Evanescence’s brand new album, The Bitter Truth, debuted on Friday, and band co-founder/singer Amy Lee recently revealed that she had to finish recording vocals for the project all by herself during COVID-19 quarantine. Speaking exclusively to PopCulture, Lee shared how the album came together, first revealing that the project wasn’t necessarily the product of quarantine downtime, since the band began 2020 “with the intent” to record a new album. She added that the situation really did not have a significant impact on their plans, however, as they “didn’t have a really set timeline” that the album needed to be finished behind closed doors.
The band had begun work on The Bitter Truth with producer Nick Raskulinecz and was very nearly completed with a number of songs when coronavirus cases began to spike and the nation went into lockdown. “We were just about to go to Europe for this big tour, with Within Temptation. Then things started one-by-one, like dominoes, day after day after day, something else was postponed, something else was canceled,” Lee recalled. “We really just started to realize what we were in and I actually still had some vocals left to do, but we needed to lock down and couldn’t see each other anymore, even between Nick and I.”
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Lee “started to feel a sore throat coming on,” so she and Raskulinecz made the decision to cancel all recording sessions and find another way to get the remaining vocals recorded. It turned out, the only option was for Lee to do it on her own. The two of them met “in the parking lot of his studio,” and Raskulinecz “laid the mic, the preamp and the compressor out on the ground, 15 feet away from” Lee and explained “how to hook it up, where the settings should be set and just taught me how to set it exactly as we’d had it for the rest of the songs on the album. And I finished the vocals at home.”
Next up was mixing, which Lee says “was easy to do remote because everybody’s got their own speakers.” After getting a few of the songs wrapped up, the singer says she “hunkered down and just focused on writing” until the band “could get together again to finish the rest of” the new album. The Bitter Truth is out now and can be purchased or streamed by clicking here.
