Amy Lee hated My Immortal at first. Yep. Hated it. That song that would become one of Evanescence‘s biggest ever hits? The song that made power ballads cool again in the 2000s? She was not keen, at least not on the first version everyone heard when the track was included on the soundtrack to that god awful Daredevil film in early 2003.
“I’ve always hated it!” she told Music Feeds in 2018. “I sound like a little kid, the piano’s crappy…and that’s the version that you always hear when you’re in the grocery store. When you hear me, it’s my 19 year old voice, and that’s always bugged me.”
Built around a simple but stirring, sombre piano line and featuring fantastical, romantic lyrics penned by Evanescence guitarist and co-founder Ben Moody about the loss of a loved one, the ingredients of the song certainly weren’t the issue for Amy – in fact, she spoke about its conception warmly to Kerrang! in 2023, 20 years after it was first released.
“Ben played a droning note thing on the piano and it was really beautiful,” she explained. “It wasn’t completely finished, but it was the song. I was like, ‘Let me take this, think about it, and make a real piano part.’ I worked really hard, arranged the part, and then realised later it was in the wrong key. The piano was way out of tune, but we liked it!”
So what was the issue? Not for the only time in Evanescence’s career, it was some pesky label interference that left a sour taste in everyone’s mouths. While both Amy and Ben wanted to use a more polished version of My Immortal on their debut album, Fallen, the bods at Wind-Up Records had other ideas. They insisted on using a rough-and-ready demo version the band had hashed out on a MIDI keyboard at the radio station Amy’s dad worked at in their hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas a few years prior.
“The label was stuck on the demo and wouldn’t let us use the version we really wanted,” Amy told MTV in 2003. “We fought back and forth about it and finally we gave in, but we were all so angry about it.”
“The head of the label really loved the demo,” she told Music Feed years later. “He was like, ‘There’s something about it that’s really vulnerable and cool. It was not even a real piano. It was a bad demo; I was just out of high school!”
Much as they did with the fight over that infamous rap addition to Bring Me To Life, Evanescence lost that particular battle: the same raw version of My Immortal that soundtracked Daredevil made it to the first edition of Fallen that hit stores on March 4, 2003.
The album, of course, was a smash hit: topping the charts in over ten countries, it has become widely regarded as a generational goth-rock classic, earning Diamond status in America for sales of over 10 million.
But Amy still couldn’t stomach My Immortal. When it came to releasing the track as a single near the end of 2003, she and Ben dug their heels in: they’d only put it out if they could release their preferred version of the song – a full-band take recorded during the Fallen sessions that included lush extra string arrangements from respected Canadian composer (and dad of Beck!) David Campbell.
This time, Amy and Ben won out: the ‘band’ version of My Immortal was released on December 8, 2003, hitting the top 10 in the US, UK, Australia and a healthy smattering of European countries.
Sadly, that wasn’t the end of the awkward relationship Amy had with the song. Just weeks after its release, Ben Moody acrimoniously left Evanescence, right in the middle of a world tour. It left Amy performing a popular track that she’d already felt unsure about, featuring lyrics written by Ben that she just couldn’t empathise with.
“Ben tends to write like a storyteller, and it’s not necessarily from any kind of personal experience,” she told MTV. “I can’t bring myself to write about anything I don’t understand completely. For me, writing is always about some specific thing that’s happened, so sometimes I feel a little distanced singing the song.”
“That’s the one song I didn’t write the lyrics to,” she emphasised in 2021 while speaking to the official Grammys website. “I helped a little bit, but they aren’t my words. Those are Ben’s words. I didn’t want to sing it, but also, I just felt like they didn’t mean a ton to me.”
Many fans began to speculate that David Mould’s video for the My Immortal single had alluded to the issues between Amy and Ben. Shot in the gorgeous Gothic Quarter district of Barcelona in black and white, it shows the duo looking decidedly glum as they mope around separate parts of the city, lines like “there’s just too much that time cannot erase” suddenly feeling eerily prescient.
It probably didn’t help that Amy had described the video as being “all about separation”, but she later clarified that any connection to the split with Ben was entirely coincidental, telling Rock Sound: “it’s almost like the director knew what was going to happen, but he can’t have known. It’s just one of those fate things.”
None of that helped the fact that My Immortal quickly became the song Amy least looked forward to playing live; she even wanted to cut it from the set for a time. “There were a couple of years where I was like, ‘I’m not playing the song tonight!'” she told American Songwriter in 2023. “‘I don’t want to. I’m tired of it.'”
Still, what time cannot erase, it can sometimes heal. As the years rolled on, Amy began to foster a different relationship with My Immortal. Having seen the emotional outpouring it inspired with Evanescence’s fans hundreds upon hundreds of times, she eventually realised that she could impose a different meaning upon the track, giving her that emotional connection she had sorely lacked in the beginning.
“On our first-ever trip to Europe, we played to a huge field of people singing it so loudly I couldn’t hear myself,” she told the Grammys website. “That song, for me, has become really meaningful. It’s about that. It’s about our fans and our relationship.”
It may have taken her a while to get there, but from hating its first appearance on an Evanescence record to the journey since, it’s probably safe to say that Amy Lee finally loves My Immortal almost as much as her fans do.
“That song has so much history for us, and I’ve come to love it in a whole new way through playing live shows all these years,” she explained to Music Feeds. “That’s always a moment in the set, that truly beautiful, intimate human connection between all the people in the room and us. It means my life, my history in Evanescence. It’s a huge part of my life. Bigger than many relationships!”