The story of Evanescence

Two outsiders in Little Rock

Amy Lynn Lee was born on the thirteenth of December 1981 in Riverside, California. Her father John was a radio disc jockey and voice over artist, and she was the oldest of five children. When Amy was six, her little sister Bonnie died at the age of three from an illness that was never identified. Amy later said the loss changed how she saw life, and that she hid much of her grief to protect her parents. She poured it into drawing and music instead. Her grandmother, a piano teacher, showed her the film Amadeus when she was eight, and she decided she wanted to be Mozart. She went on to study classical piano for nine years.[1] [2] [3]

The family moved around, from Florida to Illinois, before settling in Little Rock, Arkansas. At her new private school Amy was a loner at first and was bullied for dressing differently. The school choir slowly gave her confidence, and she ended up as its president, writing a choral piece the choir sang at graduation. At home, her attic bedroom was covered in posters of Pearl Jam and Kurt Cobain. She was drawn to grunge, industrial music, Björk and Portishead, and one day, practising Bach, she noticed a fast passage that sounded almost like heavy metal. That idea of joining the classical world to the heavy one became the seed of everything that followed.[1] [2]

In 1994, at a Christian youth camp in Little Rock, thirteen year old Amy was playing piano while the other kids played sports. A boy a year older named Ben Moody was strumming an acoustic guitar nearby. They felt like the two misfits in the room and decided to make music together. Within a month she had brought him a cassette of a song she had written. They worked in her family's house with a sixteen track recorder and a keyboard that faked strings and choirs. After trying names like Childish Intentions and Stricken, they settled on Evanescence, a word meaning a fading away. They liked that it sounded beautiful and came out of nowhere.[1] [2] [3]

For years Evanescence was a studio duo more than a live band. They made a self titled EP in 1998, with only about a hundred copies, and a second EP called Sound Asleep in 1999. Songs from those discs got played on Little Rock's modern rock station and built a small local following. Their first proper plugged in show came at a bar called Vinos on the second of January 1999, a few weeks after Amy turned seventeen. Amy said it took real work to become a performer. For shows they borrowed friends to fill out the band, then disappeared back into their bedrooms to write for months at a time.[1] [2] [3]

Around 1999 a Little Rock keyboard player and songwriter named David Hodges joined them, and the three became inseparable. Ben Moody later wrote that he maxed out credit cards to buy recording gear, and that when he could not pay the rent he and Hodges lost their apartment. He spent many nights sleeping in the back of a pickup truck, waiting for Amy to finish high school so they could all leave. In 2000 they packaged their best home recordings as a demo CD called Origin, mastered at Ardent Studios in Memphis. About two thousand copies were made. They insisted it was never a real album, just a calling card for record labels.[1] [2] [3]

Signed, stranded and fighting for Fallen

The calling card worked. A producer at Ardent heard the demos and passed them to Diana Meltzer, head of artists and repertoire at Wind up Records, the New York label behind Creed. When she heard My Immortal, she said she knew it was a hit. Amy had just started studying music theory and composition at Middle Tennessee State University, planning a career in film scoring as a backup. Three months into her first semester, the deal came through, and Evanescence signed with Wind up in January 2001. Amy left college after that one term, and within a year and a half she had gone from high school graduate to making an album in Los Angeles.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The label moved the band to Los Angeles, gave them an apartment and a rehearsal room, and told them to keep writing. Amy, who was painfully shy, was sent to an acting teacher to help with stage fright. They had expected six months in California. It turned out to be about two years, and it frustrated them. Wind up worried that a band with a woman out front would not sell to rock radio. Near the end, with producer Dave Fortman now on board, executives made a demand. Lee and Moody must hire a full time male co singer. When they refused, the label said it was pulling the funding and letting them go.[1] [2] [3]

