Three years after the release of her group's most recent album, Evanescence frontwoman Amy Lee has offered up her first solo song, "Push the Button" – an ethereal, electronica-infused quasi-pop track with no hints of her nu-metal past. The tune will appear on Aftermath, the soundtrack to the movie War Story (Lee recorded the movie's score with cellist and composer Dave Eggar), and was released this week.
Earlier this year, Lee told MTV that the film's director, Mark Jackson, had a hard time finding the right song for a War Story scene, so Lee decided to write one herself – that tune became "Push the Button." "It's very different for me, it's electronic," she said. "I did it all myself, which was crazy, because I'm used to engineering and writing and mixing demos in my house, but being responsible for that being the end product was a new challenge for me. It was like 'This is it, I'm mixing this.'"
"I wanted it to be completely different," Lee said of her approach on the soundtrack in a recent Rolling Stone interview. "I didn't want it to be like Evanescence just because I've flexed that muscle so much, I wanted people to see different sides of me ... It's one of my first chances to show another side and this definitely plays with a lot of the same emotions I played with in Evanescence, but instrumentally, it's not trying to be mainstream."
Moreover, she described the sounds on the album as being "a lot more like music I listen to now." "One's like an Arabic, weird thing, one's a sexy dance song and the other is – I don't even know what it is, it's electronic," she said. Regarding the "Arabic" song, she clarified that she was not singing in the language, but that the tune had a Middle Eastern feel, musically.
Lee said that she had always wanted to write a score but that the "baggage" of her past persona had gotten in the way. But in the same breath, she also said she felt comfortable with her past in Evanescence. "I never felt like I was playing a role, you just change," she told Rolling Stone. "It's funny, people still talk about 'My Immortal,' and it's wonderful, it's so cool, but I was like 14 or 15 when that was happening. When I wrote 'Bring Me to Life,' I was 19. Imagine the things that you thought and the way that you spoke and things that you did when you were 19 years old."
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