2001–2004: Fallen and Anywhere but Home
Evanescence were having their demos mastered at Ardent Studios in Memphis, where a producer heard it and played the demos to his friend at Wind-up Records, head of A&R Diana Meltzer. Meltzer said what made her want to sign them was Lee's voice, lyrics and their gothic sound. When she heard "My Immortal" she said she "knew it was a hit". Evanescence was signed by Wind-up in 2001. The label flew them to New York, and told them that they loved their different sound and thought they had potential, but "we don't really totally know what to do with you", Lee recalled. They were then told, "if you were this good while distracted by school and all this other stuff, how good will you be if we put you in an environment where you have nothing to do but write and be influenced by your surroundings, like in Los Angeles." They were relocated to Los Angeles, given an apartment and rehearsal space and enrolled in a gym, according to Meltzer, and Lee, who was very introverted, received help from an acting teacher to overcome her stage fright. Meltzer told HitQuarters in 2003 that, while she loved Lee's voice, their gothic sound, and Lee and Moody had already exhibited "huge talent" with their prior demo material, they were still young and she felt they could benefit from more time to work on their debut album so they "could deliver a breakthrough sound".
Lee said that at the time of signing, they did not realize the label would move them out to Los Angeles for two years, thinking it would be about six months. The length of time in Los Angeles "really frustrated" them. The label was apprehensive about the marketability of a female-led band, and advised them to just keep writing songs. It ended up being a fruitful writing experience in Los Angeles, Lee said, as they wrote half of the album there and were able to make use of other equipment to get sounds they wanted. After almost two years of Evanescence working on the album, Dave Fortman was brought in to produce it. Then, label executives refused to release the album unless Lee and Moody agreed to hire a full-time male co-vocalist. When they did not agree, the label said they were withdrawing their funding and releasing them from their contract. They left Los Angeles and drove back to Little Rock.
A few weeks later, the label relented, informing them that they would release their album if they agreed to have a male rapper on its lead single, "Bring Me to Life", in order to give something familiar to listeners. Lee was not happy about this, but reluctantly agreed to the compromise and wrote the part for the male vocal. She originally wanted the lead single to be "Going Under" as she was concerned that the public would hear "Bring Me to Life" with its male vocal and decide that was the sound of the band. She was relieved that people were still receptive to Evanescence when "Going Under" was released as their second single. Lee prefers "Bring Me To Life" without the label-forced rap, and expressed dissatisfaction that it "stamps a time period" on the song; however, she made peace with it because they were able to "survive past it" and "people were able to, for the most part, understand who we are without us getting stuck in that place."
"Bring Me to Life", featuring guest vocals from Paul McCoy of 12 Stones, and "My Immortal" were originally featured on the soundtrack of the 2003 action film Daredevil, released in February 2003. Evanescence's debut album Fallen was released by Wind-up on March 4, 2003. As with their pre-Fallen work, Lee and Moody were the main writers of the album, with Lee being the core writer. Most of Lee's writing on Fallen was inspired by an abusive relationship she was in. Lee and Moody said they did not consider their music to be "goth", with Moody adding that he thinks the "goth" label came because the songs sound sad and people think that "sad equals dark equals Goth. It's real easy for them to throw us in that box". Moody also disliked the nu metal label, stating: "I think the only nu-metal thing about us is the fact that on one song we have rap and singing". Lee also disagreed with the nu metal tag, attributing it to the rap rock of "Bring Me to Life". After the album's completion, the touring lineup was hired: guitarist John LeCompt, drummer Rocky Gray, and bassist Will Boyd, the first two old friends of Moody.
Evanescence's music was initially promoted by their label in the Christian market, and Lee and Moody publicly made it clear in an April 2003 interview that they were not a Christian band or Christian rock. Moody's comments against being in the Christian market immediately prompted the label's chairman Alan Meltzer to send a letter to Christian radio and retail outlets explaining that despite the "spiritual underpinning that ignited interest and excitement in the Christian religious community", Evanescence were "a secular band, and as such view their music as entertainment" and the label then "strongly feels that they no longer belong in Christian retail outlets". Wind-up formally requested the recall of Fallen from Christian retailers and radio stations. After receiving the letter, many Christian radio stations pulled Fallen songs from their playlists.
Rolling Stone stated in April 2003 that while Wind-up had no official Christian affiliation, they had been marketing their bands "to both the Christian and mainstream music market". Wind-Up "began courting the Christian music market more than a year ago, making its first foray with 12 Stones' self-titled 2002 debut. Hooking up with powerhouse Christian music distributor Provident ... Wind-Up attempted to tap into a segment that generated sales of more than 50 million albums in 2002". The CEO of Provident, Terry Hemmings, said that the decision to recall Evanescence's album likely would not hurt Wind-up's image in the Christian market, and that he was puzzled by the band's about-face, saying: "They clearly understood the album would be sold in these [Christian music] channels." Meltzer claimed their decision to promote Evanescence in the Christian market was made with the band's consent. Lee said that she had always opposed the promotion in the Christian market and the "Christian band" identification from the beginning, while Moody had supported it. Moody had misrepresented Evanescence in the past, talking about his religious beliefs as Evanescence's. The label wanted to use the Christian market promotion as a marketing tool for the band, which she had opposed, stating that "it was an important fight to me because it felt false. That wasn't really what our music was. And I felt like they were selling somebody something that wasn't true." She noted that Evanescence "has never been a Christian band" and lyrically never had a religious affiliation.
