This may surprise you: Goth-rock goddess Amy Lee was not swathed in black the other day when she phoned.
“I’m wearing a Cookie Monster T-shirt and a white skirt,” the voice and visionary of Evanescence said recently from her rural Pennsylvania rehearsal space.
The pale, raven-haired Lee – who took her black-clad pain to Grammy-winning heights on the blockbuster album “Fallen,” with a Meat Loaf-like mash-up of menacing metal, operatic grandeur and pretty balladry – is still wearing her emotions on her sleeve. While “Fallen” was about wallowing in misery about a not-nice boyfriend, Evanescence’s new CD, “The Open Door,” is more about: “I’m miserable and what do I have to do to work this out.” In other words, hard rock’s biggest drama queen has changed. She really has.
“I’m not gothic and I’m not depressed,” said the 24-year-old singer/pianist. “My music is my place of a lot of heavy emotions. Having that, I can be a pretty happy and healthy person in normal life. I’ve definitely seen some dark days. But haven’t we all? I feel like I haven’t had a harder or more miserable life than anyone else.”
Well, she certainly has had a lot of strife in her life of late. In 2003, after Evanescence scored with the rap-rock “Bring Me to Life” and the gothic ballad “My Immortal,” Lee’s collaborator and best friend, guitarist Ben Moody, quit the band in midtour. Then as Lee and her band were working on their second album, she faced one crisis after another:
•She broke up with her boyfriend, Shaun Morgan of Seether.
•Terry Balsamo, who’d replaced Moody as Evanescence’s guitarist and co-songwriter, had a debilitating stroke last fall while recording.
•Lee fired and sued Evanescence’s manager for, among other allegations, sexual harassment.
•The band’s bassist, Will Boyd, Lee’s friend since junior high, quit after the new album was recorded.
All the turmoil drove Lee to therapy, where she found it comforting to be in a situation where she wasn’t being judged – either by fans who post messages on the Internet or by bandmates, managers and record-label execs.
“I could speak freely and not feel that anything I said was wrong,” said Lee, the leader and youngest member of Evanescence, whose debut sold 6.5 million copies in the United States and 15 million worldwide. “That’s carried over to my life now. I care a lot less about what people think about me.”
Not only has therapy helped, but so has moving from Los Angeles to New York.
“I feel a lot safer, as weird as that may sound,” said Lee, whose apartment is part of a converted 19th-century church with stained-glass windows and a marble bathtub. “I’m not ever really alone. People are really real here.”
But how real is the Amy Lee we see in Evanescence? She has cultivated a goth/glam, princess-of-darkness image that suggests a young Priscilla Presley made over by Tim Burton.
“She’s dramatic – in her music, her style and her personality,” said Spin associate editor Melissa Maerz, who interviewed Lee for the magazine’s October issue. “She’s confident, ambitious and savvy both about her image and the business – and how to manipulate it.”
Indeed, Lee understands the image game. “I don’t wear black all the time, that’s for sure,” she said. “It’s what I need to be to represent the sound of the music. In my normal day, I’m just the other side of me.”
For fun, she plays the grand piano in her New York place, often making up music or polishing her classical chops. Or she’ll go to a street fair and “find a gyro or corn dog and shop for $2 bracelets.”
Lee started writing poetry about eternity and loneliness at age 10. The death four years earlier of her 3-year-old sister “will always be a part of who I am,” she told Spin.
As a child, Lee moved around because her father was a radio DJ. At 13, she arrived in Little Rock, Ark., and met Moody at a church camp, and they became musical collaborators.
Evanescence began in 1998 as a Christian rock band and, three years later, signed with Wind Up, the label that also gave the world Creed. She and Moody moved to Los Angeles, where they wrote and recorded “Fallen.”
She hasn’t talked to Moody since they received their Grammys for best new artist in February 2004, four months after he quit during a European tour. But she did listen to a song he co-wrote for Kelly Clarkson.
“It’s kind of what we all would have expected; that he would try to make music for pop stars in the commercial world,” she said. “That was what a lot of our fights were about – commerciality.”
Lee, meanwhile, became romantically involved with Morgan, the guitarist in Seether, which toured with Evanescence. She even sang on Seether’s hit “Broken.” But the relationship wasn’t all lollipops and moonbeams, and she and Morgan split up months ago.
He seems to be the subject of several songs on “The Open Door,” including the current single, “Call Me When You’re Sober.” Lee hasn’t heard from Morgan yet, although she knows he checked himself into rehab about the time the single was released.
“I changed my number,” she said with a nervous giggle. “I’m not in any way ashamed of what I wrote. I think the song is the most clear and perfect way I could have expressed myself. As an artist I think (he) should honestly understand that. I just can’t censor myself for this band.”
With “The Open Door” arriving in stores this month, Evanescence has hit the road to play a dozen theaters and clubs – including Saturday at the Wiltern LG in Los Angeles – before headlining an arena tour next year.
“I’m sort of running around telling everyone what to do,” Lee said before the group’s final rehearsal. “I need to calm down. We went to dinner last night and said, ‘Everything sounds awesome.’ I don’t know why I’m freaking out.”
Maybe it’s partly because the band has a new bassist, Tim McCord from Revolution Smile, and maybe it’s partly because Balsamo is not fully recovered.
“He’s come a long way,” said Lee, adding that he has divided the parts with a second guitarist. “He’s really playing the whole set; it’s still a lot of work for him. His arm was totally paralyzed when he first woke up from the stroke.”
One comforting factor for Lee is her new boyfriend. Not only is he not a musician, but he’s a 28-year-old therapist who is, not surprisingly, a good listener, she says. He inspired the last song she wrote for the album, the closing ballad “Good Enough.”
“It’s the best representation of where I am now,” she said. “After all the challenges and struggles, the constant push-and-pull of what I was writing for the rest of the album, I felt clean. I felt like I had actually purged everything out of me that I had to. I got a chance to start over with all that I’ve learned. (‘Good Enough’) came from feeling really, really good.”
This may not surprise you: “It’s my first writing from a really positive place. That’s a new thing. I usually feel I have to be fighting something to write.”
