Amy Lee’s fan advice on beauty, self-worth and artistic ambition is doing the rounds this week, after the Evanescence frontwoman used a Guardian readers’ Q&A to respond directly to a follower who had been told she was too unattractive to become a rock singer.
The fan opened her question by stating that ‘show business’s obsession with beauty and sexualization to boost sales horrifies me’, before asking Lee whether there was ‘even the slightest chance for an unattractive woman to be a rock singer’. Lee’s reply was immediate and direct. ‘First of all, I would hope that whoever told you that you are ugly is not anyone you would call a friend,’ she said in the The Guardian interview.
Amy Lee’s fan advice: beauty is ‘the deep stuff’
Lee said the question made her ‘feel sad’, and pushed back hard against the idea that physical appearance has anything to do with what makes a musician worth listening to. ‘Don’t think of yourself that way and don’t listen to those people,’ she said. ‘They’re probably just jealous.’
She then laid out her own definition of where beauty actually lives. ‘Beauty is the deep stuff: being an artist, making music. That’s where the gold is, and beauty comes out through the inside, so focus on the inside and making something great for people to experience.’ She was equally blunt about the pressures of the modern attention economy. ‘Selling your product and being an Instagram star is not the important part,’ Lee said. ‘Anybody can make great music if it’s in your soul: that’s the most beautiful thing about you.’
It is the kind of response that cuts through the usual platitudes. No hedging, no pivot to positivity-brand language. Just a straightforward rejection of the idea that a woman’s face is any kind of prerequisite for a career in rock music.
Turning 45, and no plans to stop making music
Elsewhere in the same interview, Lee reflected on age and the prospect of still performing well into her sixties. ‘I turn 45 in December, and 44 definitely doesn’t feel like I’d imagined, it’s better,’ she said, before doing the maths on what lies ahead. ‘Turning 60 is only 15 years away, which doesn’t feel that long. I don’t know if we’ll be touring hard then, but they say use it or lose it, so I’m not ruling it out.’
The idea of stopping altogether is something she finds genuinely upsetting to consider. ‘It gives you so much life to be able to bring people together and share music, so it breaks my heart to imagine that we can’t do that any more for whatever reason,’ she said. ‘I’d have to be still making music or creating in some way. It doesn’t make sense to stop.’
Given where Evanescence currently are, stopping is not a conversation anyone in the camp needs to be having. Following the release of new album Sanctuary in June, the band are heading into a UK and Europe arena tour next month, with dates in the US, Malaysia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand to follow. That is a schedule that would test any act, let alone one supposedly entering some imagined twilight stretch.
For anyone who needed to hear it: the Amy Lee fan advice here is simple, and it is not new, but it holds. Make the music. The rest is noise. Coverage of the full interview is available via Louder.