On April 7, 2003, Wind-Up released "Bring Me to Life" as the album's lead single. Wind-up president Ed Vetri revealed that when the label had introduced the song to radio, radio programmers rejected it, saying, "A chick and a piano? Are you kidding? On rock radio?" Some program directors would hear the female voice and piano at the start of the song and turn it off without listening to the rest of the song. A female voice on rock radio was a rarity, and the song was considered for airplay only after there was a male vocal on it. After the song was released on the Daredevil soundtrack, a grassroots fanbase grew and listeners began requesting air play for it, compelling radio stations to reconsider the band. The song became a global hit for Evanescence and reached number five on the US Billboard Hot 100 on June 6, 2003. It topped the UK singles chart, where it peaked for four weeks from June–July 2003. On the worldwide success of the song, Lee said: "Since we released [the song] on Daredevil it went all over the world, whether they wanted it to or not, so we had fans in countries we had never been to because they had the soundtrack and they heard it on the radio. So, it started blowing up all over the world and then we had a reason to tour all over the world. And that's how the whole international thing happened this early."
Evanescence performed on radio shows and on the festival circuit for weeks in early 2003. They embarked on their first headlining tour from April to May in the US. In June 2003, they had to cancel shows in Germany due to Moody reportedly falling ill. That month, Evanescence accepted an offer from the video game company Nintendo to perform on the Nintendo Fusion Tour, which they headlined beginning on August 4, 2003. The album's second single "Going Under" was released on August 18, 2003. It peaked at number five on the US Modern Rock Tracks, 24 on the Active Rock chart, and number eight on the UK singles chart. Lee recalled the rapid success after the album was released, with concerts going from club shows to arenas in two months. In an August 2003 interview, Moody said that Evanescence is "just Amy and I, and I want to keep it that way", adding that their process together is what works. In another interview with Rock Sound, he said that he would like tour drummer Rocky Gray to play on the next album but did not need the other tour players, LeCompt and Boyd.
On October 22, 2003, Moody left the band during the European tour for Fallen, reportedly because of creative differences. Moody had called their management and informed them he was quitting. Lee got a call from their manager asking her to "beg [Moody] to stay", to which she said "that's exactly what he wants me to do" and expressed that if Moody was going to leave, the band "would appreciate it if he'd wait until the end of the tour. But if he can't, then go ahead and go." With his impromptu exit in the middle of tour, Lee improvised and had them play as a foursome to not cancel a show. In an interview, Lee said, "we'd gotten to a point that if something didn't change, we wouldn't have been able to make a second record." She said that by that point Moody "hated the band, he hated being on tour and his negativity made everyone around him miserable. He was trying to pull the whole ship down with him" and she would not let that happen. His exit was a relief because of tensions created within the band, which was at a "breaking point". "It was a really uncomfortable situation for everybody ... completely unstable and unhappy", she explained. "It was a scary time before he left because I knew something was going to happen and I didn't know what and I was afraid everything we worked for had the potential of going down the toilet."
In Lee's termination letter to their manager, she stated that Moody was physically and verbally abusive to her. With Moody gone, "we felt like a weight had been lifted", she said. Touring guitarist John LeCompt said in a 2006 interview that Lee "gained authority as soon as Ben Moody walked out the door. They had an equal partnership, but he was the man, he had to strangle the band, all the life out of it". Lee said that she and Moody had not been friends since their teenage years, and they had pretended to be friends after Fallen's release when they were really only business partners. In 2004, Lee confirmed that there were complications for months following Moody's departure "with the legalities of everything – whether we would be legally allowed to continue under the same name". "A lot of things were held up internally that I wasn't allowed to talk about, and I was worried, because it was very important to me to be able to stand up and say, 'No. One person leaving in the middle of a tour and trying to hurt us isn't going to make us lose the entire band.'" In a 2006 interview, she stated that when Moody was in the band, "a lot of decisions had been made over my head, or around me, or for me, that I wouldn't have made for myself".
