If I should fall from grace

When they hit the headlines, their Goth/Christian credentials were Evanescence's USP. Now, singer Amy Lee tells Brian Boyd, they have so much more to offer - particularly the inside track on a nasty relationship break-up which inspired their latest single

THE first single from the new Evanescence album is Call Me When You're Sober and is as direct as they come. The band's chief songwriter and lead singer, Amy Lee, wrote it about her ex-boyfriend, Shaun Morgan from the alt-metal band, Seether. She's not worried about any fallout from the nature of the lyrics: "The song says something that's impossible to hide from. I'm stuck with everyone knowing exactly what I'm talking about. And if there are consequences for that, which there are I think, then I have to face them. But it's true, and it really happened and I had just had to write a song about what I had gone through. I'm really proud of the song."

The song's recipient is far from gruntled. The song was written just after the relationship between Lee and Morgan broke down and shortly before he entered a rehab clinic. "It saddens me that our whole relationship was reduced to that," Morgan has said. "That the almost three years we spent together comes down to 'Oh, woe is me, you don't care about me?' I'm disappointed that that's all that really mattered. I'm kind of irritated that our dirty laundry had to be aired all over the world. I wouldn't do that to somebody."

Amy Lee is not a pull-her-punches-type gal. When Evanescence began they were that strange breed - a Goth-metal Christian band. Their early EPs were available for sale on Christian music websites and they got ringing endorsements from the huge but overlooked Christian rock market in their native US.

With the release of their major label debut, Fallen, two years ago, Lee put more and more distance between herself and her early background.

Fallen was a big goth-rock monster album that stunned everybody by selling 14 million worldwide and in an interview in Rolling Stone magazine, Lee rather testily pointed out that "Evanescence are Christians in a rock band, not a Christian rock band". There were accusations that the band were representing themselves for the Christian market but, multi-platinum sales later, were busy hiding their roots.

It's not an argument Lee particularly wants to revisit. "Yes, there was a controversy for a while," she says, "but I don't feel I've anything more to add to what I previously said. I think there was some element of people trying to find something wrong with us, something to attack, because it seemed like we had come from nowhere to huge success."

That episode aside, it's been a rocky two years for the band. Lee had originally formed Evanescence with Ben Moody - the two had met at a Christian summer camp in Little Rock, Arkansas. Moody abruptly left the band during the promo tour for Fallen, citing "creative differences", but Lee went on say that if he hadn't left the band, there wouldn't have been another Evanescence album.

The lead in to the second album, The Open Door, wasn't auspicious. Guitarist Terry Balsamo, who had replaced Moody, suffered a stroke. The band changed management, Lee had a song for the soundtrack album of The Chronicles Of Narnia rejected.

"It was a crazy time," says Lee. "Obviously Terry's illness really affected the band and then I was coming out of a really difficult relationship. We did get a new manager, though, and slowly got around to recording. Everything that we have been through, individually and collectively, has made this a really special album for us. With Fallen, I think we felt like we had a lot to prove but on this one, the new song writing partnership with Terry really worked. We really crafted the songs and had the freedom to express a wide range of emotions."

It's a heavy sounding record, still unmistakably Goth but with strings and choirs attached. "There is a pressure there to follow up a big seller," says Lee. "But we wanted a bit more fun and bit more experimentation this time around. It's not an attempt to match the success of a previous work, it's an attempt to make a record that we feel better with."

It seems odd that Lee describes the work as "more soulful", given its portentous use of guitars and general heavy gloom. "I mean soulful in the way that it is not really used," she says. "I think, lyrically, this is a very specific and almost impossible to misinterpret bunch of songs. With the first single, for example, it's a case of I needed to say something and now it's been said. That goes for a lot of the songs. Maybe in the past there was stuff there that you could have taken a few different ways, but not here. A lot of it is 'here is my sorrow', but that's always been the way with me - writing music seems to bring me to a strange low or something".

What Lee wasn't banking on was how happy some of the songs turned out.

"The last song on the album, Good Enough, is a really important one for me because I think it collects together all the feelings that went before it.

"I was really worried bringing that to the table. I was sort of apologising for it and going 'this is not a really, really miserable song' but the band loved it and it's a fitting song to close the album."

It will be a happier and better band that tours this album, Lee says, including a yet to be confirmed date in Dublin later this year. "I think we are better musicians and learned a lot from the last tour about how better to pace ourselves. It's the one thing I've really missed over the last two years. That feeling you get on stage, it's so powerful and in a way, it sorts of makes everything worthwhile."

The Open Door is released on Friday September 27th