Amy and Ben packed up and drove back to Little Rock, convinced it was over. Amy later said they left California with tears in their eyes rather than hold auditions for a rapper. A few weeks later Wind up blinked. The album could come out if one song, the lead single Bring Me to Life, carried a male voice. Amy wrote the part herself, and Paul McCoy of the label's band 12 Stones sang it. She had written the song at nineteen, after a friend named Josh Hartzler looked at her in a restaurant and asked if she was happy. She was in an abusive relationship at the time, and his question cracked her carefully kept front.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Fallen was recorded in the late summer and autumn of 2002 across several California studios. Drums on some tracks came from the session player Josh Freese. Amy fought for a real string section rather than cheap synthesizers, and a twenty two piece orchestra arranged by David Campbell was recorded in Seattle, partly because non union players there cost less. Fortman estimated the whole album cost around a quarter of a million dollars. One battle she lost was My Immortal. The label insisted on the old demo, sung by a teenage Amy on a keyboard, recorded late at night at the empty radio station where her father worked. She said she always hated how young she sounded on it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Before the album even arrived, two of its songs had a bigger stage. Bring Me to Life and My Immortal were placed on the soundtrack of the Ben Affleck superhero film Daredevil, released in February 2003. Fallen itself followed on the fourth of March 2003. The personnel on the finished record was small. Amy and Ben were the core, Hodges played keyboards and arranged strings, and hired musicians filled in bass and drums. Hodges had drifted away by late 2002, before the album came out. Moody later said they parted because they were heading in different directions. Hodges went on to write hits for other artists and later defended Amy publicly.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A chick and a piano on rock radio

Rock radio did not want Bring Me to Life at first. Wind up's president Ed Vetri recalled program directors asking whether the label was joking, a woman and a piano on a rock station. Some switched off during the quiet opening. But the Daredevil soundtrack spread the song around the world, and listeners began phoning stations to demand it. The single reached number five on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent four weeks at number one in the United Kingdom, where it pulled Fallen to the top of the album chart too. Amy said the band went from clubs to arenas in a matter of months, with fans in countries they had never visited.[1] [2] [3]

There was a strange twist in the early marketing. Wind up, which had found success with Creed, promoted Fallen to Christian stores and radio, and the album briefly sat at number one on Billboard's Contemporary Christian chart. Then Ben Moody told Entertainment Weekly, with a swear word, that he could not see why they were on the Christian charts at all. In April 2003 label chairman Alan Meltzer wrote to Christian outlets calling Evanescence a secular band and recalled the album from Christian retail. Many Christian stations dropped the songs. Amy later called the whole campaign a label trick that she had opposed, because it sold people something that was not true.[1] [2] [3]

Behind the hits was a darker story. Amy said most of her writing on Fallen came from an abusive relationship she was in as a teenager. Going Under, which she had wanted as the first single, was about reaching the end of her rope and realising she had to leave. Bring Me to Life was the cry for help that came before it. Fallen debuted at number seven in America, peaked at number three that June, and kept selling. It stayed on the Billboard 200 for more than two years and was eventually certified diamond, for ten million copies in the United States.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The label needed a touring band fast, so Moody brought in two old friends, guitarist John LeCompt and drummer Rocky Gray, along with bassist Will Boyd. On the day Fallen came out, Evanescence played a two hundred capacity club in Houston. Three months later they were on the main stage of the very first Download festival in England, and soon after they headlined London's Astoria. In August 2003 they headlined the Nintendo Fusion Tour across America. Amy was twenty one, and she felt many people were waiting for her to fail. Critics called them Linkin Park with a girl singer, and some said the men behind her must have written everything.[1] [2] [3]

The split and the Grammys

By autumn 2003 the partnership at the heart of the band had collapsed. Amy said she and Ben had not really been friends since their early teens, and that they had always written apart, stitching their parts together. She described him as controlling and judgmental, and said he pushed the music toward commercial pop and once had her piano duties taken away because she was getting too much attention. On the twenty second of October 2003, in the middle of the European tour, Moody phoned the band's management and quit. The manager asked Amy to beg him to stay. She refused, saying that was exactly what he wanted, and the band played the next show as a four piece.[1] [2] [3]

