Trivia / Evanescence

• Black Sheep Hit:
  • "Bring Me to Life" is their most famous song by far, yet it's different from all their other songs as it's the only one to feature male vocals. (Unless we count "Lies" from their Origin era, or the unreleased track "Before the Dawn".)
  • Their second biggest hit, "My Immortal", is a piano ballad with no rock elements (except for a brief part in the climax, but that's exclusive to the "band" version).
• Celebrity Break-Up Song: Amy Lee stated that "Call Me When You're Sober" is largely about her ex-boyfriend Shaun Morgan, of Seether. It's unclear if Seether's song "Breakdown" is about Morgan's relationship with Lee, or a different ex-girlfriend.
• Content Leak:
  • Evanescence suffered a truly massive one shortly after Fallen came out. Aside from the self-released Evanescence EP, Sound Aleep EP, and Origin being shared on the internet (which Ben eventually encouraged to combat the insanely-priced auctions of physical copies, authentic or otherwise), a massive amount of unreleased demos, old outtakes and pre-master versions was also leaked onto the web. These include outtakes from the EPs and Origin, several demo versions of songs that ended up on Fallen, and even completely unreleased ones written and pre-produced during the same session, between 2001 and 2002.
  • Both The Open Door and Evanescence were leaked a good month ahead of the official release date.
  • In 2007, a pre-special effects version of the "Good Enough" video was leaked.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Amy Lee is not fond of doing "My Immortal" live.
  • Or the music video for "Everybody's Fool".
  • She has all but called "Origin" and all the pre-"Fallen" songs an Old Shame.
  • She wasn't happy about the male vocals for "Bring Me To Life" at first, but has since become used to it. It's worth noting that after 2007 when John Lecompt left, none of the guitarists sing Paul's lines anymore. The reworked version also leaves his lines out.
    • When she no longer had to pay lip service to Wind-Up, she downright said she had hated them with a passion all along, though she does not project this onto Paul himself, as she holds nothing against him.
  • To a lesser extent, from the interviews you get this impression of whatever the current latest album is as soon as Amy is working on, or about to release new material. Until she warms up to it again, that is.
• Creator Breakdown: "Hello" and "Like You" were inspired by the death of Amy Lee's little sister, whose name is not provided out of respect, when she was just a child and have never been performed live for her fans.
• Development Hell:
  • The band's 3rd album was supposed to be released Autumn 2010. Due to genuine creativity problems with what it was going to sound like the original Electronic / Folk influences were erased to a point and recording company issues.
  • Amy has stated since that the self titled album only features 3 songs from the original submitted album, and its sound was mostly born out of anger over their work being wasted. Now that they've left Wind Up, Amy says they might release it independently.
  • "The Bitter Truth" was actually planned at a decent pace after the promotion for Synthesis, but then got hit with a 6 month delay anyway because the COVID-19 Pandemic hit early on in production scuppering plans to work with a lot of producers, and Jen Majura was stuck in Germany so she had to record her parts remotely.
• Dye Hard: At this point, it's hard to imagine Amy without her long, jet black hair, but naturally it would be a medium brown. Ever since Fallen came out, she's only sported it natural for some time around 2013, then she briefly went redhead before reverting to her iconic black.
• Executive Meddling: Oh boy. They got this over and over again while under Wind-Up.
  • Before "Fallen" was even recorded, they were almost dropped by the label when Wind-Up tried to force them to include a permanent male rapper to make them a Distaff Counterpart to Linkin Park, and they refused. A compromise was eventually reached with the inclusion of a guest rapper on "Bring Me To Life". Unsurprisingly, Amy Lee decided to drop the rap altogether in live performances starting in 2011, and the re-recorded version from "Synthesis" doesn't include it either. The so-called "Bliss Mix", the "Fallen" version minus the rap, was released as a b-side on the "Bring Me To Life" single.
  • The band intended for "Going Under" to be their debut single, but the label pushed it back to release "Bring Me To Life" first. In hindsight, it proved a very good move.
  • Similarly, Amy Lee wanted "Imaginary" as the fourth single, but the label decided for "Everybody's Fool" instead.
  • The label scrapped the version of "My Immortal" the band had intended for "Fallen"^note The so-called "Mystary version", released on the very limited "Mystary EP", and had the version from "Origin" reworked with added strings instead. The song was Changed for the Video with the "Band Version", which is more similar to the one the band had intended all along.
  • Surprisingly averted with "The Open Door", which was largely left alone thanks to the surprising sale figues of "Fallen" giving the band enough leverage, and Amy Lee fighting tooth and nail at every step to get her way. That didn't stop the label from retaliating with a very spotty promotion.
  • Turned up to eleven with the third album, with the label basically scapping the whole project an having the bend rewrite the album from scratch; see Development Hell above.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: In a 2003 radio interview, Amy and Moody basically gave fans free rein to do so for their pre-"Fallen" material, in response to a question regarding the insane prices physical copies of the older records were fetching on eBay. They made it clear that they didn't see a dime of any of that money, since the records were no longer being sold officially, and so it wasn't worth the hassle for fans to buy them if they could just be downloaded for free. Some of these older records were later re-released for limited-edition vinyl boxsets, though fansites continue to allow for download links to be posted.
• No Export for You: The CD single for "Sweet Sacrifice" was only released in Germany.
• Recycled Script:
  • The intro for "Even in Death" uses a sample from White Zombie's "Ratfinks, Suicide Tanks and Cannibal Girls". This was recycled for "Snow White Queen", but slower and with a lower pitch.
  • In 2006, rumours surfaced that "Together Again", aka "The Narnia Song", had been hacked and repurposed as the lengthy piano intro for "Good Enough". Amy Lee later clarified that she wrote the intro indipendendly from "Together Again" and, in hindsight, she decided "Good Enough" was a better fit for it. "Together Again" was eventually released as a charity single, still perfectly intact.
  • A live version of "Exodus" played in 1998 featured lyrics that would end up being used as the whispered lines in "Missing" in 2003.
  • The vocal melody of the chorus of "Lacrymosa" and its juxtapoition with the choir from Mozart's "Lacrimosa" were borrowed from the pre-chorus of the unreleased pre-Fallen demo "Anything For You".
• Screwed by the Network: Well, the music label. The promotion for "The Open Door" was at several points hindered by Wind-Up (not helped by the band's ongoing internal drama), to the point of a partial cancellation of the third single, "Sweet Sacrifice", and a total one for the fourth, "Good Enough", despite both of them receiving music videos.
  • Also what would have been the band's third album. See Executive Meddling above.
• What Could Have Been:
  • ThatVideoMakingKid's Youtube account features lyric videos for nearly every version of nearly all of Evanescence's songs, including the original demo versions of many of the band's older songs, such as "Haunted" and "Imaginary".
  • "Lacrymosa" was originally written to be a part of the movie soundtrack of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but Disney rejected the song on the basis that it was "too dark". "Together Again" was also reportedly written for the movie, and was for some time even nicknamed "The Narnia Song" by the band and fans.
    • The story is actually a bit murkier than that: the producers of the movie have always denied to have ever approached either Amy Lee or Evanescence as a whole to write music for the score or soundtrack.
  • Before Evanescence became their band name, other names considered were Childish Intentions, Stricken, Halo Machine and For the Fallen. Amy said also that her brother suggested The Suffocating Wolves, while her sister wanted The Levitating Penguins.
  • Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park was approached for collaboration but he turned them down.

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