Evanescence‘s label didn’t want the recording of “My Immortal” that eventually became a single. Amy Lee and Ben Moody had to fight to get it released at all. Lee and Moody wrote the song as teenagers in Little Rock, Arkansas, years before Evanescence signed with Wind-up Records. Moody wrote the lyrics as fiction, built around a presence that won’t stop haunting the person left behind. Lee has described Moody’s original piano part as “a droning note thing,” unfinished, before she built out a real arrangement around it and added the bridge herself. Keyboardist David Hodges, credited alongside Lee and Moody on the published sheet music and BMI registration, was still in the band during those early sessions. Lee and Moody have generally described the song as one of theirs, written years before Hodges joined. He went on to a long career writing hits for Kelly Clarkson, Daughtry, and others, and BMI has traced that career back to his work on this song and “Bring Me to Life.”
The first recorded version was rough: a demo cut on a MIDI keyboard at the radio station where Lee’s father worked, later included on the band’s 2000 demo release, Origin. When Wind-up prepared Evanescence’s debut album, “Fallen”, both Lee and Moody wanted to re-record the song properly. According to Louder’s reporting on the dispute, the label preferred the rawness of the old demo and refused to swap it out. That same recording, teenage vocal and MIDI keyboard intact, is what appeared on the soundtrack to Daredevil in early 2003, dressed with a string arrangement by the film’s composer, Graeme Revell, and it carried over onto “Fallen” when the album arrived that March.
The Band Version, the Charts, and Ben Moody’s Exit
Lee and Moody won a second fight before the year was out. The version they had wanted all along already existed: a full-band take cut during the Fallen sessions, with Josh Freese on drums, Francesco DiCosmo on bass, Moody’s guitar, and a string arrangement from composer David Campbell, produced by Dave Fortman and Moody. It had simply gone unused. When “My Immortal” went out as Fallen’s third single that December, that was the take Wind-up finally released. Fans call it the “band version,” and it’s the one that reached radio and MTV, eventually peaking at number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 and topping Billboard’s Adult Pop Songs chart. It also hit number one in Canada, Greece, and Portugal, and logged five separate weeks at number one on the UK’s Official Rock & Metal Singles chart, a run that kept it inside that chart’s top 100 for 300 weeks. The song picked up a Grammy nomination in 2005, for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals, and is now certified Platinum by the RIAA, part of a catalog that helped push “Fallen” itself past Diamond certification two decades after release.
By the time that single reached stores, Moody was already gone. He’d left weeks earlier, during the European leg of the Fallen tour, after escalating conflict between the two of them. That left Lee fronting a song she hadn’t written the words to, credited to a co-writer no longer in the band. She’s said plainly that the lyrics are Moody’s, not hers, and for years she struggled to connect with the song on stage. By late 2021, the music video had already neared 800 million YouTube views, its comment section still filling with strangers describing their own losses. “That song, for me, has become really meaningful,” she told Grammy.com that year, tying that meaning to her fans rather than to the song’s original story.
What the Hal Leonard Score Reveals About “My Immortal”
The Hal Leonard edition of “My Immortal,” transcribed by Adam Perlmutter, shows how plainly the song is actually built underneath all that history. It’s marked Moderately, quarter note equals 70, in 4/4, and it sits in A major with its relative F# minor coloring the verses. Across the arrangement, the chord vocabulary stays almost entirely inside that key: A, C#m, C#m7, D, E, F#m, and a single Aadd9 for texture. There’s no borrowed chord, no modulation, nothing chromatic. For a song this emotionally loaded, the harmony underneath it is almost plain.
The verses are written strophically, meaning the same melodic phrase carries two different sets of words, printed as two lines of lyrics stacked under one vocal staff. This keeps the notation efficient, and it also mirrors the lyric’s own idea of something recurring in the same shape. The chorus raises both the vocal line and the harmonic rhythm at once, chords changing more often, and the melody sitting higher in the staff, and that combination does most of the work of lifting the song out of the verse. The melody itself moves mostly by step, with only occasional small leaps, which keeps it within reach for a singer working through it alongside a pianist still learning the accompaniment.
The piano part reads less like a rhythm section and more like a sustain pad. The right hand frequently doubles the vocal’s rhythm note for note, while the left hand holds long bass tones under a “with pedal” marking rather than walking a moving line. Doubled melody over a sustained low end is what gives the chart its hushed, mp feel on the page. The score also relies on a D.S. al Coda repeat, sending the performer back through an earlier chorus before breaking off into a separate coda that closes on a ritardando and a fermata. That’s ordinary shorthand in a printed score, and it accounts for a good part of why fifty written measures add up to a performance running past four minutes. Because the right hand shadows the vocal so closely, the piano part also holds up as a convincing solo performance without a singer at all, which likely has something to do with how often this particular song shows up as a solo piano cover.
The arrangement is a genuinely useful exercise in pedal control and block-chord voicing inside one key signature. That’s probably part of why it still turns up in teaching catalogs more than two decades after it was first written.