The departure was bitter. In her letter terminating the band's manager, Amy stated that Moody had been physically and verbally abusive to her. The official reason given at the time was creative differences. Moody later said he had struggled with substance abuse in the band, entered rehab after leaving, and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2005. In a long statement in 2010 he admitted he had been an awful person on that tour, had tried to persuade the others that Amy should leave, and apologised to her. For Amy there was mostly relief. She said it felt like a weight had been lifted. On that same tour she recorded a new song in a bathroom on a tape recorder, and when asked if it was about Ben, she all but admitted it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

To finish the tour, Amy called Terry Balsamo, the guitarist of the Florida band Cold, which had been opening for Evanescence. He had once played briefly in an early version of Limp Bizkit. Balsamo brought a lighter spirit to a miserable camp, and he and Amy clicked over a shared love of heavy music. He introduced her to Pantera and she introduced him to classical music and Björk. He soon became the permanent lead guitarist. Just weeks before Moody quit, the band had filmed the video for My Immortal in Barcelona's Gothic Quarter, showing Amy and Ben apart. Released as a single that December in a new full band version, it reached the top ten in America and Britain.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the eighth of February 2004, Evanescence won two Grammy Awards, Best Hard Rock Performance for Bring Me to Life and Best New Artist, beating the rapper 50 Cent, who walked onto the stage during Amy's acceptance speech. She later said the night felt complicated. Her founding partner had just left on bad terms, she felt people doubted she could do it alone, and her younger brother Robby was seriously ill at home with epilepsy. That November the band released Anywhere but Home, a concert filmed in Paris. It later caused a lawsuit when a Maryland couple sued Walmart because a swear word in a Korn cover was not flagged with a parental advisory sticker.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Opening the door

After the Fallen tour, Amy was exhausted and overwhelmed by pressure from the label. She shut herself away, cut off contact with most people, and spent about ten months writing, painting and going to therapy. She said that for many of the first sessions she simply cried. It was also a frightening time. Stalkers invaded her privacy so badly that she had to leave her home on some nights, and she turned the experience into a song called Snow White Queen, sung from both her own view and the stalker's. According to the Los Angeles Times, she was also in a legal fight with the band's former manager, Dennis Rider, whom she had sued with claims that included sexual harassment.[1] [2] [3]

From 2003 Amy dated Shaun Morgan, the South African singer of Seether, another Wind up band, and they recorded a duet called Broken for the film The Punisher. The relationship ended painfully around 2005. Morgan was struggling with substances, and Amy said the breakup dragged on for a long time. She finally packed some things, left Los Angeles, rented a house in Florida and wrote Call Me When You're Sober in one rush. When the song reached radio in 2006, Morgan announced he was entering rehab. Amy confirmed the song was about him. Morgan said it made him look like the villain to millions of people, but chose not to answer it in song.[1] [2] [3]

The Open Door was written with Terry Balsamo over about eighteen months, and Amy called it the freest process of her life. Then disaster struck. In October 2005, just after finishing his guitar parts, Balsamo suffered a stroke caused by a torn artery in his neck, which paralysed the left side of his body. He had no health insurance, and Amy said it took around twelve hours to get him a scan. Doctors doubted he would play again. He retrained his hand through physical therapy, and eleven months later he was rehearsing for the world tour, calling the road itself his therapy. Amy spent the night of the stroke in his guest room, praying.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Some of the new songs had an unusual history. Lacrymosa, built on Mozart's Requiem, Amy's favourite piece of music since she saw Amadeus, started life as music she wrote for the 2005 film The Chronicles of Narnia, which the studio turned down. She said it was rejected for being too dark. The album also held Like You, a song for her lost sister, and ended with Good Enough, the first happy song she had ever written. The Open Door came out in early October 2006 and entered the Billboard 200 at number one, selling about four hundred and forty seven thousand copies in its first week. Call Me When You're Sober reached the American top ten.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The line up kept shifting. Bassist Will Boyd left in 2006, saying he did not want another big tour and wanted to be near his family, and guitarist Tim McCord switched to bass to replace him. In May 2007 John LeCompt announced he had been fired by phone and that drummer Rocky Gray was quitting too. Amy said the two had never liked the new music and stayed on for the money. They were replaced by Will Hunt and Troy McLawhorn of the band Dark New Day. In the middle of all this, in May 2007, Amy married Josh Hartzler, the therapist whose question had inspired Bring Me to Life, in her parents' garden during a break in the tour.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Falling back in love with the band

