Before she was a global rock icon fronting one of the biggest bands of the 2000s, Amy Lee was just a 19-year-old wrestling with a secret emotional struggle. While Evanescence’s “Bring Me To Life” became the anthem of a generation, dominating charts and propelling the band to multi-platinum status, its origins lie in a single, disarming moment of connection between Lee and a man she barely knew.
The story begins in 2000, three years before the song’s release. Lee was in a restaurant with Josh Hartzler, a therapist and a friend of a friend. At the time, she was trapped in a difficult personal situation but hiding it well behind a carefully constructed facade. However, Hartzler saw right through it with just three words.
“It just really caught me off guard,” Amy recalled years later to Metal Hammer. “I felt very exposed, but it felt good at the same time, like he could see me. ‘How can you see into my eyes like open doors?'”
The question he asked was simple but devastatingly perceptive: “Are you happy?”
That moment of vulnerability sparked the lyrics that would eventually become “Bring Me To Life.” Lee explained the context of the encounter: “I’d been in a really bad, abusive relationship, which had been very difficult for a long time. I thought that I was doing a pretty good job of pretending I was OK, but Josh, this guy that I didn’t know really well but I liked a lot, we went into a restaurant while my bandmembers were parking the car. When we sat down, he looked at me right in the eyes, and said, ‘Are you happy?'”
While the song’s lyrical core was pure, its final sonic form involved a battle with the band’s label, Wind-Up. With nu-metal dominating the airwaves, executives demanded the addition of a male rapper to ensure radio play—a decision the band vehemently opposed. “That was not our original plan,” she told Metal Hammer. “It was something that we had to do. It was a concession we had to make for the label.”
The compromise brought Paul McCoy of 12 Stones into the fold, contributing the famous “Wake me up” call-and-response vocals. Lee noted the band’s hesitation to be boxed into a fading genre: “That’s one of the reasons we didn’t want a rapper in the song in the first place, because it puts it in a box. Since that was our first song [from the album], that was the main reason for the fear.”
Despite the creative friction, the song became a juggernaut. It hit number one in the UK, top five in the US, and helped their debut album Fallen sell 17 million copies worldwide. And as for the stranger in the restaurant? The story has a perfect ending: Amy Lee and Josh Hartzler eventually married, proving that his intuition was spot on from the very start.
