Two days ago, Amy Lee was dying in a cemetery. “It was a shoot for the new Johnny Cash video,” she explains. “The concept is all these celebrities – Justin Timberlake, Tony Hawk, P. Diddy— dressed in black like Johnny Cash. You know, expressing the pain of the world. They said I could do whatever I wanted, so I said, ‘Why don’t I go to a cemetery and lay some flowers on a grave?’ We shot it at Trinity Church”, she says, referring to the soaring neo-Gothic cathedral three blocks from Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. “It was really creepy,” which, coming from her, is high praise.
Lee, 24, is the singer from Evanescence, the most popular goth-rock band in the world. Sitting in a park on a blindingly sunny July day, however, she couldn’t look less like a princess of darkness. She’s wearing pink shades, a purple and white stripped tank top, a flowing black skirt and flip flops, and her raven tresses are pulled back into a loose ponytail, revealing a pale, pretty face. She’s nibbling on a double meat turkey and cheese Subway sub— a foot-long, because “I’m going to save the second half for dinner,” she says. If it weren’t for the silver death’s-head pendant dangling from her neck, she could be any NYU coed lazing away a summer afternoon.
“Anyway,” she says about the video shoot, “I really wanted to wear this coat I’d just bought— long sleeve black velvet, very dramatic. But it turned out to be the hottest day of the year, like a hundred degrees. So I’m walking around in this ten pound coat buttoned all the way up, tail dragging behind me, just so, so hot. But I had to wear it— it used to belong to Tim Burton.”
She looks up from her sandwich and lets out an ironic laugh: “God. I am so goth.”
For the past three years, Lee’s life has been straight out of a Lemony Snicket novel— one unfortunate event after another. First she broke up with her boyfriend. Then her band imploded. Next came stalkers and therapy; then another breakup; a bandmate’s stroke; an alleged sexual assault and ensuing seven figure lawsuit; another bandmate’s retirement…
“It’s been an eventful couple of years,” she says, grinning and tossing crumbs to some pigeons.
Back in 2003, Evanescence were the unlikeliest success story in music. Five shaggy kids from the aptly named Little Rock, Arkansas— a town whose most famous musical export up to that point was a certain sax-blowing ex-president— the were either dismissed as a cash-in gimmick (Linkin Park with a cute chick) or ignored altogether. But then “Bring Me to Life,” a monster collision of snarling guitar riffs and Lee’s icy, ring-wraith vocals, landed on the Daredevil soundtrack, and faster than you could say “Bennifer II” they were skyrocketing to the top of the charts. Lee became an overnight icon for legions of fourteen year old girls with Emily the Strange posters on their walls and black lipstick in their purses, and Evanescence’s debut, Fallen, went on to sell 6.5 million copies, win two Grammys and park in the Top Ten for nearly a year.
But it all came crashing down in October 2003, when Ben Moody, the band’s guitarist and Lee’s co-songwriter, decided he’d had enough and quit the band mid-tour. It was a doubly painful blow for Lee; she and Moody had been best friends since 1994, when they met at a church summer camp. The pair dated briefly but eventually grew to be more like siblings— a rock and roll Pugsley and Wednesday. Lee soldiered on after the split, insisting it was a long time coming and best for everyone, but at the time she was devastated.
“I don’t hate Ben,” she says today, eyes glistening. “I just don’t ever want to speak to him again. He was truly kind of poisonous. Some people just aren’t good for you— it doesn’t mean they’re Satan, but you can’t have them in your life.” She says they haven’t spoken in nearly two and a half years, since the night of their Grammy triumph. Moody has left her a few voicemails, but she doesn’t respond. “It’s manipulative. We need to just live our separate lives.”
Lee has been staring intently at her fingernails, slowing chipping away at the dark blood-red polish. Suddenly she looks up, embarrassed. “Wow, I’m being so bad right now. I’m going to burn for it. I’m going to get a pig heart in the mail from his mother after this interview. But it’s the truth.
“Relationships are fascinating to me,” she continues. “You pour your heart into someone, share everything, and it feels so good at first. But then you realize, “I am completely vulnerable. This person can destroy me.’ That inspires me.”
If she’s right, then last winter must have been inspirational beyond belief. In late November, Lee and the band fired their longtime manager, Dennis Rider, just one album into a three album deal. When Rider sued Lee for breach of contract, seeking $10 million in damages, she struck back with a countersuit detailing exactly why he was being given the boot— and it’s a doozie. It alleges Rider “neglected Lee’s career and business and focused his efforts on having extramarital affairs… becoming intoxicated during business meetings, physically abusing women and boasting about it… and using Lee’s corporate card to purchase gifts for his mistress,” one of which was an $18,000 car. And there’s more: The suit also accuses Rider of making “overt and unwelcome sexual advances” toward Lee, including once when he “put his head in Lee’s lap and ran his hand up her leg” and another time when he said “he wanted to perform a gynecological examination on her.”
When we ask about the case, Lee goes even paler. “I should absolutely not talk about it,” she says. “It’s possible I could have no money by the end of this thing. I could be destitute.”
Rider had been the band’s manager since 2002; he shepherded them through every step of their career and wielded enormous power. “I was very young and vulnerable,” Lee says. “And to have my trust be completely dashed and thrown back in my face— that’s what hurt the most.”