When The Open Door tour finished in December 2007, Amy told the band she needed to stop. She did not know if it was the end, or if she might simply go and have children. She spent about eighteen months living a normal life, painting, listening to folk and indie music, and taking harp lessons. Troy McLawhorn went off to play guitar with Seether, Shaun Morgan's band. When Amy's attempts at solo music did not quite work, she realised she missed Evanescence. In November 2009 the band played a surprise show in New York that sold out in five minutes, followed by a festival in São Paulo, and she said she fell back in love with it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The comeback album was not easy. Sessions in early 2010 with the producer Steve Lillywhite were electronic and stripped down, and The Roots drummer Questlove even played on one song. Then the label rejected the material. Amy said she was told none of the songs she had poured a year into were good enough, and that she was devastated and furious. She channelled the anger into what she called the band's heaviest album. For the first time, the whole band wrote together in a rehearsal room. They recorded in Nashville with producer Nick Raskulinecz, known for Foo Fighters and Alice in Chains, and Troy McLawhorn rejoined in June 2011.[1] [2] [3]

The album was simply called Evanescence, because Amy felt it was about the band itself. For the first time, her face was not on the cover, just the band's name drifting through vapour, a nod to the word's meaning. Released in October 2011, it entered the Billboard 200 at number one with about a hundred and twenty seven thousand copies, their second chart topping album. The world tour that followed took them from Rock in Rio to Japan, the Middle East and Africa. That December they performed at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert. The tour ended at London's Wembley Arena in November 2012, and the band announced a long break.[1] [2] [3]

The break turned into a fight over money and control. In late 2013, Wind up sold its back catalogue, including all of Evanescence's recordings, to the Bicycle Music Company. In January 2014 news broke that Amy had sued Wind up, claiming around one point five million dollars in unpaid royalties and accusing the label of undermining the band. The case was settled, and Amy said she signed an agreement not to speak negatively about it. In March 2014 she announced that, for the first time in thirteen years, she and Evanescence were free and independent. That July, she and Josh Hartzler welcomed their son, Jack Lion.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Independence, orchestras and grief

In August 2015 the band announced that Terry Balsamo, Amy's main writing partner for a decade, was leaving. Amy said they stood united that it was the right thing, and wished him health and love. His replacement was a German guitarist and singer from Stuttgart named Jen Majura, recommended by Testament's Alex Skolnick. Amy said she played like a supervillain and sang like an angel, and she was the first other woman in the band. On the twenty first of November 2015 Evanescence played Ozzfest Japan near Tokyo, their first show in three years. Meanwhile Amy was busy scoring films, recording cover songs, and making a children's album with her father and sisters.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2017 the band finally released the demo CD Origin as part of a vinyl box set, after Amy had resisted for thirteen years. She called it like an embarrassing old diary, but said she could finally see why fans loved it. Then came Synthesis, released that November on BMG. It rebuilt old songs with a full orchestra and electronic beats instead of guitars, plus two new songs. It was co produced by Amy and a programmer who happens to share the drummer's name, William B. Hunt. On the Synthesis tour the band played with a different local orchestra in every city, something Amy had dreamed of since childhood.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In January 2018, during the Synthesis era, Amy's younger brother Robby died at the age of twenty four after a lifetime of severe epilepsy. Amy had been the American chair of an epilepsy awareness charity called Out of the Shadows since 2006, partly because of him. She said losing him changed her, that grief is not something you get over but something you learn to live with. The new song Imperfection, written from the point of view of someone left behind after a suicide, became more special to her after his death. She also said the band had been through other losses in those years, including the death of a child in bassist Tim McCord's family.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A cover song pulled the band back into making original music. In 2019 Amy recorded Fleetwood Mac's The Chain for the trailer of the video game Gears 5, then got the band to cut a full version together. It topped Billboard's rock digital song sales chart. In January 2020 they went into the studio with Nick Raskulinecz again to record a few heavy songs, planning to finish the album piece by piece with different producers. A European tour with the Dutch band Within Temptation was booked for that spring. Then the pandemic arrived, the tour was postponed again and again, and Amy decided that 2020 would be the band's creative year.[1] [2] [3]

