Whatever Happened To Amy Lee?

Amy Lee burst on the music scene as lead singer of Evanescence, which she co-founded with guitarist Ben Moody in 1994 when they were just 13 years old. It was nearly a decade later that A&R exec Diane Metzler heard some demos they'd been recording, and was particularly impressed with "My Immortal." Convinced the song could be a hit, the band was signed to Wind-up Records, which brought them to L.A., where they spent the next two years working on what would eventually become their debut album, 2003's "Fallen." 

"Fallen" proved to be a breakout smash, selling 17 million albums on the strength of "My Immortal" and other hit singles, including "Bring Me To Life," "Going Under," and "Everybody's Fool."

Since then, Lee has continued to front Evanescence, leading the band through some big personnel changes and seismic shifts, while always maintaining an uncompromising commitment to following her own artistic muse. Here's what she's been up to since "Fallen."

During a 2003 Evanescence show, Amy Lee took to the stage wearing a dress featuring various disparaging words — including "nothing," "useless," and "I will end you" — written on the front. As Blender reported, the intent of the dress was to confront an ex-boyfriend who'd been physically and verbally abusive toward her throughout their three-year relationship. Declining to identify him, she said, "Most of 'Fallen' is inspired by that relationship. I never want to say his name or see him again. ... But like a lot of women in that situation, I spent my time protecting him and persuading people that everything was OK."

Speaking with Spin a few years later, Lee admitted that while the notion of remaining in such an unhealthy relationship for so many years was difficult to comprehend, she'd done it. "It's weird to stay in an abusive relationship for so long," she said. "But I guess that's the way abusive relationships are." Having done a bit of self-analysis, she'd come to realize that she probably held onto that relationship longer than she should have because all the drama she was experiencing inspired her songwriting. That said, it was certainly not a good time, which she explained by referencing her song "Going Under," and the lyric, "I'm going under, drowning in you." Describing the experience of listening to the song, she said, "I was thinking to myself, 'You know what you need to do, and you're not doing it.'"

Following the release of "Fallen" in late 2003, Ben Moody left Evanescence. Rumors swirled that Moody was the abusive ex whom Amy Lee had referenced. Although neither has said as much, Blender reported that a lawsuit plainly stated, "Ms. Lee was recently in an abusive relationship with Ben Moody." Lee did, however, confirm that he was out of the band and wasn't coming back. "We got to the point where the band was really unhealthy," she recalled. Looking back three years later, the wounds he'd allegedly inflicted hadn't healed. "I don't hate Ben," she said in a 2006 interview with Blender. "I just don't ever want to speak to him again. He was truly kind of poisonous." 

Moody's spot in the band was taken by guitarist Terry Balsamo, and given that Lee and Moody had collaborated on writing the songs on their debut album, his exit allowed her to focus more on her singular vision. "I just think the next album can be nothing but better," she told the Sydney Morning Herald. 

As Lee explained in an interview with MTV News, she'd found working with Balsamo to be far more fruitful than her collaborations with Moody, and hinted at a "new sound" for Evanescence. "It still sounds like the Evanescence everybody knows," she shared, "but at the same time it's going in a new direction, and I love that direction."

In early 2005, Amy Lee went underground. As she explained to Blender, she'd just completed a grueling world tour with Evanescence while her record label turned up the heat demanding a new album. She retreated to her Los Angeles home, where she unplugged her phone and began writing songs. "That's my favorite part," she explained of the 10 months or so she spent shutting out the world, and the headspace she entered to fuel the songwriting process. "I go into this kind of weird, dark, obsessed-with-my-own-sadness funk," she said.

The songs that resulted displayed Lee's evolution, both musically and personally. "I couldn't have written this album four years ago," she told VH1, admitting she'd been placing increased demands on herself as a songwriter.

Meanwhile, those songs also reflected the travails that she'd gone through, including Ben Moody's fractious split from Evanescence, her own bitter breakup with her ex-boyfriend, Seether frontman Shaun Morgan, and the fact that her band's new guitarist, Terry Bolsano, suffered a severe stroke that had left half of his body paralyzed. All of it, though, proved the veracity of that old axiom about how what doesn't kill you makes you tougher. "The band, and me personally, we've all ended up stronger," she declared to the Sydney Morning Herald.

In January 2007, Amy Lee was taping a special for Canada's MuchMusic channel when her interviewer commented on the diamond ring she was wearing on a very specific finger. "I got engaged last night," she confirmed, as reported by CBS News. A few months later, Lee and fiancé Josh Hartzler got married in her hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, before honeymooning on a small island off the Bahamas.

