Q and A's with Carly Smithson and new bandmate Ben Moody

Today the greatest Idol in history, Carly Smithson, came forth with her long awaited announcement of the next phase in her musical journey, revealing she has joined a band to be called The Fallen, with the original members of Evanescence.

We spoke with Ben Moody, formerly of Evanescence, and Carly by phone on Tuesday.

Q and A with Ben Moody

Q: How are you today?
BM:I am so excited and if you were in the studio, you’d be excited too. 
 Last night we recorded strings to our first single Bury Me Alive.   Incredible. It’s been very difficult to keep something like this a secret. Especially since it has consumed all of our lives.

Q:Tell us the story of how this came together.

To be completely truthful this began in 2003.  There was a point in time before I left Evanescence when Rocky (Gray) and John (LeComte) and I sat down and said, this thing is going in a different direction, and we all love the music that we make together and we all contemplated doing it with someone else.  But the timing wasn’t right and it wasn’t something I was willing to rush in to, but something needed to change so I left. 
And then as time went on, their stint with Evanescence ran its course. We’ve all been doing our own thing, but it just felt the time was right so I reached out to them and to my long time friend Marty O’Brien who’s playing bass with me ever since I left Evanescence.  And I said, how do you feel about doing this, about looking for someone to complete our family and to finish this thing?  It feels like everything with our old fans is at a standstill. There’s not new music, there’s no tour. There’s nothing.
So I reached out and everyone was just ready to get started.  There wasn’t even 'a let me think about it.' It was -  yes, when do we start?  So we began looking for our soulmate, which we were scared was going to take a long long time.
But my roommate Monique and Carly are very good friends. And Carly had been over at the house quite a bit, but I wasn’t there, because I'd been out looking for a singer.  Which is funny because we’ve been at this for so long.

Q: Had you been out scouting?
BM: We’d been flying to new York, to auditions. This has been a very big process. The thing is when you’re doing that, you’re auditioning people to take the place of someone. And it never felt legitimate, .  Hana Pestel at my independent label said (of Carly), you’ve got to get your head out of your ass and just listen to her sing, because she had already met her. Because she had lived at my house – I’ve got a whole compound of people. Its like Fight Club. We’ve got bunk beds in the basement, people setting stuff on fire. 
So Hannah made me watch her and I was like, damn, I’ve made a mistake.

Q: What was the first thing you saw?
BM: I watched about 15 videos or something ridiculous online.  And her voice was obviously – I mean, it was what it was. Incredible. So I called Monique and I said, look, I’ve got to talk to Carly now.  And she said, well, she happens to be with me, we’ll be home in 20 minutes.
So I went down and talked to Carly in Monique’s room until about 4:30 in the morning. And we talked about what she’s been doing, what she wants to do musically.  And the reason why Monique is pressing so hard for us to get together, is I'm sitting here mouthing off to Monique about all this stuff I want to do visually.  We’re really going to take this thing to a level that Evanescence never touched, which is major theatrics and a lot of visuals.  The music being bigger than ever before. 
And so at the same time Carly is over in Monique’s other ear saying, Oh my God, I want to do this, I want to do that.  And they’re basically identical.  So Carly and I sat down and we just kinda geeked out at looking at stuff on the internet. I want to take this from Cirque de Soleil, I wanna do this kinda outfit and costume. It really was a geek fest.

Q: So you planned a whole show?

BM: Well, we both, myself, John, Rocky and Marty have been planning all this stuff  on one side and Carly’s been planning it on the other and they just happened to be literally identical. And I don’t mean, like oh, they were kind of the same.  I mean, an uncanny amount of detail being identical. And it was just clear to me that we had found our better half.

Q: Had you seen her do Bring Me To Life on the Idol tour?

I had not seen it until the following day. And well, that was funny, because that was what most of the people who auditioned sang. So it was like, step one done.  But the guys had gone back to Arkansas and they were working and doing different things.  I called them and said, listen, we gotta put everything on hold for two days.  And we’ve gotta record her. She was kind enough to come in and just sing a couple of the old songs just so the guys could hear why I wanted to throw a kink in our plan, and switch over to being with Carly.  And everyone hands down was just – this is right, this feels right. So they came back to LA and we got into our rehearsal room and we just played and within three songs it was not a stiff, okay, everyone’s playing real precisely and listening real closely. We were playing Run In the Hills and Barracuda and it became, like a band does, just (messing around.)



