"It’s more than sales – it inspired an entire generation of young girls to know they had a place in heavy music." Inside Fallen: the album that turned Evanescence into instant 21st century metal superstars

Amy Lee in 2003.

Evanescence’s Amy Lee was at one of the many awards ceremonies she attended back in the first half of the 2000s when she was approached by a fan. This wasn’t unusual in itself, except this fan happened to be rapper and mogul P. Diddy.

“He said, ‘I love your album, I listen to it when I work out’,” Amy tells Hammer today. “And I was like ‘Really? That’s awesome!’ That was surprising to me. You know who I am? That’s weird.” Weird is right. Just a couple of years earlier, Amy had been a shy, aspiring singer and songwriter who had played no more than a handful of times with the band she’d co-founded as 13-year-old almost a decade earlier. And now here she was, getting star-spotted by hip hop A-listers at swanky awards ceremonies.