Evanescence’s Amy Lee has spoken about winning Best New Artist over 50 Cent at the 2004 Grammy Awards in a new interview.
Lee spoke with Daily Beast about the 20th anniversary of Evanescence’s breakout ‘Bring Me To Life’-featuring debut album, ‘Fallen’. The interview eventually touched on their ‘Best New Artist’ win at the 2004 Grammy Awards, beating 50 Cent, whose nomination followed the release of his 2003 debut, ‘Get Rich Or Die Tryin’’. The rapper responded to the rock band’s by walking onstage as Lee delivered her acceptance speech.
“50 Cent hates my guts,” Lee said, reflecting on the event. “It’s just one of those things… I mean, truthfully, we thought he was going to win too. It was such a wild night. People are like, ‘What was it like to win a Grammy?’ and I’m like, ‘Stressful!’ I mean, it’s wonderful now, to have them, but it was surreal… I just remember thinking, ‘I don’t even think anybody in this room knows who we are.’”
“He didn’t do anything, he didn’t grab the mic, it wasn’t that bad. He just sort of like, made an appearance,” Lee added, commenting on 50 Cent’s interruption. “No, he never said anything to me, but he likes to talk about me and how he was robbed. I don’t want to start a beef with him.”
In 2020, while delivering a speech in commemoration of being given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, 50 Cent expressed his bitterness over his loss to Evanescence that year. “You got the largest debut hip hop album [but] you don’t got no Best New Artist trophy,” he said. “The Best New Artist, they gave that shit to Evanescence. Can you find fucking Evanescence? I ain’t seen Evanescence since that night. Since that night they gave them the trophy.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Lee reflected on how record label executives initially expected Evanescence to include a male vocalist, as they were worried about the marketability of a female-fronted rock band. “Their initial mandate for us was that we were going to need to put somebody in the band full-time and put him on like eight out of 11 tracks on the album, to be the female Linkin Park or something,” Lee said. “Because that’s something that was like something else, and then [the label] could pitch it that way. And I was just like, absolutely not. You’re not going to change our band.”
Last week, the band released a new TikTok filter designed to imbue videos with the same pale blue-toned effect which characterises the cover of ‘Fallen’. To promote the release, Lee posted on the platform using the filter herself, commenting: “20 years baby! And I still don’t have a nose! Let’s see you try.”
The TikTok filter follows the band’s re-release of ‘Fallen’, which features remastered audio, B-sides, unreleased demos, live recordings, and updated cover art.
Evanescence’s last full-length album was ‘The Bitter Truth’, which was released in 2021 and featured the politically-charged lead single, ‘Use My Voice’. In a recent interview with NME, Lee elaborated on the track, saying: “Over the past few years, especially in my country, everything has been politicised to the point that we all need to stand together and use our voice.
“I’m not telling you what to believe, just to get out there. I believe that if everybody voted, we’d have better leaders. There are very clear rights and wrongs out there.”