The bitter truth

The Bitter Truth was made in lockdown. The American members met in Nashville, living in tour buses or a shared house after testing, while Jen Majura recorded her parts from Germany. Some songs dated back to the sessions for the 2010 album. The first single, Wasted on You, arrived in April 2020 with a video the members filmed on their own phones at home. Another single, Use My Voice, featured guest voices including Lzzy Hale, Taylor Momsen, Sharon den Adel and Lindsey Stirling, and was used to encourage Americans to vote. The album finally arrived on the twenty sixth of March 2021, their first record of all new songs in a decade.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Amy said Use My Voice was inspired by Chanel Miller, the sexual assault survivor whose court statement in the Stanford case moved her deeply. She told NPR that she had fought for years just to be recognised as the songwriter, because people assumed the men standing behind her were the brains. She called that fight exhausting, and part of the reason Evanescence had not released albums every couple of years. She also looked back on the Christian marketing of Fallen and said the label had used religion as a sales tool against her wishes. For the first time, she began speaking openly about politics and social justice, saying human rights mattered more than the popularity of her band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The touring that followed was stop and start. A run with Halestorm in late 2021 had its final shows pushed into January after several Covid cases in Evanescence's camp. In February 2022 the video for Bring Me to Life, filmed in Romania nearly two decades earlier, passed one billion views on YouTube. That May the band parted ways with Jen Majura. Tim McCord moved back to guitar, his original instrument, and Emma Anzai, bassist and co founder of the Australian band Sick Puppies, joined on bass and backing vocals. In November 2022, after four postponements, the Worlds Collide tour with Within Temptation finally went ahead across Europe.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The next year showed how far the band had come. Evanescence toured North America with Muse, played Rock am Ring in Germany, and returned to Download in England, drawing what was reported as the biggest crowd ever at its second stage. In October 2023, at the Allianz Parque stadium in São Paulo, they played the biggest solo show of their career. Fallen turned twenty, and the band released a rap free demo of Bring Me to Life to mark it. By 2022 the band had sold an estimated thirty one point nine million albums, making them one of the best selling hard rock and metal acts in history.[1] [2]

Afterlife and Sanctuary

In March 2025 Evanescence released Afterlife, written for Netflix's animated series Devil May Cry. Amy had never seen the franchise, but the show's composer Mako sent her a track, she watched the first season, and co wrote the song with him. The series creator Adi Shankar said Evanescence was the only band that could fit. Afterlife went to number one on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Airplay chart in July 2025, the band's first ever number one there. It came twenty two years after Bring Me to Life first entered that chart, the longest wait for any group. It also became their first number one on the Rock and Alternative Airplay chart.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Amy was suddenly everywhere. In May 2025 she sang Hand That Feeds with Halsey, a lifelong fan who had dressed as Amy on the Fallen cover, for the John Wick spin off film Ballerina, and the song topped a Billboard rock chart before the film opened. The band recorded Fight Like a Girl with K Flay for the same film's end credits. In September Amy joined Spiritbox singer Courtney LaPlante and the singer Poppy on a song called End of You. Late that year the band supported Metallica in Australia, and in December they played Afterlife at The Game Awards in Los Angeles, with pyrotechnics and scenes from the show on giant screens.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In April 2026 the band released Who Will You Follow and announced their sixth album, Sanctuary. It came out on the fifth of June 2026 on BMG, produced by Jordan Fish, formerly of Bring Me the Horizon, alongside Zakk Cervini and Nick Raskulinecz. It was Emma Anzai's first album with the band. Amy said it had taken more than three years and had been her outlet for everything that felt wrong and out of control. She told Kerrang she did not want to be a political voice but felt forced to respond to the turmoil in America. Critics called it heavier and more electronic. It debuted at number thirty eight in America and number ten in Britain.[1] [2] [3]