Lee said that she and Moody had never sat down and wrote together, and instead would combine their respective parts in songs. From the start, Lee would only write music by herself, considering it a vulnerable process and feeling disrespected by Moody and unsafe around him. The creation of Fallen largely consisted of her and Moody writing music separately and then adding to each other's work, due to tension and significant creative differences between them. Lee's creative disagreements with Moody included his strict approach to songwriting and focus on commerciality; he would "always be corralling" her ideas, and wanting to push them in a more commercial, pop direction. She said his influences were "a lot different" from hers. "It was always a push and pull between us, for me", she explained. "It's cool because Fallen really is a lot of compromise. It definitely leaned toward what he wanted a lot of the time." Creative restrictions included instrumentation decisions such as her wanting to play organ on the record and Moody not wanting that. She stated that at one point, all her "pianoplaying rights were stripped away" from her because Moody felt she "was getting too much attention", so a keyboard player was hired. During the making of the album, "there was so much back-and-forth and so much turmoil between us and the label and each other. I always had to fight to get my music made and I remember focussing more than anything on the work and on the fights and on, 'I'm gonna make this right'", she recalled. "I'm very proud of the way that it went, but it wasn't easy." "A lot of the reason it's been so much fun writing [post-Moody] is that we're not thinking about that. It's like, 'What do we like? What's fun?'", and there is "no pressure of wanting to rule the world".
Moody said in a 2003 interview that he focused on making the album "as accessible as possible, to as many people as possible". In 2005, he conceded that he and Lee had different approaches for the music, stating, "[Amy] is much more creative than I am ... I am a bit more commercial minded ... she is more educated musically, and she wanted to explore that. ... it was like my way or the highway. We just couldn't meet in the middle, so I was like, "The hell with it." He also said that he struggled with substance abuse during his time in Evanescence. In August 2010, he released a statement on his history with Lee and Evanescence, where he said that he was a different person at the time, his friendship with Lee had deteriorated, and they had conflicting opinions, personalities, and desires with the band. Moody apologized to Lee for comments he made to her in anger. He said he realized the band would end if he stayed and believes he made the right choice. He added, "Evanescence has progressed a great distance from the original sound, and made it clear that they intended to expand much further. Amy is very artistic and never has had a problem thinking outside of the box and defying expectations."
Lee called former Cold guitarist Terry Balsamo, with whom Evanescence had toured, to replace Moody on the Fallen tour. Balsamo soon joined Evanescence as the permanent lead guitarist. She and Balsamo "clicked" and "connected on a lot of musical interests". The band played several shows with Korn in Europe, with Evanescence originally set to headline however Lee wanted Korn to headline instead. Fallen's third single "My Immortal" was released on December 8, 2003, and peaked at number seven on the US Hot 100 and the UK singles chart.
At the 46th Grammy Awards in February 2004, Evanescence won the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance for "Bring Me to Life" and Best New Artist from five nominations. On May 31, 2004, Fallen's fourth and final single "Everybody's Fool" was released, and peaked at number 36 on the US Modern Rock Tracks chart, and number 24 on the UK singles chart. Lee had begun writing music again by November, including the songs "Lacrymosa" and "Together Again", which she initially wrote for the soundtrack of the 2005 film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe but were rejected by the studio.
During the Fallen tour, Lee wrote a song titled "The Last Song I'm Wasting on You", recording it in a bathroom on an analog recording device. It became a B-side on the single "Lithium" from Evanescence's second album. When asked if the track was about former bandmate Moody, Lee said, "If I answer that, then I'm not hiding anything anymore. But I just sort of answered it, didn't I?". She later deemed it "one of those personal, hard moments, when beauty is born out of pain". On November 24, 2004, Evanescence released their first live album and concert DVD titled Anywhere but Home, which includes a concert in Paris, a live cover of Korn's "Thoughtless", behind-the-scenes footage, three previously unreleased songs, and Fallen's four music videos. The album sold more than a million copies worldwide.
Fallen spent 43 weeks in the top 10 of the Billboard 200, peaking at number three. It was listed for 104 weeks on the Billboard 200, and it was one of eight albums in the history of the chart to spend at least a year in the top 50. Fallen was also number six on CBS's list of "Top Bestselling Albums of the Last 10 Years". It was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in April 2003 and 4× platinum in January 2004. It has sold more than 17 million worldwide, including 10 million in the US, since its release.
In 2023, Lee recalled the journey of early success, stating that "there was a lot to be excited about, but there was a lot of hard stuff going on in the background. Not just drama about what we were doing, but also my brother was sick, and it was a scary time to be out on my own. And I did, in a lot of ways at that time, feel alone." She found the extensive exposure and objectification at that age difficult to handle, and did not feel supported by those around her. With everything happening, she was "just sure it was always right about to fall apart." She described facing a lot of obstacles, including attempts at control and manipulation behind the scenes, as well as being considered just the singer/frontwoman among the men, and learning to say no to things. Lee deemed the "fight for credibility" as a creator to be one of the biggest challenges she faced early on with the Fallen era, explaining: "It was the mentality of labels to tell, especially newer artists, that they need to have writers. ... And the reason that they wanted [men] to do it was because that's where the money was. That's where the power was. Everybody else wanted to be able to say they did that when I did that". She also noted that, for being the frontwoman "people assume that it's not yours. And some of the people around me were more than happy to let them believe that."
