Amy & Will (former Bassist), plus some other dude dancing/rocking to Britney's "Baby One More Time" unfortunately it's not the original song but a cover...
It’s been nearly four years since Evanescence wrapped the tour in support of their last album, The Open Door. In that time, singer Amy Lee has been hard at work doing anything but fronting a globally successful rock act. Sure, she wrote some songs along the way, but mostly, her focus was on being, as she puts it, “a normal person.” And, yes, she enjoyed every minute of it.
“I would buy groceries, I thought about teaching kids music … I just needed to get away from it. My entire adult life, until a couple years ago, was all about this,” she told MTV News. “When I just turned 18, I got signed. I quit college, and we just moved into a house together and just started cramming to do whatever we needed to do to make it. And then we went to L.A., and the label had us up there doing artist development for a couple years, and then we were on tour and it went big fast, and then right after touring behind Fallen, we started writing again right away. … I just wanted to be a normal person for a minute, before I was 50 years old.
“I got married and we were in the middle of a tour — I had, like, one week off, and then we went straight back on tour — and there was plenty of stuff that went on in that time; there was drama … there’s always freaking drama,” she continued. “So we get towards the end of it, and I was like, ‘Guys, I don’t know about this. I need a break.’ I just wanted to be normal; I didn’t want to think about the next thing for as long as it took.”
And considering how hard she worked at avoiding Evanescence, it’s ironic that all it took was a single show with the band — a 2009 warm-up gig for a headlining spot at the Maquinária festival in Brazil — to remind her of just how much she missed her former life. And from that moment on, things changed.
“I had to get back together with all the guys, and we practiced all the old stuff, getting a set together, and I enjoyed it so much. I started falling back in love with … that part of me, the Evanescence part,” she said. “I’d kind of been doing everything else, writing-wise, by myself, and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I love this stuff too. Maybe we should all make a record!’ ”
So, recharged, Evanescence did just that, heading to Blackbird Studio in Nashville to work with producer Nick Raskulinecz on the follow-up to The Open Door. They’ve nearly finished — Lee said there are currently 16 songs at or near completion — and earlier this week, their longtime label, Wind-up Records announced that the album would be hitting stores October 4.
Lee told MTV News that the new album will be self-titled, a decision that’s not only symbolic, but an all-out statement too.
“It’s about the band; it’s more of a band record. But I started thinking about it, and it’s also that this whole record and the lyrical content and a lot of the things that it’s about to me is about falling back in love with this thing, with Evanescence, with what I’ve obsessed over for a decade, longer than that,” she said. “And it took me a minute, I definitely stepped away from it in a big way, and went, ‘OK, guys, I don’t know what we’re going to do. I don’t know what’s going to happen here. Let’s just live our lives for a while and see what happens next.’ ”
And while it’s difficult for Lee to describe just how the new songs sound (“It’s epic, it’s dark, it’s big, it’s beautiful … all of those things,” she laughed), she knows exactly how they make her feel — and after such a long time away from the group, that’s more important to her than anything else.
“There’s a huge body of work right now, 16 songs, and obviously not all of them can be on the record, and that’s going to be a heartbreaking moment. But, for me, when I listen to them, it’s a journey,” she said. “It takes you on an emotional ride … it takes you to a lot of different places, emotionally. It makes me feel really happy, because even the songs that are desperate, like, those desperate feelings were turned into something beautiful and productive and great. There’s songs that are painful, but listening to them makes me feel so good, because I took that pain and made it out of it by using music as an outlet and turning it into something great, moving on with my life, being productive instead of sitting around in a rut.”
Muppets: The Green Album Tracklist(hits stores August 23rd)
01. OK Go – Muppet Show Theme
02. Weezer and Paramore’s Hayley Williams – Rainbow Connection
03. The Fray – Mahna Mahna
04. Alkaline Trio – Moving Right Along
05. My Morning Jacket – Our World 06. Amy Lee – Halfway Down the Stairs
07. Sondre Lerche – Mr. Bassman
08. The Airborne Toxic Event – Wishing Song
09. Atreyu’s Brandon Saller and Good Charlotte’s Billy Martin – Night Life
10. Andrew Bird – Bein’ Green
11. Matt Nathanson – I Hope That Something Better Comes Along
12. Rachael Yamagata – I’m Going to Go Back There Someday Source
Imma watch Anywhere But Home tonight.
I still remember when I got it for Christmas
The epic BTS was the first thing I watched. Amy drunk & Terry rapping on the bus
Amy Lee is having a hard time talking about Evanescence's upcoming album, partially because she's out of practice — it's been a while since the band's frontwoman has had to run the press gauntlet, after all — but mostly because she keeps using words like "fun" to describe it. And even she realizes how odd that seems.
"I can't give a good quote about it, because it's probably the heaviest record we've ever done, but we're having a great time making it," the singer said, laughing. "I don't want to say the word 'fun,' but it is ... it's totally fun. We're just going for it. So I don't want to say that it's 'expressing the pain of a thousand sorrows,' because it's not that. I mean, it's just more mature; it's just a great record. It's hard to sum it up."
Of course, she's quick to add that "fun" doesn't necessarily mean "silly or poppy." "It doesn't translate right ... I'm having fun; we're all having fun," she explained, "And there are moments where you can hear that."
But Lee will be the first one to admit that, when Evanescence return in October with their first album in five years, they'll be a very different beast indeed. Case in point: the first single, which, though she won't reveal the title, is one she feels comfortable describing as a definite departure for the band.
"It's really different for us. It doesn't sound like any Evanescence track you've heard before," she said. "It's heavy, but the melodies and stuff, I feel like I just did what I wanted. I just literally sang what I wanted to sing, because it was fun and it kind of made me smile, and that ended up being the really fun, cool, catchy thing that got everybody hooked on it."
And though it's different, Lee knows that there's plenty riding on the band's comeback single, which is why, even if she was smiling when she recorded it, the song's still got plenty of the band's trademark growl, too. And the same goes for the album.
"You always have to think about that. We have to go through making the decisions with the label, and see what they're going to push," she explained. "We don't get to do whatever we want all the time, so the single has to sound like a hit. But, for us, we want more than that.
"There's a lot I want to get across all at once, before I lose anybody's attention. So, the song that I think is the first single is the song that wraps it all up. It's got a cool meaning, a lot of great lyrics going on, it also just smacks you right in the face and it's heavy and it's great ... I think that there's a couple songs that meet that same criteria."
To that end, though she (accidentally) uses words like "fun" to describe it, the new Evanescence album might just be the next logical step for the band: The same themes are there, but for the first time in her career, Lee is writing about them (and herself) in new ways. At the end of the day, as has always been the case, catharsis is key.
"There are themes of brokenness, the quest for freedom, and then there's songs that are just about falling in love ... it's just all over the place," she said, laughing. "There's this beautiful song that — it's definitely going to make the album, or I will kill someone — it's not like a single or anything, it's just this epic album track that's about loss from the perspective of someone losing someone in a tragedy, and it's really cool to listen back to that, too.
"That's not something I did on The Open Door. The Open Door was all about me and my personal experiences. And there's some moments on this one that are actually taken from things that I watched go down, from my friends and stuff like that. But really, whatever makes me feel the most, that's what's on the record, because that's what I need to get off my chest."
