudden he left the band — it’s nothing like that.
“We were best friends when I was 14 — I am now 22 and we haven’t been best friends for years.
“It had become a real show. We were working partners, and by the time the album came out even, the only real thing we had in common was artistic.
“The fact that he left the band, it wasn’t like it killed me and hurt my feelings and made me feel like I lost a friend, it was actually more of a relief because he’d been so unhappy on tour recently that it was making everyone else unhappy.
“We all hope he’s happier now.”
Lee certainly seems to be.
Other than still having to tour an album that’s a year and a half old while itching to get to work on a followup, her life these days is far from the dark, introverted stuff of Fallen.
“To be honest, it’s the best it’s ever been for me,” Lee says.
“It’s kind of weird. It’s kind of weird to wake up and not have anything eating away at you that there’s something really wrong, because I’m really used to that.
“For whatever reason, whether it be a bad relationship that you can’t get out of, or a situation that you can’t avoid or something.
“Obviously I still have problems in my life, everybody has problems but everything’s going well.”
That everything includes her relationship with Shaun Morgan from the band Seether.
The two acts are currently touring together and Lee appears on Seether’s new disc performing the track Broken with Morgan as a duet.
“I was a little scared of the whole working together thing, because you never want to push it too hard, you never want to spend way too much time together,” she says, noting it’s great to see the world with her boyfriend.
“It’s cool that we did this one song together, but I think it’s going to be the only one.”
Lee hints there are other people she’d like to write songs with for Fallen’s followup, but says right now she’s enjoying writing by herself — her three bandmates are also writing separately — and revelling in her newfound artistic freedom sans Moody.
Whenever it comes out, the new album, she says, will reflect that freedom.
“What I want to do is just be free completely of any kind of structure,” she says. “I don’t want to have to make our songs a certain way.
“When we did Fallen — I love all of those songs and I really wouldn’t change them — but at the same time they all follow certain rules.
“Not to say that I’m going to make — I hope not — some record that’s so out there that no one understands it. That’s not me at all either.
“First and foremost, the human heart is the main focus.”
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