Evanescence

It started with a cassette. Amy Lee handed Ben Moody a tape of herself, playing piano and singing a song she had written, and that was the beginning. They were teenagers in Little Rock, Arkansas, and what they wanted to build was, in Lee’s words, the idea of combinations that were unlikely: the cinematic and the classical symphonic world married to metal, hard rock and alternative. A choir voice over a wall of guitars. It should not have worked. It did.

For years they were barely a band in the touring sense, a duo who played live once or twice a year, putting out two EPs in the late nineties and a 2000 demo CD called Origin before Wind-up Records signed them in January 2001. The full band, the version people pictured later, came after.

What they made together was brief and enormous. Fallen, in 2003, is the only Evanescence studio album to feature Moody; he left that October, partway through a European tour. Lee has spoken since about how hard those years were, the relationship behind much of the writing, the pressure of a label that kept telling a young woman what her own band should sound like. One record. It was enough to change everything.