All My CDs, pt 38: Fallen

Fallen - Evanescence

For a brief period during my teens, my family had cable and VH1 played music videos for an hour before school started. There are a small number of pop songs that have the distinction of having been released during that time, and thus are the only songs I've seen videos of. Bring Me To Life by Evanescence is one of them. I, like many teenagers suffering from periodic depression, was attracted to extreme displays of melancholy, so I was of course attracted to the agony-ridden lyrics and desolate imagery in the Bring Me To Life video (featuring the lead singer dangling off the side of a building). So I got the album, Fallen, and proceeded to annoy my family with it.

One of my father's first observations was that all the songs sound the same, and he was correct. Every song on this album is also about the same sorts of things: despair, deep spiritual and emotional suffering, and the desperation to sacrifice anything to end that suffering. Everybody's Fool is the only song that identifies an external source for the bad feelings it expresses, in the person of a manipulative and deceitful queen-bee type. All the others strongly imply an inner source of turmoil, which in turn implies a struggle with mental illness. It's the perfect album for a depressed adolescent to obsess over.

But it's not just the lyrics that make this music especially cathartic in a pure and addictive way. The music itself employs hard-rock instrumentation, orchestral interludes, and even a segment of latin chanting to give an individual, mental crisis a sense of grand scale and importance. Until that point, many mental health issues were minimized and derided as "only in one's head", and an implicit acknowledgement that these issues are both real and life-threatening was novel at the time. In more recent years, media attention to the threats of mental illness especially to adolescents has made progress, but there is still much that needs to change. Music like this is probably doing more good than harm, despite its tendency toward tiresome, formulaic melodrama. So I tend to enjoy it, even now that I am older, healthier, and have slightly more nuanced (even hipsterish) tastes.

A groundbreaking approach to the portrayal of mental illness may not have been the band's original intention, by the way. It's often circulated as a "shocking but true fact" that Evanescence got their start as a Christian rock band. I did not find this shocking. I had noticed almost right away that Tourniquet contained lines like "my soul cries for deliverance," and references to salvation and even "Christ". In several songs it is easy to interpret the source of intense inner suffering not as mental illness, but sin and damnation. But I am not a Christian, and I do deal with mental illness issues, so I like my interpretation better.

Next: The Open Door
And: The End of Shelf One