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Never one to do things by halves, David Bowie threw himself the 50th birthday party to end all 50th birthday parties in January1 997, when he staged a show at New York’s Madison Square Garden at which he was joined by a dazzling array of special guests for a once-in-a-lifetime journey through his incredible back catalogue.

The evening saw Bowie share the stage with Smashing Pumpkins Billy Corgan, The Cure’s Robert Smith, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, Foo Fighters, Lou Reed and more, and the celebrations also ended up having an unintended effect on The Cure’s long-term line-up.

Bowie’s Musical Director at the time was Reeves Gabrels, his former Tin Machine bandmate, and it fell upon the Staten Island-born guitarist to make sure each guest joining Bowie onstage had learned their parts ahead of time. Not everyone got the personal touch that he afforded to Robert Smith, however, as Gabrels told this writer in 2021, recalling that the pair ended up going on a three-day drinking bender in New York.

We’ll let the man himself pick up the tale…

“Robert [Smith] was the last one that I got together with,” Gabrels explained. “He came into New York on the Wednesday evening, we got together, we were talking, went through the songs and it was pretty obvious he had done his homework. He was spot on.”

Rather than congratulate themselves on a good night’s work , shake hands and head off to get some solid beauty sleep ahead of rehearsals for the star-studded, prestigious gig which had brought them together, the two musicians instead decided to hit the town together.

“We decided to go out to get a drink,” recalled Gabrels, somewhat underplaying the events to come. “The next thing I remember, it’s Friday, early afternoon and we’re sitting in the lobby of the hotel we were staying in, and we both looked at each other and said, ‘I think we should go to bed now, it’s time for us to get some rest before rehearsals.’ And so he went back to his room and I went back to mine and then late Saturday morning, we got on a tour bus that took us to New Haven to do rehearsals. There’s two days missing from my life. Apparently, we had a really good time!”

They may not remember the specifics of this epic bonding session, but the pair obviously got on incredibly well, to the point where,15 years later, Smith would invite Gabrels to become The Cure’s guitarist, a position the American musician still holds today. We wouldn’t necessarily recommend that you try to steer your next job interview towards a 48-hour sesh with your prospective boss, but if it happens, stay positive, because, undoubtedly, trust, respect and the ability to get on it without a second thought can be seen as admirable qualities even outside the music industry, we’ve heard.

Just don’t blame us if things go tits up, okay? Cheers.

Is The Pineapple Thief’s Bruce Soord consumed by existential angst, or has he made the most quietly powerful solo music of his career? Prog takes a walk with the Ghosts In The Park.

“It started off completely different,” says Bruce Soord. Ghosts In The Park, his fourth solo studio album, is his most personal, heartfelt record yet. The songs were conceived on tour with The Pineapple Thief while he was confronting the death of his father. Writing from a place of such profound intimacy shaped the music, transforming his original vision for the album.

“I was going to do more of an electronic-backed record,” he says. “Then, when I was on tour and it was just myself and the acoustic guitar, I realised that was the real spirit. There’s this feeling where you come up with something and you know when it’s an accurate projection of what you’re thinking and feeling; then there’s a feeling when you you’re just going through the motions. It may as well be AI – you’re just putting Lego pieces together until a song pops out.”

There’s nothing mechanical about Ghosts In The Park. Sitting in a series of hotel rooms, Soord found the sounds to match the emotions he was feeling.“That’s when I realised I could do it with the melodies of an acoustic and my voice,” he says. “The hotel room is where I found it the record.”

It was such a successful experience that the album features many of the original guitar demo performances. “I was always under the impression that I was going to go back in my studio and re-record. When I did, technically it sounded better, but it just didn’t have that hotel room magic. It sounds really pretentious, but I put the new recordings in and the song lost its soul in a way.”

Perhaps it was a case of reverse red light syndrome: the absence of the pressure to capture a perfect performance that made the hotel performances special. “I was just going along with the flow, not worrying about what’s going on the record,” he says. The result is music shaped by the geography of a tour itinerary and maps of the heart and mind.