As of 2026 the line up is Amy Lee, guitarists Troy McLawhorn and Tim McCord, bassist Emma Anzai and drummer Will Hunt. The Sanctuary world tour began in West Palm Beach, Florida on the eleventh of June 2026, with Spiritbox, Poppy, Nova Twins and K Flay opening on various dates, and it included a homecoming show in North Little Rock. The European leg began in Leeds that September. More than two decades on, Evanescence is often credited with opening rock radio to women's voices, and artists from Lzzy Hale to Halsey and Doja Cat have cited Amy as an influence. The girl who wanted to be Mozart ended up building her own world instead.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

The people around Evanescence

Amy Lee and Ben Moody. They met at a youth camp at thirteen and fourteen and built Evanescence as a duo, but by their own accounts they wrote apart and clashed over control and commercial direction. Moody quit mid tour in 2003, Amy accused him of abuse, and he later apologised in a long public statement. He says he then handed over his half of the band name without a fight.[1] [2] [3]

Amy Lee and Josh Hartzler. Hartzler, a therapist, was a new acquaintance when he asked Amy in a restaurant if she was happy, the question that inspired Bring Me to Life. He also partly inspired Good Enough. They married in May 2007 in her parents' garden, and their son Jack was born in 2014. She calls him the supportive husband who does the dishes.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Amy Lee and Shaun Morgan. The Seether singer and Amy dated from 2003 to 2005 and sang a duet for The Punisher soundtrack. Their breakup was long and painful, and his struggles with substances fed directly into Call Me When You're Sober. He complained the song cast him as the villain, while she said she wished him well in his recovery.[1] [2]

Amy Lee and Terry Balsamo. Balsamo stepped in from the band Cold when Moody quit and became Amy's writing partner for The Open Door and the self titled album. He taught her Pantera and she taught him classical music. She stood by him through his 2005 stroke, refusing to tour without him. He left in 2015, returning once on stage in 2019.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Amy Lee and Wind up Records. Diana Meltzer signed the band after hearing My Immortal, but the relationship with Wind up soured. The label forced a rapper onto the first single, used an old demo against Amy's wishes, marketed them to Christian stores, and later rejected a whole album. In 2014 Amy sued for about one and a half million dollars in royalties and walked away independent.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Amy Lee and David Hodges. Hodges joined around 1999 as keyboard player and string arranger, and Ben Moody called him his musical soul mate. He left before Fallen came out but still shared its two Grammys. He went on to write hits like A Thousand Years for Christina Perri, and in 2007 publicly defended Amy against her former touring musicians.[1] [2] [3]

Amy Lee and Paul McCoy. The 12 Stones singer was the label's choice for the male voice on Bring Me to Life, a part Amy wrote for him. She once felt the rap made them sound like someone else, and later dropped it live. Yet she says she has great love for McCoy, and in 2019 he joined them on stage in New Orleans to sing it again.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Amy Lee and John LeCompt and Rocky Gray. Moody's friends LeCompt and Gray were hired as touring players for Fallen and treated as full members. Their exit in 2007 was bitter, with LeCompt saying he was fired without warning and Amy saying they never liked the music. In 2009 both joined Ben Moody in a new band called We Are the Fallen.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Amy Lee and Dave Fortman. The former Ugly Kid Joe guitarist produced Fallen and The Open Door. He remembers his engineer's jaw dropping the first time Amy sang in the booth, and credits her with inspiring a generation of symphonic bands. In 2017 she joined Ugly Kid Joe on stage in Belgium to sing Cats in the Cradle.[1] [2]