Q: Do you have the same influences?


BM: Yeah, we do.  Granted everyone in the bands influences are drastically different, but the fact that we could just start playing Barracuda and be happier than we’ve been in five years is a very good sign.

Q: How did the plan change?

BM: Our plan was when we first started, before they opened the door, go back to the time period of recording "Fallen" and make that move of going back to the time period of 2003 and move forward musically from that point.  But the name The Fallen seemed to be the perfect fit because we’ve all fallen away from our original course somewhere along the way and that record is what set us all up with the platform to do this. And it just seemed right.

Q: 

Did you get into talking about Carly’s own wild journey?


BM: Yes, that first night. It was kinda awkward, I'm sure for her because it was one o'clock in the morning, she gets dragged over to my house and I’m like listen this going to be weird but I'm going to pry into your life and I need to know everything about you and I need you to say yes or no right now to changing your entire life overnight. And so she’s telling me her whole story. And its not like our alternative which would have been plucking someone out of obscurity and putting them into this situation.  She has a very similar struggle to us but we’ve all had our moment when we thought everything was just bright and we set a course for a perfect life, and everyone’s dream situation got taken from them at some point. So we're all equally hungry now and have enough wisdom and experience to not (mess) up.

Q: How is it different from working with Amy, who was your high school friend?


BM: We started the first version of evanescence when she was 13 and I was 14.



Q: How is it different starting a band with someone you meet as a fully formed adult?


BM: It's completely different, and its weird. Its actually better. I cant explain it. You think it would be hard to try and do something like this again, but I think that’s why it took five years before this plan was put into effect. Because something was just aligned and everything was right.  Doing this over with adults, people you meet now, people you meet post an experience like American Idol or Evanescence, everything is so much less uncertain and everything is so much more - it seems poetic.  She had, you know, record deals in the past and she’s had the American Idol thing. And we had Evanescence and Evanescence went bad.  And so now everything is so much more appreciated. Everybody is so much more respectful of each other. And everyone is so much more aware of how much more we need each other.

Q: How is The Fallen different from Evanescence?

BM: Its different in the fact that this is a real band. It was never set up that way in the past.  This band is one hundred percent democracy. Everyone is equal. Everyone brings their own crap to the table. And what also is different is that I believe it's better. The music is more exciting. It's got more intensity behind it.

 This is bringing more energy than Evanescence could ever muster.   And I mean Evanescence in its best day. We’re older. We’re better. We’re tighter. The music is louder. The music is heavier.  This is just better.

Q: You’ve referred to the theatrical elements.  What are you planning there?

BM: 
I don’t want to give too much away. We don’t want to be an arena rock band just for the sake of being arena rock.   We’re going to start in theaters.  And we want to put on an amazing theater show. And when and if it grows to other places, other avenues, we want to add as much as we can from what we see in our head. Trust me, it will be something you have to see two or three times to take it all in. Did I say two or three? I meant eight or nine.

Q: What are your album plans?


BM: We’re not going to do an album because we don’t want to have that long period of time away from playing and away from fans.  We’re going to release a couple of songs roughly every eight weeks  for the next year and a half. We’re going to be doing it all digital and then at the end of the year we’re going to compile all the songs. We’re going to do special versions, we’re going to do live stuff. We’re going to do bonus tracks and a huge picture booklet of the entire year and at the end of the time we’ll make a super CD for just the hardcore fans.

Q and A with Carly Smithson 

Q: You had other offers on the table, how did you decide to take this route?

CS: I knew I wasn’t making the wrong decision when I turned down the other offers.  Actually, I didn’t. I thought I was making a huge mistake.  But I’d rather make a huge mistake then be miserable in something I’d regret for the rest of my days. I wanted to stay true to what I love and believe in and this is everything that we’ve all wanted for a long time which is awesome.

Q: What were the other offers you were turning down? 


CS: Just other deals that came along that were all about pop music.

Q: What felt wrong about them?


