THE MOST TRAGIC LOSSES THAT CHANGED AMY LEE
Amy Lee didn’t dream of being a rock star as a young girl. Her earliest musical influences came from the classical world.
She was fascinated by her grandmother’s piano playing and the film “Amadeus,” and she dreamed of one day being either a classical composer or scoring films, as she told Kerrang!. Even when she discovered grunge and heavy metal as a teenager and started down the path to becoming the leader of Evanescence, Lee made connections between heavy metal and the classical writers she knew.
Still, she made the transition into rock and grunge, though she didn’t at first think of herself as a singer. Vocal performance was initially only an outlet for her poetry. For her poems, Lee drew on a darker muse than a classic film or her grandmother’s talents. When she was only 6 years old, Lee’s younger sister Bonnie died of an illness that left her physicians baffled. Lee was close to her sister and was devastated by losing her, but she didn’t want to compound her parents’ grief by showing her feelings. Poetry, and later music, became her outlet.
Lee carried that early sense of loss into her career with Evanescence. She’s identified two songs, “Hello” from the album “Fallen” and “Like You” from “The Open Door” as being about her sister. She’s also come close to tears discussing her sister in interviews and long declined to share her name, out of concern it would upset her parents or lead overcurious fans to encroach on her sister’s grave.
Amy Lee has described the death of her little sister as “when I became an artist. The music is my attempt to heal myself. Things like that can destroy you, or you can get through it,” she told Blender in 2004. Her lyrics as a teenager were so dark that her mother advised her to see a therapist; Lee declined their suggestion of antidepressants, worried it would compromise her art. But if her parents were upset by some of Lee’s writing, they supported her in her pursuit of a music career. And the family grew over time. Lee is the oldest of five siblings, and in 1993, her only brother was born: Robert, better known as Robby.
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