Amy Lee and Nick Raskulinecz. The Nashville producer, known for Alice in Chains and Foo Fighters, rescued the self titled album after the Lillywhite sessions were scrapped, produced The Bitter Truth alone when the pandemic hit, and worked on Afterlife and Sanctuary. Amy said she trusts his opinion because he makes great records and helps her decide quickly.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Amy Lee and Halsey. Halsey grew up wearing an Evanescence shirt until it fell apart and recreated the Fallen cover when dressing as her heroes. In 2025 the two sang Hand That Feeds for the film Ballerina, which topped a Billboard rock chart before the film even opened. Halsey called Amy her original dark rock queen.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Evanescence

• Watching Amadeus as a child made Amy try playing piano upside down with her hands crossed, like the actor playing Mozart. Her grandmother showed her the film at eight. Amy has confirmed she wanted to be a classical composer by eleven, and that she copied Tom Hulce's upside down, cross handed trick from the movie.[1] [2]
• Before choosing Evanescence, Amy and Ben tried out the names Childish Intentions and Stricken. They wanted a word that seemed to come out of nowhere. Evanescence, meaning a fading away, struck them as beautiful and elusive.[1]
• The band's very first EP, released in 1998, was pressed in a run of only about a hundred copies. They sold it at their rare early shows. Ben Moody later joked that the early CDs were just a way to raise money for pizza.[1] [2]
• After Fallen took off, the old Origin demo CD was selling for around four hundred dollars on eBay. Amy and Ben publicly told fans to download the demos for free instead, and Amy warned about a seller passing it off as their first album.[1] [2]
• Ben Moody said he slept in the back of a pickup truck while waiting for Amy to finish high school. He wrote that he maxed out credit cards to buy recording gear, then lost his apartment with David Hodges when he could not pay the bills.[1]
• Evanescence did not play a proper plugged in gig until January 1999, almost five years after forming. The show was at a Little Rock bar called Vinos on the second of January, just after Amy turned seventeen. Before that they mostly recorded at home.[1]
• The strings on Fallen were recorded in Seattle partly because non union players there were cheaper. Producer Dave Fortman joked that had they known how big the album would be, they would simply have recorded in Los Angeles. The album cost around a quarter of a million dollars.[1]
• The version of My Immortal on Fallen was recorded late at night at the radio station where Amy's father worked. They could not afford a real studio session, so they used the empty station and a MIDI keyboard. The label loved the raw demo and insisted on it.[1] [2]
• Amy says the piano part of My Immortal turned out to be in the wrong key, on an out of tune piano. Ben had played her a droning idea on the piano. She took it home, worked hard on a proper piano part, then realised the key was off. They liked it anyway.[1]
• Sean Combs, then known as P. Diddy, once told Amy at an awards show that he worked out to Fallen. Amy said the encounter left her baffled that he even knew who she was. She described feeling like an imposter who had sneaked into the Grammys.[1]
• Josh Freese, later of Foo Fighters, played drums on some of Fallen's songs as a session musician. Evanescence at the time was really just Amy, Ben and keyboard player David Hodges, so hired players covered drums and bass in the studio.[1] [2]
• The Bring Me to Life video was shot in Romania over about seventeen hours, and Amy did her own stunts. Director Philipp Stölzl said he expected to use a stunt double, but Amy hung from Paul McCoy's arm for hours herself. The video later passed a billion YouTube views.[1] [2]
• When Fallen was pulled from Christian stores, it was sitting at number one on Billboard's Contemporary Christian albums chart. The distributor told shops they could return Evanescence product for full credit, and the band's music was removed from later Christian charts.[1]
• On their 2003 European shows with Korn, Evanescence were meant to headline, but Amy insisted Korn go on last. Korn were one of her influences. In 2007 she sang Freak on a Leash with them on MTV Unplugged, and the bands later co headlined tours together.[1] [2]
• The Anywhere but Home DVD hides a bonus Bring Me to Life performance behind a thorn on its menu screen. Selecting the biggest thorn on the left of the menu reveals footage from the 2003 Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas.[1]
