Amy Lee, the Evanescence singer still outrunning the rap verse her label forced on her

Amy Lee

Photo: Justin Higuchi / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 13, 1981 Riverside
Occupation	Singer
Awards	Grammy Award for Best New Artist · Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance · NMPA Songwriter Icon Award · Revolver Golden Gods Award for Best Vocalist · Hollywood Music in Media Award for Best Original Song in an Independent Film

The song that made Amy Lee famous has a man in it she never wanted there. Her record label would only release Evanescence’s debut if a male voice carried part of the lead single, so a rap verse was written into Bring Me to Life and handed to a singer from another band on the same roster. The track crossed the world, its video has passed a billion views on YouTube, and the verse has followed her ever since, filing the band under a nu metal moment she never felt part of. Much of what Lee has done since reads as a patient correction: a pianist raised on Mozart building a rock band around her own voice, then fighting, contract by contract, to own it.

Amy Lynn Lee was born on December 13, 1981, in Riverside, California, the eldest of five children of a disc jockey father. The family moved often before settling in Little Rock, Arkansas. When she was six, a younger sister died at the age of three of an illness that was never identified. Lee has said the loss changed her whole perception of life, and she later wrote Hello on Fallen and Like You on The Open Door for her.

The piano came first. She asked for lessons after hearing her mother play, studied classical repertoire for nine years and found Mozart at eight through the film Amadeus. Film scores, grunge, industrial music and Björk followed. She remembers noticing that a fast passage of Bach sounded close to heavy metal, and the idea of welding opposite worlds together stayed with her.

At 13, at a Christian youth camp, she met the guitarist Ben Moody. They played bookstores and coffee houses around Little Rock and recorded two independent EPs and a demo, Origin. Lee enrolled at Middle Tennessee State University to study composition for film scoring and left after one semester to work on the band full time.

Wind-up Records signed Evanescence in 2001 and kept them in Los Angeles for almost two years. Executives then refused to release the album unless the duo hired a full-time male co-vocalist. They refused and drove home to Little Rock; weeks later the compromise arrived, a male rapper on the lead single only. Paul McCoy of 12 Stones sang the part Lee wrote for him, and she wanted Going Under released first. Rock radio was hostile anyway. Wind-up’s president later recalled programmers asking, “A chick and a piano? Are you kidding? On rock radio?” The song broke through the soundtrack of Daredevil, reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent four weeks at No. 1 in the UK. Fallen, released in March 2003, stayed 104 weeks on the Billboard 200 and has sold more than 17 million copies worldwide. In February 2004 Evanescence won the Grammy for Best New Artist and the Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance for Bring Me to Life.

The canonized version of that era, a gothic girl fronting a nu metal band, leaves out how little of it Lee chose. Wind-up also marketed the album to Christian retail, a strategy she says she opposed from the start because it sold listeners something that was not true; after Lee and Moody said in an April 2003 interview that Evanescence was not a Christian band, the company recalled Fallen from Christian stores. Moody walked out in the middle of the tour that October, citing creative differences, and later admitted he had run the partnership in a “way-too-controlling manner.” She has never accepted either the goth or the nu metal tag and prefers to call the music alternative. The less comfortable truth for the band is that its biggest commercial moment remains the record she had the least control over, and two decades of better-argued albums have not moved that marker.

What followed was hers. After ten months of isolation, painting and therapy, Lee wrote The Open Door with guitarist Terry Balsamo, including Lacrymosa, built on the movement of Mozart’s Requiem she calls her favourite piece of music. It sold 447,000 copies in its first US week in October 2006 and gave the band its first No. 1 album. When Wind-up rejected a new album produced by Steve Lillywhite in 2010, she was, in her words, angry enough to write the band’s heaviest record; the self-titled Evanescence also opened at No. 1 in October 2011, the first written collectively by the band.

In January 2014 Lee sued Wind-up for $1.5 million in unpaid royalties; the case was settled, and in March she announced, “Today, for the first time in 13 years, I am a free and independent artist.” The freedom went into side work: Aftermath, a film score written with composer Dave Eggar, and Dream Too Much, a family album recorded with her father and sisters after the birth of her son in July 2014. Synthesis in 2017 rebuilt old songs for orchestra and electronics and took a live orchestra on tour for the first time. In 2018 her brother Robby died at 24 after a life of severe epilepsy, a cause she has long supported. The Bitter Truth, released in March 2021, carried that grief.

Her guest list explains why younger heavy artists treat her as a reference rather than a relic. She has sung with Korn, Lindsey Stirling and Bring Me the Horizon. In 2025 Hand That Feeds, recorded with Halsey for the film Ballerina, topped Billboard’s Hot Rock and Alternative Songs chart, and End of You paired her with Poppy and Spiritbox singer Courtney LaPlante. That November Evanescence opened six stadium shows for Metallica in Australia and New Zealand, the band’s first stadium run.

Sanctuary, the sixth studio album, arrived on June 5, 2026, through BMG, produced by Jordan Fish, Zakk Cervini and Nick Raskulinecz and the first to feature bassist Emma Anzai. It gathers Afterlife, from the Netflix series Devil May Cry, and Who Will You Follow, which reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Rock and Alternative Airplay chart. The charts were modest, No. 38 in the US and No. 10 in the UK, while the stage told another story: a world tour opened in West Palm Beach on June 11 with Spiritbox, Poppy, K.Flay and Nova Twins in support and moved into arenas across the UK and Europe in September.

The 2026 run closes at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado on October 26. Lee then takes Sanctuary to arenas in Australia and New Zealand, opening in Perth on March 5, 2027, and ending in Auckland on March 20, still singing every night a song that carries a verse she never asked for.

Tags: singers, rock, Evanescence, Sanctuary, Amy Lee, Ben Moody

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