The voice you know best on this song was recorded by a teenager. Amy Lee was still a kid, working out of the radio station where her father worked, because that was the room they could get for free. No label yet. No reason to be careful. What got captured on those late nights has an origin story most people would never guess from how the song sounds now, and the path from that room to the version on Fallen is stranger than the polish lets on.
Ben Moody and Amy Lee were both fifteen when this song first existed. It came from the years before Evanescence was a band anyone had heard of, an early piece that survived everything that came after. The world hears it as raw personal confession, a young woman opening a vein on tape. Hold that thought. Whose grief you are actually listening to is a more complicated question than the song’s reputation allows, and the answer has surprised a lot of people who thought they knew exactly what this song was.
A fifteen-year-old wrote it as a ghost story. The world heard a confession, and never let her live it down.
Then there is the matter of which recording you are even hearing. There is more than one. The song exists in versions that are not the same song, one stripped almost bare, another that brings in guitar and drums and bass after the bridge and swells into something bigger. Which of those reached the most ears, and how, is its own small drama. The phrase “the version you know” turns out to be doing a lot of work here, and not in the way you would assume.
The facts around it are plain enough. Released as Fallen’s third single in December 2003. It climbed to No. 7 in the States, hit No. 1 in Canada, went Platinum, picked up a Grammy nomination. The black-and-white video was shot in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona, all stone and shadow, which suited a song about a presence that will not let the living go. A ghost story, more or less, written by two teenagers and somehow heard by millions as their own.
So: a song from before the band, carried out of a borrowed room, that exists in more than one form and means more than one thing depending on who you ask. The recording you fell for and the song its makers thought they were making may not line up the way you assume. Press play. Then surface the three Pearls below, because each one moves a wall you did not know was a wall.
Surface any pearl, in any order, to hear what's really going on.
“The piano that opens "My Immortal" is gorgeous.”
It isn't a piano. It's a MIDI keyboard, run on a demo Amy Lee cut as a teenager. "Not even a real piano," she said. The band wanted it re-recorded; the take you know was always meant to be scrapped. But the label's A&R heard it once and refused to let it go. The most-played version of one of the biggest ballads of the decade is the rough draft nobody on the band wanted you to hear.
“You know exactly how "My Immortal" sounds.”
Then you may know the version the label rejected. There are two: the bare album version, and a "band version" with guitar, drums and bass crashing in after the bridge. The label cut the band version from the album. Lee and Moody overruled them and made it the single, so it's the one on the radio and in the video. The "My Immortal" most of the world actually heard is the take the label threw out.
“Amy Lee chose to put her heart into every word here.”
She didn't write the words. Ben Moody did. Lee has called it "Moody's song" and said it carries no personal meaning for her; the voice is hers, the feeling is borrowed. The performance the internet quotes as Amy Lee's soul on tape is her singing someone else's idea of grief, convincingly enough that the world handed it to her anyway.
Linkin Park · Hybrid Theory · 2000
In the End
A song that went Diamond was built to land nowhere. That was on purpose.
The real meaning of In the End →
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