i'm going on an adventure

Oh you know, just Dansby doing Dansby things. [7/8/26]

In the lead up to the new album and the release of "Forever Without You", Amy Lee has been talking about the beginning of her career. And now my dad is apparently obsessed with Bring Me To Life 23 years late. So I've been thinking about Lee's early career a lot myself.

like, look, there's a lot of things she's not going to say explicitly, especially not all these years later. but Moody was abusive to her when they were involved romantically, and stayed abusive after their relationship ended but were still in the band together, until whatever happened That Night happened and Moody left the band. which was of course followed by a SHITTON of sexism directed toward Lee, because a woman couldn't have been a legitimate creative force behind a rock band, because she's "difficult", because she's "emotional". and this all happened under a MASSIVE microscope because Fallen was such a MASSIVE album. Wikipedia says it's still the sixth best-selling album of the 21st century. they rocketed to stardom in their early twenties off an album where a lot of the lyrics are about the abuse Lee faced from another member of the band! that's a fucked up thing to live out! and that's what she's been carrying around for so long.

and just to hear her say, and i can't remember her exact words, "you should not feel stupid for loving someone, and that also doesn't mean you have to stay with them."

and I mean, the entirety of the song "Forever Without You".

and obviously I've never met her but it just. paints a picture of a person who's really healed and gained a lot of perspective. she's able to find the good moments of a really chaotic point of her life. she's able to see the flaws in her past thinking while also giving herself grace for them. and she'll remember the love and good moments with Moody and what they built with Evanescence, but living without him is "good for her, and what she needs." and now she's flying. and you can even see that is the symbol of the Sanctuary album: a bird.

do you know what it was like to watch Lee last night? she's filled with power and joy. she fucking sings "Like You" now, which they never performed live before this tour, because it's about her dead sister! and no one asked her or pressured her to (at least not that we know of) she chose to do it herself. how good of a place she had to be in to make that choice.

she brought up LaPlante from Spiritbox and the Nova Twins to sing Fight Like a Girl with her, and they were all having a blast, and Emma Anzai was still up front playing bass while the guys hung in the past for that song. Bring Me to Life isn't a desperate plea anymore, it's like a story about how she did come back to life. Lee sang about how angry she is at Trump. ("About Us" is one of my faves off the new album so I was excited to hear it.)

THEY HAD FIRE SPECIAL EFFECTS. the fire came out in time with the "wake me up" rap parts of BMTL. how fucking cool! and Lee hasn't stopped singing My Immortal, but she asks the audience to sing with her and turn on their phone lights, and it's more like thanking the fans than the pain of those lyrics. Lee hasn't stopped singing Imaginary, but she sings "just pass me the bitter truth" and "i don't want to live my life choking on a beautiful lie" in other parts of the show.

it's like that tumblr post about turning into the most beautiful middle-aged freak. (does 44 count as middle aged?)

and I think so many fans came to Evanescence in the beginning because they were also suffering. and the show opens with the song Sanctuary of course, telling us to "breathe it in, scream it out, no one's coming to save us but that doesn't scare me, I'm with you all the way down."

we never escape The Horrors. the past is still with us. but we can break free from it and become beautiful middle-aged freaks.

One of my friends in high school changed his named as soon as he turned 18, so that the ethnic name his family gave him was finally the name reflected on all of his paperwork. He told me that he understood why his parents had given him an “English” name, but that he felt that if he needed to assimilate in order to succeed, then that was a type of success that he didn’t want.

When I was on my way home from the courthouse after changing my own name, I got into a conversation with my rideshare driver, who was extremely interested once I told him what I was in court for, and wanted to know how I’d done it, how much it cost, was it difficult, etc. It turned out that his girlfriend had chosen the name “Yo-yo” when she came to the United States, unaware of how rare that was as a name, and that she was frequently made fun of because of it. Neither one of them had realized that a name change was so easy, and he told me he was excited to let her know that she had options.

There was an intern at a summer job I had once, who changed her name to be the same name, but a different spelling. She said that she had no idea why her parents had spelled her name so oddly to begin with, and suspected that it was just an honest mistake either by them or by some nurse, but it had been a headache for her entire life, and it was a huge relief to not need to be correcting people’s spelling on important documents anymore.

One of my exes legally changed his name to have an exclamation point, because he liked to sign his name with an exclamation point.