Meet Me On The Downs was written in response to the loss of his father. “This isn’t exceptional; this is a universal experience I went through. I’m not looking for anyone to go, ‘Oh Bruce, that’s terrible’ – it’s just a normal part of life,” he says. “My father suffered from dementia and had a very long and slow decline until he died last summer; and my mother has been suffering from end-stage Alzheimer’s for goodness knows how long.

When my father eventually died, I drove to the retirement home which I’ve been going to for the last seven years. I parked outside and I thought, ‘What a strange feeling this is.’ You look up at the window and think, ‘There’s no one in there any more.’ So I sat in the car and reflected on the stillness.”

The lyrics explore that landscape of loss as Soord went into his father’s flat to begin clearing it out. “All the photo albums were scattered on the floor, so that was something I put into the lyrics. I came back from the flat, went into the studio, thinking about how I wanted to remember my father. His dementia was so extreme that he was delirious, so it got quite intense.

“I didn’t want that to be my memory, so I went to the studio, I shut my eyes, and I tried to go back as far as I could, and picked out memories of when I was four or five. The more you thought about it, the further back you could go, and that formed the second half of the song. That’s just an example of how personal the record is. That might not be everybody’s thing, but for me it was a way to make it sincere.”

Conversely, The Pineapple Thief isn’t the right vehicle for such sensitive subject matter and introspection. “With them I’m still singing about similar things in terms of relationships – love and death and all that stuff – but in a much, much broader way. The solo stuff is so much more personal; I’m basically baring everything; my soul, really.”

The Pineapple Thief and Soord’s solo releases are “completely compartmentalised” in his mind, reflecting the different experiences of working alone versus in a group. “In The Pineapple Thief, we’re always together, we’re always talking about the songs together; but when I put this record together, it’s me, on my own in my studio or in my hotel room. I unapologetically made the tracks about very, very personal things.”

He recently toured the album round small venues with TPT bassist Jon Sykes, using looper pedals to recreate the music’s layered parts. “I always had a mind to playing it live on a very intimate basis,” says Soord. “When I’m introducing the songs, it can feel like you’re having a conversation with every single person in the room.”

“I know it’s a cliché when you talk about intimate shows, but that is absolutely what it feels like. The Pineapple Thief is now this big rock show with lights, the big stage, the big, loud PA. But my solo stuff is me and Jon sat down with our instruments and that’s enough. I’ve been to some shows that have been solo or just two people in churchy venues, and I’ve come away thinking, ‘Wow, that’s one of the best shows I’ve been to!’ Sometimes you don’t need all the production. It’s just a different animal.”

Ghosts In The Park isn’t purely acoustic, boasting terrific electric guitar work in tracks like Kept Me Thinking and Pillars. “I indulged myself with some solos,” admits Soord, who names Camel’s Andy Latimer and The Alan Parsons Project’s Ian Bairnson as his six-string heroes because “they both share the ability to do melodic, hooky solos that you could sing or air guitar along to. You don’t need to widdle up and down the fretboard to come up with a good guitar solo, so I thought, ‘Let’s do that; let’s have some confidence in yourself and get the guitar out.’”

It’s also an album of rich, layered sounds and dramatic arrangements, whose grandeur belies the music’s humble hotel room origins. “I always like the drama,” says Soord, picking the title track as the song that he’s “most proud of in terms of the songwriting and arrangements.” He explains: “It gets very big and very dramatic in the silences. That’s what I’ve always enjoyed, surprising people with silence. There’s a section where it almost fades to nothing, and you’re thinking, ‘What’s going on here?’ Then all of a sudden it starts again. You can only get that kind of drama when you get that juxtaposition of intense moments and really delicate bits.”

His previous solo record, Luminescence, featured string arrangements by Andrew Skeet, but this time Soord didn’t want to go down that road, preferring an approach that he can replicate onstage. “I thought, ‘No, rather than have a string section, I’m going to have an acoustic guitar orchestra,’” he says. “The title track has sections where I’m layering – a wall of acoustic guitars – which is easy to do with a looper pedal live, so you still get that big, lush arrangement. But really, I just wanted to make the whole thing from my performance and my soul.”