As she revealed in an interview with Westword later that year, she and her new husband — a therapist — had known each other for years before getting together. "Is it ironic that I married a therapist?" the writer of angsty songs joked. "He's always been the guy I had a crush on and never told and wrote music about. He's been my muse," she added.

Several years later, Lee and Hartzler had some big news to share. Lee tweeted, "I've been working on a very special new project for 2014-A BABY! Josh and I are expecting! I'm so happy." In July of that year, she shared a photo of their newborn son on Instagram, gushing about her excitement over becoming a first-time mom. "Our little cub, Jack Lion Hartzler, is here. I have never known the depths of my heart till now," she wrote in the caption. "The world just exploded into technicolor."

After getting married in 2007, Amy Lee was unsure of her future with Evanescence. When the band's tour ended, she took some time off — a year-and-a-half off, in fact. "I'd never been an adult and not the chick from Evanescence, so it was cool to just be normal for a while and not be working on the next thing," she told Billboard. Eventually she began writing songs and contemplated working as a solo artist. After recording some of these new songs with famed producer Steve Lillywhite, however, Lee came to realize that she missed being part of a band — and that she was ready to move forward with Evanescence. "I came back to, 'OK, I do want to make another Evanescence record. I want this to be about the band."

Once she and the rest of the band reunited and started performing, all the old pieces clicked into place. "I started falling back in love with ... that part of me, the Evanescence part," she recalled in an interview with MTV News.

The result was 2011's self-titled "Evanescence" album, and it was clear that fans hadn't forgotten about the band when they debuted the album's debut single, "What You Want," via an MTV special. "To see a band still draw this response from fans, even though they weren't active for five years, it's really kind of rare," MTV News writer James Montgomery told Billboard.

After hitting the road in support of the "Evanescence" album, Amy Lee once again felt the need to take some time to herself and get off the rock-star hamster wheel. That said, she'd never been great at shutting off her creativity, and during this time away from the band she focused on composing music for films. "I'm very excited to tell you that [cellist and pianist Dave Eggar] and I scored an independent film coming out in January! Its called 'War Story' by Mark Jackson," she tweeted in late 2013.

"It's going to surprise my fans," she told Loudwire of their film score, cautioning that this new musical direction was pretty far removed from her work with Evanescence. "There's a lot of blending of sounds, a lot of ominous tones," she added, explaining why fans were likely to have their expectations throttled. "It's not, like, a soundtrack," she said. "It's an atmosphere."

She followed that up by scoring a few short films and reunited with Eggar to compose the music for the 2016 film "Blind," starring "30 Rock" actor Alec Baldwin and "Ghost" star Demi Moore. 

In 2014, Amy Lee launched a lawsuit against Wind-up Records, the label that signed Evanascence a decade earlier. As TMZ reported, not only did she allege the label was withholding more than $1.5 million in royalties owed to the band, she also accused Wind-up of getting rid of veteran promoters and replacing them with inexperienced rookies who bombarded the band with terrible ideas; this, she claimed, was a deliberate effort to sabotage Evanescence's future success. 

Loudwire added some context, pointing out that just a few weeks earlier, Wind-up announced that it had sold a big chunk of its back catalog to another company — including all of Evanescence's master recordings.

Lee was initially silent about the suit, but later took to X, then known as Twitter, to celebrate her freedom. "Today, for the first time in 13 years, I am a free and independent artist. I have wanted this for so long and I am so happy," she wrote. When a fan questioned what she'd meant by that statement, she elaborated in a follow-up tweet. "Meaning I am free from my record deal," she wrote, implying that her legal battle had been resolved and she and Evanescence had been released from their contract with Wind-up. Now, she added, she was now able to put out her own music on her own timeline, and in her own way.

Flush with freedom, Amy Lee began recording her own music, away from Evanescence and the band's label. In 2015, she tweeted a link to a new recording posted on her website, a cover of Portishead's "It's a Fire" — indicating there were more covers to come. About two weeks later, she fulfilled that promise by tweeting about a second cover, a haunting version of U2's "With or Without You." More covers followed: Chris Isaak's "Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing," and Led Zeppelin's "Going to California." She compiled all four on "Recover Vol. 1," a solo EP she released in early 2016. "Making these covers has been a really satisfying outlet for me lately," she said in a statement shared via her website. "I get to play with music I already love and know so well, and instead of just singing my own parts over the speakers (like I've done for years with some of these!), I'm getting inside it."

