1. “Like You” from The Open Door
“It is about something that’s hard to even talk about but feels good to write about,” Amy Lee once said of “Like You,” one of the most personal songs on The Open Door. “It’s about my sister who passed away when I was a little girl. I was six years old and she was three. It’s affected my life and definitely affected my music writing, and it’s made me who I am. It’s one of those things that happens early enough in life that it forms you. I think in a lot of ways I made it a thing that I can use in a positive way in my life. I’ve learned from it and grown up, and I’ve always felt older. Twenty-four sounds young to me, it’s weird.”
“Like You” arrives just past the album’s midpoint, a ghostly lull amid hi-voltage guitars. The opening piano chords—simple, aching—let Lee’s voice float free, almost as if she’s singing across a vast emptiness. When the drums finally kick in, they don’t puncture the mood; they cradle it, as though honoring a memory too fragile to batter.
I connect to “Like You” on a deep level. I was four when my sister passed at six—too young to hold onto shared memories, yet old enough to feel a permanent ache. Whenever Lee’s voice soars on the bridge (“I long to be like you, lie cold in the ground like you. There’s room inside for two…”), I feel that same bittersweet lift: grief entwined with a yearning for reunion.
2. “My Immortal” from Fallen
“My Immortal” stands as one of Evanescence’s most enduring heart-rending ballads, its simple piano-and-strings arrangement laying bare every drop of raw emotion.
“These wounds won’t seem to heal, this pain is just too real
There’s just too much that time cannot erase”
Here, Lee captures the paradox of memory: the more you try to outrun it, the more it clings.
“I’ve tried so hard to tell myself that you’re gone
But though you’re still with me, I’ve been alone all along”
In these lines, hope and despair intertwine—she knows the truth of absence even as she fights against it.
Originally written on piano by Amy Lee and Ben Moody when they were just fifteen, “My Immortal” first appeared as a late-night demo featuring only Lee’s voice and a MIDI keyboard—no live strings. For the album’s “band version,” producers Dave Fortman and Ben Moody added guitar, drums, bass and a new string arrangement by David Campbell (building on Graeme Revell’s earlier orchestration), yet the final mix still centers Lee’s piano and vocals, preserving its confessional intimacy.
The bridge—where Lee admits that she’s “been alone all along”—resonates especially deeply. For me, it mirrored the loneliness of growing up with a shadow of her absence: surrounded by family’s love, yet carrying a solitary grief only I could understand. Just as the strings swell under Lee’s final refrain, I find catharsis in the release of remembering and honoring her, note by note.
