Dec. 13: Singer Amy Lee of Evanescence is 29 today.

Born Amy Lynn Hartzler, but known professionally as Amy Lee, is a  singer-songwriter and classically trained pianist. She is co-founder and lead vocalist of the rock band Evanescence which has been described as a rock or metal, but mostly as a Gothic band.

Amy says her biggest musical influences range from classical musicians such as Mozart to modern artists Björk, Tori Amos, Danny Elfman and Plumb.

Amy's father is a disc jockey and TV personality. Lee took classical piano lessons for nine years. Her family moved around quite a bit, before settling in Little Rock, Arkansas, where Evanescence started. She wrote her first song when she was eleven years old. At the time, she hoped to become a classical composer.

Amy briefly attended Middle Tennessee State University to study music theory and composition and later dropped out to focus on the band.

Lee co-founded the band with guitarist Ben Moody. The two met at a youth camp after Moody heard Lee playing Meat Loaf's "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)" on the piano. Within a month, the pair were playing acoustic sets at Arkansas book stores and coffee houses, and they eventually recorded two EPs, Evanescence EP in 1998, and Sound Asleep EP the following year.

In 2000, Evanescence recorded a longer EP Origin. This demo contains three songs from the debut album Fallen and was written by Lee and Moody: "Whisper," "Imaginary" and "My Immortal."

The band released their first full-length album, Fallen, on Wind-up Records in 2003. Fallen sold more than 15 million copies worldwide and helped the band win two Grammy Awards.

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A year later, Evanescence released their first live album, Anywhere but Home, which sold more than one million copies worldwide. In 2006, the band released their second studio album, The Open Door, which sold more than five million copies.

The song "Hello" from Fallen and "Like You" from The Open Door has been reported to have been written for her younger sister who died in 1987 at the age of three from an unidentified illness.  

The line-up of the band has changed several times during its history.

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