Songoftheday 09/11/24 - I'm so tired of being here, suppressed by all my childish fears...

 

 

"My Immortal" - Evanescence

from the albums Daredevil: The Album (Original Soundtrack) and Fallen (both 2003)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #7 (one week)

Weeks in the Top-40: 27

 

Today's song comes from the goth-rock band Evanescence, who brought a powerful female touch to the male-dominated world of hard rock with their debut single "Bring Me To Life", which reached the top five on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart in the early summer of 2003.  Their follow-up single, "Going Under", was a decent rock radio hit, reaching #5 on Billboard's Alternative Rock chart and #26 on their Mainstream Rock counterpart, but only managed to "bubble under" the Hot 100 at #104 without pop radio support. (It remains a favorite of mine from the set.)

For the third release from Fallen, the band put out the second song after "Bring Me To Life" that also appeared on the soundtrack to the superhero movie Daredevil starring Ben Affleck. "My Immortal", written by the group's Amy Lee and Ben Moody along with former pianist for them David Hodges, has lyrics depicting the pain and anguish of loss. As much as she knows she must move on, the memory haunts her and the wounds are just too fresh. The production from Dave Fortman is quite delicate and vulnerable for most of the record, with Amy being backed up by a piano and strings and a far-off sounding synth. But at the 3 minute mark the floodgates open to allow Lee to let all her emotions out in a wall of sound before a denouement at the end. The music video gave even more gravitas to the track, as Moody was about to leave the band under not so good circumstances, and the video separating the pair illustrates there is more than one kind of loss...

"My Immortal" became Evanescence's second top ten hit on Billboard's Hot 100 in April of 2004. On the radio, the song peaked at #2 on the Mainstream Top-40 chart, topped the older-skewing Adult Top-40 list for three weeks, and made it to #19 at the Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") format. (Surprisingly the song never appeared on the rock radio charts.) Internationally, the single topped the Canadian sales chart (and #3 in airplay there) as well as the singles chart in Greece and Portugal, and reached the top ten in Norway (#2), New Zealand (#2), Italy (#3), Spain (#4), Australia (#4), Germany (#5), Belgium (#5 Flanders/#9 Wallonia), Hungary (#6), the United Kingdom (#7), the Netherlands (#7), Denmark (#7), Switzerland (#7), Czechia (#8), Sweden (#9), Finland (#9), and Poland (#9 Airplay). At the Grammy Awards in 2005, "My Immortal" was nominated for "Best Duo/Group Pop Performance with Vocals", which was won by the Latin-rock band Los Lonely Boys for "Heaven". 

The fourth and final single from Fallen, "Everybody's Fool", was only a minor hit on Alternative Rock radio, popping in at #36, but overseas reached the top-40 in Greece (#11), Italy (#16), Norway (#17), Australia (#23), the United Kingdom (#24), Ireland (#32), Belgium (#35 Flanders), the Netherlands (#35), and Switzerland (#35). 

Evanescence will be back to the series.

(10/10)

(Click below to see the rest of the post)

Here they are performing the song at the Billboard Music Awards...

Next up, live in concert behind the album...

and lastly, from a show in 2017...

Up tomorrow: Country star gets caught up in a tornado, perhaps.