Amy Lee didn’t rush back into the studio. She waited. Nearly a decade, in fact, if you’re counting Evanescence albums the traditional way. Synthesis reimagined the past with orchestras and restraint, but it wasn’t a return — it was a pause, a deep breath. The real question hanging over the band wasn’t when they’d make a new record, but how you follow something like that without pretending time hadn’t passed.
That’s partly why covering Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” mattered more than it might’ve seemed. “There’s something amazing about it,” Lee said. “The lyrics are really, really beautiful. It feels real, like a real story, but at the same time it’s open enough that you can apply it to your own life.”
The cover wasn’t even their idea at first. It came through Gears of War 5, initially framed as a short vocal moment. “They wanted me to just sing it for like 30 seconds to a minute,” Lee said. “And I loved it — but I was like, ‘We can’t just stop like that. Can I please get my whole band to do the whole song? If we’re going to do this, we have to do it for real.’”
That insistence turned the track into something bigger: a reason to reconnect as a band in a way they hadn’t in a while. “It gave us this excellent opportunity to get in the studio in a rock, original way,” she said. “We’d been doing Synthesis with the orchestra, working outside our comfort zone, which was cool — but this felt really good.”
The timing wasn’t accidental. “We’re gearing up for writing our new record,” Lee explained. “This was the perfect thing to get us in there, bouncing ideas off each other, seeing what we sound like today.”
That sense of today matters. Evanescence hasn’t always been a smooth operation, and Lee doesn’t pretend otherwise. “It’s not an easy thing keeping a band together,” she said. “It’s really rare and special when you have people who respect each other and work like a functional — semi-functional — family.”
She laughed, then got serious. “It’s been a long road getting to where we’re at now. I absolutely feel that love and respect for my band, and that they have for me. That means everything. I’m 38 — I don’t think I could work in a world where it wasn’t that way anymore. Life’s too short.”
That emotional through-line is what “The Chain” ultimately locked into for her. “It takes work to keep a relationship together,” Lee said. “That mutual respect — we all appreciate it very much. It just felt really good to come together that way for this song.”
There’s also the mystique. It’s impossible to talk about Fleetwood Mac without mentioning Stevie Nicks, and Lee doesn’t dodge the comparison. “Mystery is important to me in music,” she said, though she admitted it’s something she’s wrestled with rather than cultivated.
“I’m a little old school,” she said. “I started out without social media or even a cellphone. I loved wondering what was going on with a band.” She pointed to Nine Inch Nails and Portishead as formative touchstones. “I loved Beth Gibbons. Her voice was incredible, the music was creepy, and you didn’t really know what she looked like. It made you imagine.”
Lee isn’t interested in hiding humanity — just preserving space. “There’s something really alluring about not knowing everything,” she said. “It can become whatever you want it to be.”
That philosophy extends to soundtrack work. Writing for games or films, she explained, offers a different kind of freedom. “You already have a map,” Lee said. “You know what it’s supposed to feel like. You don’t just have to follow blindly into the darkness and discover something about yourself you maybe didn’t want to know.”
Games, especially, sit in a strange middle ground. “There’s a visual, a feeling, but it’s not line by line,” she said. “You can blow the world open a little more.”
The video for “The Chain” leaned into that hybrid space — part Gears, part Evanescence. “We wanted to put ourselves in that place, but not exactly,” Lee said. “It has to be a combination.”
She enjoyed that process more than she expected. “This time I actually had a vision,” she laughed. “Like, ‘Let’s pick a color scheme. I’m gonna smear lipstick on your face. Trust me.’”
As for the new album, Lee is careful — almost superstitious — about defining it too soon. “Whatever I say, my little rebellious heart is going to run the other direction,” she said. Still, a few things are clear. “It’s been a really long time since we’ve released a full original album. This one has to sum us up. The whole picture of who we are now.”
Coming off Synthesis, the first instinct was simplicity. “We were like, ‘Let’s strip everything away but our instruments and just rock. Go heavy.’” That energy unlocked something, then led them down other roads. “That’s how albums work.”
They’re recording in batches, starting with three songs produced by Nick Raskulinecz. “Nick is the king of just getting in a room and jamming,” Lee said. “We refine everything until it’s solid.”
Instead of waiting years, they plan to release songs gradually. “I miss that feeling a true single used to create,” she said. “Where everyone was listening together. I don’t want to wait anymore — and I don’t want people to wait.”
Lee summed it up simply. “I want to scratch my own itches,” she said. “Do all the things that feel awesome and put that out there.”
It’s not nostalgia. It’s not reinvention for its own sake. It’s a band deciding — finally, confidently — to be all of itself at once.
Listen to the interview above and then check out "The Chain" below.
