Don't worry, this is not going to be another long winded explication babbling about every song on an album, or anything like that. No, today we have a wee little tale about a p2p adventure, a web search or two, and random associated goodness. Oh yes, there's also a mystery, yet to be solved.

It all started when I happened to fire up Limewire. Thinking that I'd see about grabbing a copy of the full band version of My Immortal that's been playing on the radio lately, I typed "Evanescence" into the search query. (I love the pure piano version on the album, but that mix with the metal solo and slightly different take of the vocal track is is sweet too.) Oh, and if lucky, I thought I might also find the beautiful acoustic Bring Me To Life track that occassionally surfaces on the airwaves.

Item 1. My Immortal (band version). Easy. Tons of sources popped up immediately. I'll take the nice juicy high bitrate mp3, thank you.

(A minor FYI to anyone wondering. I bought a legal copy of their only mass market album long ago, so I feel absolutely no guilt hunting down other versions of songs that are either completely unavailable for purchase, notoriously hard to find, or might possibly be featured as a B side on some single somewhere that I'm not insanely obsessed enough to hunt down and buy.)

No luck on item 2. I found no Bring Me to Life, acoustic flavor. Oh well. (Or if it was in there somewhere, it wasn't labeled in such a way to be distinguised from the scads of copies of the regular version.)

<sidetracked>
There was one Bring Me to Life that claimed to be a "rare remix". I knew something was amiss when, after the download was complete, xmms wouldn't open it. When the "file" command detected it as a windows media format (though the filename had a standard .mp3 extension), I suspected something was amiss. Out of curiousity, I tried feeding it into mplayer, and onto my screen popped some good old honest to goodness hermaphrodite porn, of the hardcore explicit variety, along with some url printed at the bottom. (I shudder to think how those who claimed they were traumatized by Janet's costume malfunction would react to that.) A quick "q" key followed by an rm command took care of that. I do not share Randal's taste in that regard.
</sidetracked>

Anyway, back to my search. Scrolling through the list of results, I saw several other interesting song bearing the "Evanescence" name that I wasn't familiar with, and tagged anything knew I didn't already have for download.

What I got... Wow.

The first song I played, titled "Listen to the Rain", is obviously from a live performance. A minute into it, I almost wondered if this was really the same band. The piano part definitely sounded like them, but a chior? And no hint of Amy Lee's voice? No hint of metal guitars either. But regardless of whether or not it's really Evanescence, I was like, "This is freakin beautiful!" The style was like something you might hear in church, but with really talented singers.

A google search confirmed, that yes, according to several lyric databases, the song "Listen to the Rain" is indexed under the same band as other Evanescence songs with which I am familiar. Wow. My already large appreciation for this outfit's musical versatility grew by another notch.

Anthor song called Restless, a studio recording, bears the trademark Evanescence style, mostly. But I'm not 100% positive the singer is Amy Lee, though it could be. If it is her, she's obviously capable of a much higher pitch than anything on Fallen would indicate. The instrumentation is also a little bit less... evolved... than the stuff on Fallen. Like hearing something from an earlier stage of evolution. I'm going to guess it's something they made before they had fully finalized the Evanescence sound formula.

Another song I grabbed, Before the Dawn, is definitely Amy Lee singing. But the backing is not the guitars/piano/orchestra we're used to. A lot of raw percussion with an ambient backing. In the singing, Amy is totally on her game. Amazing.

Other tracks I managed to grab: Farther Away (With some absolutely bizarre versions of the loud hit/soft silence moments and fades with panning effects mixed in, like they were experimenting with possible effects. Musically annoying, but interesting in a quirky way.). Surrender, a cool track, and Fields of Innocence. There were a couple of other songs that turned up in the search, but their hosts managed to disconnect before I could snag them.

This wealth of unique material led me to wonder, did Evanescence release another album at some point that I never heard about? Well, yes. According to some lyrics databases, there exists an album called "Origin", but it contains almost none of these exciting tracks I found. Actually, a lot of it overlaps with Fallen.

No matter. It's not available anywhere on Amazon, which tells me it's probably out of circulation or something. Maybe made before they got signed to a big label.

So there's all these awesome Evanescence standalone tracks floating around that aren't on any album. Actually, now that I look in more detail, I see that at least one of them is a B-side on a single.

Perhaps they're trying to pull a Tori. (And succeeding, it would seem.)

Predictably enough, the official site (warning: lots of flash crap) makes mention of any of this other work. But there is one really impressive thing I did find while surfing around there. For some of the lyrics, you can see a scanned copy of handwritten versions.

They're so interesting not just because of the mere fact that it's Amy Lee's handwriting, but they certainly look like a first draft. There are doodles on the paper, scribbled out portions, and many corrections. A little peek into the thought processes of the soul from which the words originated.

I dig it.

Evanescence is the best damn act to appear on the scene since the beginning of the Millennium. No contest. But of course, feel free to disagree. If you do, you'll be wrong.