• A Maryland couple sued Walmart over a single swear word in Evanescence's live album. The word appeared in the band's cover of Korn's Thoughtless, and the album had no parental advisory sticker. The settlement let Maryland buyers get refunds.[1]
• In Johnny Cash's video for God's Gonna Cut You Down, Amy wears a velvet coat that belonged to Tim Burton. Each celebrity chose their own action for the 2006 video. Amy chose to lay flowers on a grave, filmed at Trinity Church in Manhattan.[1]
• Amy designed the dress she wore to the 2004 Grammys and had Japanese designer H. Naoto make it. She designs many of her own stage clothes, including those in the Going Under video and the dress on The Open Door cover.[1]
• The song Weight of the World features a music box and toy piano Amy had kept since childhood. It was written about the pressure of fans expecting her to solve their problems. She said she is not a therapist and does not have all the answers.[1]
• Amy wrote the chorus of Lithium on guitar at sixteen and only finished the song years later on piano. She liked the chorus but never used it until The Open Door, when she added verses on piano. She used the word as a metaphor for numbness.[1]
• Your Star was inspired by a night in Lisbon when Amy, jet lagged and lonely on tour, could not see any stars. It came from the loneliness of touring Fallen. She also cited Pantera as a musical inspiration for the song.[1]
• Terry Balsamo had a guest room at Amy's house that she had painted pink and called the princess room. On the night of his stroke, she slept in that room, played Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and stayed up praying for him.[1]
• Before Cold and Evanescence, Terry Balsamo briefly played guitar in an early line up of Limp Bizkit. The run was in the mid 1990s in his home city of Jacksonville, Florida. He joined Cold in 1999.[1]
• Fallen's song Tourniquet is a reworked cover of a Christian death metal band's song, co written by drummer Rocky Gray. The original, My Tourniquet by Soul Embraced, is about the Christian debate over suicide. Amy wrote a new melody and a second verse.[1] [2]
• Questlove of The Roots played drums on a song from Evanescence's scrapped 2010 sessions. The track was called You Got a Lot to Learn. The label rejected those Steve Lillywhite sessions, though three songs were later reworked for the self titled album.[1] [2]
• Evanescence has had two Will Hunts, a drummer and a programmer, and both have played on stage together. Drummer Will Hunt joined in 2007. Programmer William B. Hunt co produced Synthesis, and on that tour he added electronic drums beside his namesake.[1] [2] [3]
• The self titled 2011 album was the first Evanescence cover not to show Amy's face. It shows the band's name in drifting vapour, a play on the word's meaning. Amy said fans knew who they were by then.[1]
• Drummer Will Hunt once filled in for Tommy Lee in Mötley Crüe when Lee had tendinitis. That was in 2008. Hunt has also played with Black Label Society, Staind and Static X, and in 2025 he covered for Godsmack's drummer on a European tour.[1]
• Afterlife ended a twenty two year wait for Evanescence's first number one on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart. It was the longest such wait for any group. Bring Me to Life had peaked there at only number eleven back in 2003.[1] [2]
• Fallen was one of only eight albums in Billboard history to spend at least a year in the top fifty. It logged well over a hundred weeks on the Billboard 200 and was eventually certified diamond in the United States.[1] [2]
• Evanescence's new bassist Emma Anzai co founded Sick Puppies after arguing with a classmate over a double booked school music room. She and Shimon Moore both wanted the room at their Sydney high school, then bonded over Silverchair. She still plays in Sick Puppies.[1]
• Amy still keeps the dolls from her teenage attic bedroom in her studio as mascots. She said they remind her of how everything looked when it all began. The posters of Pearl Jam and Kurt Cobain are long gone.[1]
• Amy originally wanted Going Under, not Bring Me to Life, as the band's first single. She feared people would hear the rap on Bring Me to Life and think it was the band's real sound, and was relieved when Going Under was accepted.[1] [2]
• Amy's first song with lyrics, A Single Tear, was written for an eighth grade school assignment. She recorded it on a cassette, playing guitar while a friend from choir sang backing vocals. Her first composition was an instrumental written at eleven.[1]
• On the Synthesis tour, Evanescence played with a different local orchestra in almost every city. Each night's orchestra rehearsed that day. Amy said it felt like standing in the middle of a movie score, something she had dreamed of as a girl.[1] [2] [3]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.