All of which raises the question of what drives his urge to share such profound, personal experiences with an audience? “I still can’t really answer that,” he says. “I’m generally a very happy, positive person, but if you listen to my solo records, you probably think, ‘Goodness, is he just so wrapped up in the existential problems of being a human? is this who Bruce is all day long?’

“It’s not. I just find it very intriguing to sing about life and death and all that stuff, and try and make sense of it. It is a strange thing. It’s ridiculously personal stuff you’re sharing; it’s not like I would sit in a coffee shop and talk to people about this kind of thing. I never would.

“I’ve pondered it for many hours, and I think it’s just a cathartic thing and a way of coping with this existential issue of being a human that we all have.”

Ghosts In The Park is on sale now.

It’s 2007, and Evanescence are opening for Iron Maiden on the main stage at Download festival. They’ve sold 14 million copies of their debut album, Fallen, while mega-hit Bring Me To Life made them such a cultural phenomenon that they beat rapper 50 Cent to a Best New Artist Grammy. And yet… there are heckles. There are boos. There are constant chants of “Maiden! Maiden! Maiden!”

“Look, I know I’m the only chick to be up here all day, and I know I’m one of the only ones to be singing any melodies. But that doesn’t mean we fucking suck!” she tells them, before piano ballad Lithium. “As far as I’m concerned, we fucking belong here!”

It wasn’t the first time Evanescence had played Download. In 2003, they’d drawn a young daytime crowd for their first ever UK show, while Metallica played a ‘secret’ set inside a tent across the field. But ultimately their sound and image clashed with traditional metal ideals, and for some metalheads, like those baying for Bruce and co, it was too much to take.

It would be a long time before Evanescence played Download again. But when they returned in 2023, they were greeted as heroes. Headlining the second stage, while the crowd spilled around corners and clambered on top of food trucks to get a view, Amy held the diehards and a whole new generation of converts in the palm of her hand, with the kind of steely self-confidence that can only come from being a genuine metal icon.

Afterwards, she jumped in a golf buggy and zipped over to the main stage to join headliners Bring Me The Horizon on their collab song, One Day The Only Butterflies Left…, and Nihilist Blues. The sets themselves were great and all, she says today over a Zoom call, but what really struck her was how much the festival had changed for the better.

“It felt so much more inclusive,” she recalls. “I wasn’t the only girl on the bill. They had a nail artist backstage!”

After 2023, surely they’ve been approached to headline it themselves?

“If I had been asked to headline it, I would’ve headlined it,” she says, before flashing a cheeky grin. “Maybe next year!”

Twenty-three years on from their first Download appearance, Evanescence are members of an increasingly exclusive pool of bands for whom an album release constitutes A Really Big Deal. That’s in no small part due to the fact they’ve only released four studio albums in that time.

There was 10 years between their 2011 self-titled release and their last studio album, 2021’s The Bitter Truth. Being an Evanescence fan requires patience. In that ‘downtime’, Amy scored two feature films (2014’s War Story and 2016’s Blind), released children’s album Dream Too Much and recorded a covers EP. Plus, the band released 2017’s Synthesis – an orchestral re-imagining of their biggest hits.

Of course, the anticipation is also due to Amy herself. A defining figure of the 2000s, who pretty much patented the sound of heavy guitars and piano, her instantly identifiable voice has influenced everyone from Paramore’s Hayley Williams to Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale, and she became a fashion icon to millions of alt girls in the hyper-sexualised, misogynistic climate of the time. Protecting the integrity of the art is something she’s stood her ground on since day one.

“It’s definitely a spiritual thing for me, making music,” she says today. “That’s why it takes years between albums, to really think it out and let things come the way that they’re supposed to come, instead of saying, ‘Well, we’ve got to put an album out, because of whatever commercial reason.’”

