AMY LEE Says EVANESCENCE's Music Is 'Something Completely New'

August 31, 2003

EVANESCENCE singer Amy Lee recently spoke to Tacoma's The News Tribune about the overhelming media attention that is helping her band become the first hard-rock act in recent memory to produce a female frontperson who generates anything resembling the kind of star power and charisma of icons such as Robert Plant, Ozzy Osbourne, or more recently, Marilyn Manson or Anthony Keidis.

"I've never tried to be like someone or to be exactly not like someone to prove a point," Lee said. "I've just tried to be myself. And this is the way our band wanted to be. ... It wasn't like a deliberate thing. It just kind of happened. And why other people don't do it, I don't know. I wish more people would be original and do their own thing."

Many writers, fans and pundits struggle to describe the band's sound. Most often, the group gets called metal or nu-metal — the label currently favored by MTV.

This frustrates Lee, who noted that one of the group's goals is to defy categorization.

"I have never been comfortable with being labeled," she said. "I don't think metal fits us. I don't think nu-metal fits us. I don't think anything fits us. I can't think of one word that would describe our music. That's impossible. Maybe it's because I'm too close to it and it's like my baby. But it would take, like, 10 words for me to give a name for it. I think we're something completely new."

EVANESCENCE's sound is heavy and dark, yet strikingly melodic and inviting. Lee's multioctave voice lends a strong element of beauty and softness to even the hardest-rocking tracks.

"We're definitely a rock band, with elements of classical and elements of, like, this cinematic thing," Lee said, finally attempting to define the EVANESCENCE sound.

"Then there's definitely darkness, so I guess I would have to say there are elements of goth and elements of - what's the name for music like Tori Amos, the softer, feminine emotional stuff?

"I don't know, but it's definitely like a beautiful, epic, heavy thing all together." Read moremore.

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