Today (March 26), Evanescence release The Bitter Truth their first all-new studio album in a decade. In the latest issue of Music Week, Amy Lee guides us through the return of the multi-platinum, Grammy Award-winning band.
Evanescence have a strong UK chart record. Their debut 2003 major label debut Fallen is currently on sales of 1,352,806 according to Official Charts Company data, while 2006’s The Open Door is on 356,803 and 2011’s self-titled record stands on 124,473.
In 2017, Lee told Music Week that some people might still view her as “the girl falling off the building” in the Bring Me To Life video at the height of the nu-metal era – and she is hopeful that The Bitter Truth might change that perception of the band…
“I’m so proud of our work,” she told Music Week. “I wish I could shove our new music in the faces of everybody that’s only ever heard Bring Me To Life. I really wanted to show a lot of different sides of myself, and what we can do as a group. I have an incredible group of musicians around me, and I always want to let us take it all the way and show what we can do, because I always want to feel like we’re growing. I’m very proud of the album. I wanted to show who we are now, and what we’ve been through, and what that sounds like. And I think we accomplished that.”
The Bitter Truth – released via Columbia – is being made available in multiple formats, including a CD edition that comes with a making-of snippets bonus cassette…
“I love it!” Lee told Music Week, before explaining how it came together. “Over the course of all this time, I had recorded little ideas into my voice notes, and I have ProTools so I do a lot of home recording when I’m writing and just creating – some of that turns into Evanescence stuff and some of it doesn’t. It’s this whole world of stuff that nobody hears. There was just all this audio so I just started putting clips together and marrying it together. I love listening to it. You’re hearing real moments when ideas were hatched and pieces were written, plus songs that didn’t make the album that we were jamming on.”
Amy Lee also gave her thoughts on physical music, namely that bands need to offer fans more than ever before when it comes to releases…
“I don’t think we could go 10 years without putting out an album and then not include all the extra fun stuff,” she continued. “And I plan on doing more fun stuff with it, too. I think it would be nice to make a really big book of just cool content, behind the scenes stuff, pieces of paper from composing, there’s a lot of stuff that would be cool to put into something physical. I know we have a lot of fans that have been with us for a long time, and they love collecting the extra deep cut behind-the-scenes type stuff. I’m like that too. I’m a huge Bjork fan, and I have so much cool, collectible weird stuff of hers. A lot of the artists that I’ve really loved over the years are that way.”
A lot has changed in the music industry between Evanescence’s major breakthrough in 2003 and now. Amy Lee shared her reflection on one thing she feels has very much changed for the better…
“It’s not that I’m the first woman on the moon, because many women came before me, in all genres," said Lee. "But, in the moment when Fallen came out, it really felt like I was the only girl around, at least in hard rock. When we were initially touring, bands, producers, engineers, LDs, tour managers... everything was men. And I’m not crediting myself for this, but I have watched the change from 2003 to 2021, and it has been so wonderful how it has changed for the better [with] so many badass women, all across the board. Onstage, in rock, in hard rock, in metal, also behind the scenes, it has just slowly grown to be such a more inclusive place than the old-fashioned cliched rock’n’roll boys’ club that it used to feel like. So that’s my favourite positive. And I only feel more and more empowered and inspired every time I see a woman out there, doing it, when I know that they weren’t there before.”
Interview: Eleanor Goodman