The singer is chatting to Hammer from the white-walled studio at her family home in Nashville, where she lives with her husband, therapist Josh Hartzler, and her 11-year-old son, Jack. It’s an airy, wide-open space, one side of the room lined with windows. Behind her is the door to another room, an electric drum kit visible beyond the threshold. A grey and white patterned rug covers most of the floor.

“It purposefully looks like it’s stained all over, so that no matter who spills a drink, we’re good,” she chortles. “It’s just part of the art.”

Evanescence are gearing up to release album number five, Sanctuary, on June 5. Having had exclusive access to a stream, we can confirm fans will be delighted. Blending cinematic melodrama, romance and industrial guitars with an overt electronic influence (courtesy of producer Jordan Fish, previously of Bring Me The Horizon, who worked alongside fellow producers Nick Raskulinecz and Zakk Cervini), it blends the familiar with new ideas, and is easily the heaviest they’ve sounded since Fallen.

It’s also Amy at her most self-assured and inspired. That’s reflected in our conversation today. Her distinctive voice and reputation for gothic gowns proceeds her; you half expect her to float into view, an ethereal sylph trailed by wisps of lace. On the contrary, the singer is friendly and down-to-earth, albeit tough. She’ll only answer the questions she wants to answer, sometimes talking around answers, setting firm but polite boundaries.

Leaning comfortably back in her chair, sipping from a large tumbler, her glossy black hair tumbling over the shoulders of a loose t-shirt, she tells us, “I feel very fulfilled right now. If I think of something that I want to do, we’re gonna try it, and most of the time it works out. I’m so excited for this album to come out.

“I think they’re the best lyrics I’ve written, and I think part of that has to do with perspective and being here after all this time, but also when things start flooding out, you have to catch them…”

As we speak, she’s distracted by Jack, who appears outside the window. He accompanied Amy when Evanescence supported Metallica on the Australia and New Zealand leg of their M72 World Tour in November 2025. Has he twigged yet exactly who his mum is?

“Yeah, it’s starting to hit him in a new way,” she smiles.

He’s old enough now, she beams, to be catching the metal bug himself.

“First of all, to see his mom get up there… so proud,” she says. “But to see Metallica with the pyro, with the fireworks, the 80,000 people… I watched him get inspired in a way that I will have in my heart forever.”

There’s only been a five-year gap between albums this time around, positively supersonic for Evanescence. The band started writing in 2022 and recording in 2023, slowly building ideas and letting them grow.

By this point, you’ll have most likely heard Sanctuary’s lead single, Who Will You Follow, which contains the line: ‘When all your faith in reality fades away / Who will you follow then?’ among haunting piano and a nasty riff. It’s a fitting introduction for an album Amy explains is “coming from a place of righteous rage”.

“I mean, how do I say that everything is fucked without, like, just saying everything is fucked?” she says. “We’re in our screens more than ever. The people that run the media have a vested interest in what you believe.”

She called the album ‘Sanctuary’ because the music represents a place of safety and truth at “a chaotic and violent time where more and more it feels like things are spiralling out of control”.

Amy had always kept her political views private, until 2020, when on February 6, the day US President Donald Trump was found not guilty on charges of impeachment, she tweeted: “I can’t stand by and keep my mouth shut when my country’s freedom is taken away.”

A year later, the band’s 2021’s album, The Bitter Truth, buzzed with political sentiment, while she was photographed at the anti-Trump No Kings protests in both 2025 and 2026. Why was then the right time to speak out?

“Well, before that, I didn’t feel like it was so pressing in from every side. It’s inescapable now,” she considers. “When I was in my 20s and we were doing Fallen, [the music] was very introverted because I was focused on looking in. As you go through life and you have experience, you have to look out.”

Amy prefers to leave her lyrics open to interpretation, glossing over direct questions about themes and stating that, on Sanctuary, the lyrics “are all over the place”. One track on the album – she doesn’t say which – is about a relationship, inspired by the Fallen days.