CS: I’m not a pop artist. I didn’t want to do pop. I wanted to do heavy rock music and I’ve wanted that from the beginning. And I'd be happy not doing anything rather than doing something that wasn’t the right thing.



Q: When you were performing Evanescence’s Bring Me to Life on tour, did you ever imagine you could be singing with this band?

No…No.

I kept getting told that you don’t have the rock voice, you cant do rock music.  But it’s everything I am. It’s everything I listen to. I’m not the regular girl next door.

Q: So what did you think when Ben started talking to you?


I don’t even know. It was the most bizarre experience. And I got into the car after and I was driving back to San Diego that night and I just thought about it the whole way home, because I needed to make a decision fairly fast.
  And I called my manager the next day and said, 'what do you think of this?' And he said, 'I think it’s awesome.' And I said, 'yeah, I think it’s pretty awesome as well.' And being solo was kind of lonely. Trying to make a record solo.  And now there’s four other people who bring all sorts of different things to the table and musically it's like everything I was trying to do. The whole heavy rock with great melodies.  

Q: Have you thought of Amy Lee as an influence?

CS: This was one of the people I mentioned but purely because a female with an angelic voice doesn’t get taken seriously as a rock voice. But Ann Wilson had a pretty angelic voice; she didn’t have a raspy voice.  Chester from Linkin Park, he didn’t have a raspy voice.  But all these people make these big massive theatrical music which is basically what rock music is; it’s just massive.

Q:You were told you need a raspy voice?


CS: They just felt my voice was more suited for pop music which…no thank you. I think I got the first glimpse of how I could make this happen, recording in the studio. I said, I can sing this type of music and I can record it really easily.  And I really love those powerful big high choruses.  And I think that’s what Ben and the boys really saw in me when they came to me. And it’s just a friggin’ family all of a sudden.

Did you feel you had found soulmates right away?
Yeah! It’s weird. Everything! It’s like we’ve been friends for ever. 

Q: What have you been doing since then?

CS: We sat down in that initial meeting and Ben said, I understand you’re doing your own project, but where do you see yourself?  What are you trying to achieve. And I told him visually what I was trying to achieve. Stage show-wise.  Musically where I wanted to go. And it was like we were both on the same page. It was exactly his vision too. It was perfect. I played him some of my ideas for music. They loved them.  They played me some of theirs.  I immediately come up with melodies for some of them.  We’re working on so many songs at the moment.  Everything that I had been putting into motion just happened so fast as soon as this band got together.  Whereas I was doing it for a long time with people who didn’t really get me or were trying to pull me in another direction.   I literally jumped into this situation and everything I was trying to put together and everything they were trying to put together for all of us fell into place really fast.  The right mix straight away.

Q: Are you excited to tour again?


CS:Hell. Yeah. It’s so exciting. I’m just excited now.  Singing music that’s ours. And I’m excited to be able to completely jump out of the box.  The Idol thing you know was very PG, it was for a family audience. This isn’t a family audience. This band. We are The Fallen but the boys came from Evanescence which already is an established act and they already have a following which isn’t PG. I don’t have to strip myself down.   As much as I love the show. I love all the people on there and they are amazing.  For me personally it wasn’t creatively and musically the best time for me.  Ever since I came off the show, I’ve been so happy and I’ve never been more happy than being in this band.
Idol did exactly what I was supposed to do. And I am so glad I held out for the right opportunity and the right moment.  These guys make the most amazing music and it just all fell together. It’s great.

-- Richard Rushfield

Comments

[Charles]

Carly is an amazing singer and if she wants to rock out then I'll be there. This seems like a really good fit to me.

[Laura]

I can not wait to see this new band. Carly was meant to rock and this seems like the perfect fit!

[standstill]

greatest american idol my foot
you are a phony richard

[Conny]

It's seems the perfect timing for all of them. But it seems that they are trying too hard to be the OLD Evanescence. Don't get me wrong, Carly CAN sing, I actually loved her when she performed on American Idol, but the whole band seems to be a joke. It's like a parallel to the other band and quite frankly, it's a little bit childish of the former members. For crying out loud, Carly even looks like Amy Lee!! But I will see how it all turns out, maybe I will like their music, who knows, but Evanescence will still be my favorite band! :) I wish them all good luck!