(Rider strongly denies the allegations and quickly issued a statement calling them “appalling,” “untrue” and “disappointing beyond words.” When reached for further comment, his attorney told Blender, “I think we will stick with our previous policy of allowing the matter to play out through the court system,”)
“Dennis was a good guy and I think he meant well,” says new guitarist Terry Balsamo. “I personally didn’t see a lot of that stuff going on, but he and Amy obviously had their differences.
Emphasizing that she’s speaking generally, and not about anyone in particular, Lee admits that she has “allowed people to take advantage of me. I’m learning as I grow up that some people are really hurtful and mean and evil. People aren’t always going to have a conscience and be good to be. They’ll put their heart on a shelf and do what they have to do to get ahead.”
But as sordid as this is the suit’s most startling revelation might have come in what was essentially a footnote: a copy of Rider’s termination notice that Lee’s attorneys included as evidence. “As you are well aware,” it reads, “Ms. Lee was recently in an abusive relationship with Ben Moody. She has no intention of associating with any persons who engage in that sort of… illegal conduct.”
Does that mean that Ben was physically abusive, we ask? Lee inhales sharply: “I’m not going to answer that. Sorry.”
In February 2005, Amy Lee vanished. Evanescence had just finished another exhaustive round of world touring to promote a live CD and DVD, and the label was already pressuring her to start making the next album. Overwhelmed, she retreated to her house in L.A.’s Topanga Canyon, locked the door and pulled the phone out of the wall. Lee spent the next 10 months writing songs. “That’s my favorite part,” she says. “I go into this kind of weird, dark, obsessed with my own sadness funk.” She painted stuff like the five by six foot anatomical heart spewing a fountain of blood that currently hangs in her apartment. She composed some music for the Chronicles of Narnia movie, only to have Disney brass reject it as “too dark” and “too epic.” And she did something her mom had been asking her about since the last album; She started going to therapy.
“For the first, I don’t know, lots of sessions, I’d just go in and cry,” Lee says. “Everytime. I guess I was letting out all the ghosts of my past.”
It’s a slightly surprising admission, if only because she’s already so fearlessly confessional in her lyrics. Evanescence’s debut was largely about an abusive boyfriend, full of tortured screams and pleas for salvation; it may have sounded like typical teenage Sturm and Drang, but there was real anguish underneath.
The band’s new album is also intensely personal. But where Fallen was a cry for help. The Open Door is a liberation statement. “It’s so clear now that I’m unchained,” Lee sings in the very first verse, and more than one song sounds laser-targeted at Ben Moody.
Much of the album also addresses Lee’s breakup with Shaun Morgan, singer for the South African hard-rock band Seether, whom she dated from mid 2004 until last fall. “It was good for a while,” she says. “But it ended really, really wrong. It’s just that fatal thing— girls are so attracted to assholes.” Morgan recently announced that he was canceling a tour to enter rehab, and The Open Door’s first single, “Call Me When You’re Sober,” addresses his troubles— a sassy, almost flirtatious kiss-off to a manipulative lover.
On Fallen, Lee was like a vampiric Kewpie doll, haunted by her demons but also fragile and sexless. “When you’re young, you’re so awkward about yourself and your body,” she explains. But now she’s getting less shy about embracing her feminine side— and about being sexy. “I feel so much better now, so much more confident. So free.”
The black cloud that’s haunted Lee hasn’t blown over completely, though. Balsamo suffered a stroke in November, when a blood clot in one of his neck arteries entered his brain; he says he’s only about 60 percent recovered and still has some paralysis in his left arm. And in July, bassist Will Boyd announced he was quitting to spend more time with his family, leaving the band scrambling for a replacement.
But Lee isn’t worried. “I’ve really broken down the door of being afraid all the time,” she says. “I’m not going back to where I was— ever.”
The next afternoon, Lee phones Blender. It’s a wet, gray Friday, and she’s playing the piano and listening to the drizzle on her window. “I love it,” she says, laughing. “I’m only happy when it rains.”
She’s at her brand new apartment near Manattan’s Germency Park that she shares with her cats, Shermine and Stella. (Her last pet, a kitten named Zero, was killed by coyotes before the move from California.) The building is part of a converted church, complete with turrets, a spire, stained-glass windows and her favorite, a massive marble bathtub. “It’s like you’re being baptized,” she gushes.
Lee also has a new boyfriend, Josh, a 28 year old therapist who lives in New York. They’ve been friends since Lee was a teenager, and she’s always kinda-sorta had a thing for him but could never bring herself to admit it. “To be honest, I felt like I wasn’t good enough for him,” she says, “He’s kind, he’s a good listener, he makes me do breathing exercises when I freak out. It’s the first stable relationship I’ve ever been in.”
Josh is also, she admits at the risk of sounding “like a stupid obsessed weirdo,” her secret muse. She wrote “Bring Me to Life” about him, and inspired one of The Open Door’s most touching moments, a tender, album-closing ballad called “Good Enough”. It’s the sound of a woman who may have finally found true love— probably as close to contentment as a death-obsessed goth princess is going to get. “When I first heard it, I was worried— like ‘This is corny, it doesn’t fit our image,’” Lee says. “But you know what I’m realizing? Sometimes it’s okay to have a happy ending.” |