She doesn’t reveal who it’s about, but does confirm it’s not about Seether’s Shaun Morgan, the subject of 2006 single Call Me When You’re Sober. She was inspired to write it while sifting through old Fallen memories.

“I was going through old audio from my handheld recorder and old footage. It put my heart in a place I hadn’t been in a while, and brought up some old things. It’s not like the album is about that, but there is a space for it where we go there.”

Meanwhile, the crunchy and direct Tell Me When You’ve Had Enough, which repeatedly asks ‘Where’s the light?’, and About Us, which taunts, ‘This is what you wanted right? … Now bow down to your God / You know he doesn’t give a damn about us…’ ripple with frustration and anxiety.

“Motivating people and telling people to get out there and vote; I did that real hard,” she says of the 2024 election. “I’m starting to wonder if that is going to be an option next time.”

She doesn’t want fans to come away from Sanctuary feeling hopeless, though. Album closer Wide Open Heart feels like a deep breath after being underwater. ‘You can’t kill real love / That’s the one thing they can’t touch.’

“I’m in a rock band!” Amy exclaims. “I’m gonna make the best music that I can, with the most inspiring message that I can… I hope that our album fuels people. I hope that it gives people inspiration and puts some light out there.”

When Evanescence broke through in 2003 with the world-changing juggernaut Bring Me To Life, their success was vast and immediate. At the time, nu metal, which had been the dominant sound in heavy music during the last half-decade, was losing its grip on the mainstream, but the band’s label, Wind-up Records, still insisted the track needed a male rapper if it stood a chance of being a hit.

Amy had argued against the move, but the label got their way; rapper Paul McCoy, from little-known band 12 Stones, was drafted in. And while Amy has been publicly critical about the creative choice, her stance has since mellowed, and she even performed the song with Paul at 2025’s Louder Than Life festival in Louisville, Kentucky.

“I was so worried about the first song being a collab, because I wanted people to understand us, and I was so worried the first look would be confusing,” she says.

“But all those things that worried me are all cool perks now. We have a built-in part to sing with people live when we go and do a festival. It’s this extra-special moment in the night where we get to do our thing and share nostalgia with fans, but then also include other people.”

Bring Me To Life saw the band categorised as both nu metal and goth, two genres they are still associated with today – but Amy never identified with either.

“Honestly, I never liked that word,” she says of the latter. “I was like an alt rock, ripped-up jeans kind of girl. The word goth [to describe our music] is stupid. I hate that word.”

“I don’t think that word is particularly modern, but I don’t really care,” she says of nu metal. “Labels are labels, whatever you want to call it, is fine. We know who we are, and where we’ve come to is full of so much amazing growth, but it’s also full of, like, respecting where we came from. So you get to hear it all together on this whole album.”

It’s not escaped her, though, that Y2K trends in general are having a resurgence, with artists from across both the commercial and alternative spectrum taking the fashion and downtuned sound of the 90s and 2000s in new directions. She’s glad Evanescence are part of the conversation.

“I think it’s natural, at this sort of 20-year mark, for throwback vibes and nostalgia to hit,” she muses. “There is so much interesting innovation in rock and metal today, it has come so far from where it was back then… the rules are out the window.”

On Evanescence’s second album, 2006’s The Open Door, Amy took full creative control. A more dramatic, atmospheric collection of songs, it’s stood the test of time and she was proud of it, but it sold a fraction of Fallen. Did she have trust issues after Bring Me To Life?

“Oh, yes, yes. Definitely, but also I think just the insecurity of being younger and thinking about what people think more than I wanted to, because that’s how it is when you’re younger,” she says, adding that in this latest era, she feels “more open” to working with other artists and producers, being “comfortable with myself enough to try things instead of being so precious”.

What’s behind this, she says, is her symbiotic relationship with Jordan Fish, whom she first met at Download in 2023.

“When you find somebody that you’re so in tune with creatively, and you know what you’re doing and you get each other, it’s… I don’t want to say the word ‘easy’, because it was a lot of work, but it feels easy. Jordan and I just get each other.”

