HALESTORM‘s Lzzy Hale joined EVANESCENCE on stage during last night’s (Friday, November 5) concert at the Veterans Memorial Colosseum in Portland, Oregon to perform a cover version of LINKIN PARK‘s “Heavy”. The show served as the kick-off of the EVANESCENCE and HALESTORM‘s U.S. co-headlining tour, which will run through December 18 in Worcester, Massachusetts.
EVANESCENCE and HALESTORM first toured together in 2012. EVANESCENCE singer Amy Lee later guested on the track “Break In” on HALESTORM‘s 2020 “Reimagined” EP and Hale lent backing vocals to the EVANESCENCE song “Use My Voice” and appeared in the accompanying music video.
“With Amy, she’s an otherworldly talent,” Hale said in a joint Revolver interview with Lee. “Alice Cooper once told me that you can’t teach charisma, you can’t teach that intangible thing that makes you great, and Amy has that, she was born with it. You can teach people how to sing, but you can’t teach people that. When Amy sings, she reaches into your soul and squeezes it and doesn’t let go until the song is over and you’re, like, ‘What just happened to me?!’ For me, from a technical standpoint, it’s effortless.
“It is not,” Lee chimed in with a laugh.
“Now that being said, as a singer myself, I know how hard you work, but you make it feel effortless, and that obviously takes paying attention to your craft, knowing your breathing techniques and your resonance areas and how to navigate through them and also how to take care of yourself, especially on the road so you’re not tiring yourself out,” Lzzy continued. “That takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of discipline and getting to know your body and knowing when and where to hit it or lay back on it, how to get yourself through a show night after night after night. Both Amy and I don’t mime. We’re not up there lip-syncing to tracks, so there’s a whole other skill set that goes with that. I absolutely admire Amy for never straying from that over the years. For me, I know I’m really proud to get up there and actually sing, to know how to use my voice every single night. Collaborating with Amy is so much fun because I know that she’s on that top level and that she cares.
Lee added: “I’ll put it simply, when we’re singing together — our voices are different but similar in range — I end up not hearing the difference between us. We’re singing different notes but when we both lock in it feels like being a part of a choir. You feel something happening and you know you’re a part of it. You wonder if it’ll keep going even after you stop. It’s just very cool to be so in sync with a live singer. I think both of us are just used to locking in with our own vocals on a track and syncing up perfect background vocals to what we just did, but to have that happening in real time with two different voices is just really special. It’s not something I get to experience often and it’s just a complete pleasure.
Hale said: “It’s kind of like a dance, too, we’re waltzing together and we have to be listening to each other and the dynamics, the ebb and flow. Can you dance with your partner?”
Lee continued: “And that takes trust. We both trust each other. We both know that the other person has got it, so you’re able to lose yourself in it.”
EVANESCENCE is on tour supporting this year’s “The Bitter Truth” album. HALESTORM is promoting its latest single, “Back From The Dead”, which recently became the band’s sixth No. 1 at rock radio.
