Evanescence singer Amy Lee caught up with Donny Fandango ahead of their SOLD OUT HoHo Show at Peabody Opera House on Sunday (December 3). She spoke about how the reimagining of Synthesis came to be, including the idea of playing with a full orchestra, playing beautiful theatres while wearing “fancy clothes”, how playing in this type of busy, high-level orchestral atmosphere forces her to focus and “step up” and much more.

“[The song] ‘Hi-Lo’ we’ve had in the bank for a long time,” Amy said (see video below). “I wasn’t quite finished [writing it before], but it’s just a song that never fit anywhere that I’ve been holding on to and waiting to find its right home for 10 years. So it’s this weird thing that I feel very close to already that I’ve had to listen to with my family and my friends to now finish it out and have the orchestra on it. That’s what it needed — it needed that beautiful, luscious emotion that [longtime collaborator, orchestra arranger and composer] David Campbell put on there. But I wrote that song with our producer on this album, the guy that did all the programming, Will [Hunt, not to be confused with Evanescence‘s drummer, also named Will Hunt]. It was our first collaboration together 10 years ago. And the other one, ‘Imperfection’, is brand new. We just wrote it this year. And it was very collaborative between Will, again, and also David Campbell, the arranger. He’s done all the string arranging for Evanescence for all of our albums, but this one… We went in [and said], ‘Let’s go in and go really deep and rip [the songs] apart and elevate ’em to another place together and make something new.’ So for all of it, and the new [song] included, he was a real part of what laid the foundation of what was gonna happen. So it gave the music and the writing and everything a chance to grow in some different directions.”

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