A whole 17 years after its original release – and then getting some major resurgence through meme culture in the last couple of years – Amy Lee from Evanescence has said that their huge hit Bring Me To Life was forced to have a male vocalist on it.
In a recent interview with The Forty-Five, Amy talked about how the collaboration with Paul McCoy (you know, the nu-metal guy who gruffly raps “wake me up, I can’t wake up, SAAAAVE MEEE”) came about, revealing that it was something her label had pushed and they had to compromise on.
“The fact that it was a woman and a piano that started the track was just too much,” she said.
“Eventually, we came to the compromise that we only had to do it on one song and it could be a guest vocalist. That was really hard for me because I had to start out with our first song feeling like I made a sacrifice on my art.”
Amy said that her label had wanted a masculine vocalist on the track so that it could be more “familiar” to hard rock and alternative audiences – and in-turn pander to the massive boys club in the alternative music scene that Amy had picked up on in the early 2000s.
By making the compromise to have a male vocalist in their breakout track – which the label apparently pushed to have as a full-time thing – Amy said she worried that she was going to lose her record label contract.
In hindsight, she recognises the betrayal that lied in having to make a choice on her own music so early on, but also wished she had fought harder.
“If that song, like that, was the only thing people ever heard of us on a mainstream level and then we went away, I would be not happy,” she said.
“I would be very disappointed in my career, because I would have felt really misunderstood and like I should have stood up for myself in the first place.
“Luckily I did stand up for myself, but I would have wished that I’d tried harder.”
Consider me woken up inside.
