Amy Lee on Portishead Covers, New Album, Tour Mishaps
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- Amy Lee said she could "happily do an entire album of nothing but Portishead covers," citing Beth Gibbons as one of her greatest vocal and musical inspirations during her teen years discovering trip-hop alongside Massive Attack.
- Amy Lee wrote "Bring Me to Life" at 19 while processing an abusive relationship, and says she now feels "very proud of the 19-year-old me" performing the song in huge venues.
- Amy Lee's new album Sanctuary deliberately blends healing with anger about world events; she said she's "done with letting people make me feel I should be quiet" about politics, describing what's traditionally called politics as "life and death, rape, genocide."
- The Sanctuary tour has produced recurring mishaps including a kabuki curtain dropping on Lee's head in windy amphitheatres and her singing entirely the wrong song one night while touring with Spiritbox and Nova Twins on their joint track "Fight Like a Girl."
- Amy Lee praised Nathan Fielder's use of "Bring Me to Life" in The Rehearsal season two, where he speculated Captain "Sully" Sullenberger listened to the song before successfully landing on the Hudson — Lee said "I had tears in my eyes by the end."
- Amy Lee revealed that Secret Door came from a recurring dream where she walked through a secret door in the woods and felt "beautiful love"; she ran upstairs the moment she woke up to write the 3/4-time track.
- Amy Lee said she turns 45 in December and doesn't rule out touring in her 60s and 70s, citing Elton John, Stevie Nicks, and Bruce Springsteen as evidence that longevity in rock is possible.
Why it matters: Lee's interview marks a visible shift from the guarded, irony-burnished public figure of Evanescence's early 2000s peak to an artist openly naming "fascism" and "genocide" as subjects she refuses to stay quiet about, while leaning harder into the trip-hop vocal lineage that shaped her sound — a repositioning that gives her current Sanctuary tour and album a sharper political edge than her earlier work.
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