In 2025 the collaborations continued, with Evanescence on a huge upswing. In May, Amy recorded two songs for the soundtrack of John Wick action spin-off Ballerina: Hand That Feeds, with popstar Halsey (produced by Jordan), and Fight Like A Girl, which featured rapper K.Flay (produced by producer and film score composer Tyler Bates).

Female empowerment is what drew her to Ballerina – not just the ass-kicking heroine part of it, but what the songtitle Fight Like A Girl represents.

It’s easy to draw parallels with her own journey through music, grappling with the inherent sexism of the metal scene. When Evanescence co-founder Ben Moody acrimoniously left the band in 2003, she was blamed and branded a diva by the media.

“It’s a line in the movie when the trainer is telling the main character [assassin Eve Macarro] how to get it done,” she explains of the context for Fight Like A Girl. “Because it’s not just about physical force. [Men are] always gonna have that advantage on you. They’re bigger than you. But you can be clever. You can get in there, fight dirty, do what it takes. Stay the test of time, wait it out.”

In September 2025, she teamed up with Spiritbox vocalist Courtney LaPlante and Poppy for the incendiary single End Of You. Produced again by Jordan Fish, it felt like a pivotal moment for metal: three female artists, each coming at heavy music from different angles, bringing their own individual vibe to the track, singing about liberation from toxic relationships. It felt powerful, a moment that perfectly summed up the progressive nature of modern metal.

“Yeah, that was the idea,” Amy nods. “To show our unity, you know? One thing I love about them both is how fearlessly they embrace their femininity within such heavy music. It’s beautifully rebellious. I mean, we all have different styles and different outfits, blah, blah, blah, but we’re here for the music.

“I love Courtney. We had a blast working together,” she adds. “And then, Poppy’s great too. I’ve gotten to know her more through this process. She kind of plays a character when she’s on, but she’s a very cool person in real life.”

End Of You came together remotely, with the three artists sharing ideas online after Poppy and Jordan visited Amy in Nashville. They sat on the patterned rug in her studio in a circle and “hammered a bunch of stuff out”, with Amy laying down her vocals then and there. She was energised by the collaborative nature of the session, an indication of how much her mindset has changed from the earlier Evanescence days.

“Just getting inspired by other people’s minds and spirits, and letting them in as much as you’re taking them in, is so good,” she smiles.

Working with other female artists in recent years, she says, has been a deliberate choice. Building a community of women around her is important – something she never had in the early days when diversity was scarce and she was often the only woman on a bill.

In June, Evanescence will go on a world tour with a line-up of female artists – Spiritbox, Poppy, Nova Twins and K.Flay – in tow. It’ll be an opportunity for the band to celebrate their present and future, as well as their substantial legacy.

Fallen celebrated its 20-year anniversary in 2023. We point out that a song like Bring Me To Life is a rare thing, a song with almost mythical status that everyone seems to have an almost embryonic connection to, and that continues to resonate.

“How I feel about that song is grateful,” she says. “I can’t credit it to any particular one thing or an equation that you could follow. I think it’s a combination of a whole bunch of things; the time that it happened, everything falling into place at the right time.”

Just as it is for anyone else, she says, untangling herself from the court of public opinion has been a “struggle”. She never looks at comments on social media.

“I post and I’m gone. I love our fans and ability to talk directly to them, but I don’t sit there and go through comments. That’s a faceless entity judging you.”

No doubt misogyny played a part in that hostile reception at Download in 2007. But while Evanescence have long silenced the hecklers, there’s no way in hell the Amy Lee sitting in front of us would give them the time of day anyway.

“You can’t base your actions on how you’re judged,” she says, her head held high. “Be you and be confident in that. It doesn’t mean being a bitch. It means you’re not one. If you know that your heart is true, and you’re doing your best, then that’s it… mic drop.”

Sanctuary is out now via Music For Nations/Columbia/Sony. Evanescence tour the UK with Poppy and K. Flay in September.