Later that same year, Lee released another album — and that one was an even bigger departure: "Dream Too Much," an album of music for children. Released exclusively through Amazon Music, the music represented where she was in her life as the mother of a young child. "My husband and I had our first baby in 2014 and he has been the center of the inspiration for this children's album," she said in a statement, as reported by Blabbermouth.

Branching out on her own beyond the boundaries of Evanescence had proven to be creatively fruitful for Amy Lee. "It feels really good to have a lot of different things going on at once in the sense that I feel like I'm not just flexing one muscle," she told Rolling Stone, explaining how refreshing it felt to be viewed as something other than just the frontwoman for Evanesence. "It's cool to be able to show what else I can do," she added.

That ultimately led Lee to spearhead a bold new project with Evanescence, in which she and the band recorded new versions of some of their best-known songs with the accompaniment of a symphony orchestra for the 2017 album "Synthesis" (their first new album since 2011). "This is a total passion project for me," Lee said in a statement to Rolling Stone. "There are so many layers in our music underneath the huge drums and guitars," Lee said in a statement. In 2018, Lee and Evanescence took "Synthesis" on tour, with an orchestra in tow.

In 2021, Evanescence unveiled "The Bitter Truth," the band's first album of original material in a decade, indicating that Lee remained a creative force to be reckoned with.

In addition to her film-scoring collaborations with Dave Eggar, Amy Lee reunited with the cellist for a 2017 solo recording of "L'amore Esiste," a single from Italian singer Francesca Michielin that had so enchanted Lee when she heard it on the radio while visiting Italy that she created her own version. In the years that followed, Lee continued to spread her wings via collaborations with other artists. These included providing piano and backing vocals for Veridia's "I'll Never Be Ready" in 2018, and joining violinist Lindsey Sterling for her 2019 single "Love Goes On and On," in addition to appearing in the music video.

Meanwhile, 2020 saw Lee embark on several collaborations that took her in some eclectic directions, such as teaming up with Body Count (the band led by "Law & Order: SVU" star Ice-T) for the metal-edged single "When I'm Gone." That same year, she joined Japanese group WagakkiBand for their single "Sakura Rising," and contributed vocals to the single "One Day the Only Butterflies Left Will Be in Your Chest as You March Towards Your Death" from British rockers Bring Me the Horizon.

Lee also performed a duet with Halestorm frontwoman Lzzy Hale for a reworked rendition of the band's single "Break In." "Amy brought new meaning to this song, turning what was once just a love song into a statement of unity and support for each other," Hale told LouderSound. The following year, Evanescence and Halestorm toured together as co-headliners.

Amy Lee took even further steps outside her comfort zone by voicing a character in an animated movie. In 2023, she tweeted the news that she was going to be part of a standalone "Metalocalypse" movie, spawned by the Adult Swim TV series following the exploits of a fictional heavy metal band. "Yeah so, they're making a Metalocalypse movie and I'm TOTALLY IN IT," she wrote. "Stoked to be a small part of something I have been a HUGE fan of since day one!"

That film was "Metapocalypse: Army of the Doomstar," in which Lee's voice appeared in a brief cameo, part of a voice cast that included "Star Wars" alum Mark Hamill, Metalica's Kirk Hammett, "Mad Men" star Jon Hamm, Anthrax frontman Scott Ian, Malcolm McDowell of "A Clockwork Orange," Juliet Mills of the bonkers soap opera "Passions," and O.G. "SNL" cast member Laraine Newman.

"I'm always looking for something fun like that, whether it's voice acting or making music of any kind for a film," Lee told Stereogum. "It's interesting the way the film industry and TV industry work. It's so depressing how often things go so far and then get canned. There are so many things that get half-made and then dumped, and I've written music for a lot of those." She laughed before adding, "It's not my fault! Or maybe it is. Maybe I should stay away."

In April 2024, a rumor began circulating that Linkin Park — which has been without a frontman since the death of Chester Bennington in 2017 — was looking to move forward with a female singer. As that rumor took flight, Evanescence singer Amy Lee became one of the women mentioned as being the potential new frontwoman for Linkin Park.

While she and Lzzy Hale were interviewed for iHeartRadio Canada, Lee was confronted with that rumor. "That is an incredible compliment," she said of her name being floated as a possible singer for Linkin Park. According to Lee, not only was she unaware of the rumor, but there had been nothing presented to her at all. "No, I have not been contacted or anything like that. ... But [I] feel like our worlds, our fanbases are a lot of the same people," she said.

After shooting down the rumor, Lee then revealed that she'd actually be open to making it come true — to a certain extent, at least. "They should ask me about that. I don't have a ton of free time, but I might do it part-time," she said.