You know those shows where you go, just a little concerned about whether the singer is going to be able to pull off the vocals?

That should not be a concern with Evanescence and Halestorm, who have joined forces in what they call "one of the biggest female-fronted tours in years."

This is a meeting of powerhouse singers with Amy Lee, who fronts goth-metal heavies Evanescence, and Lzzy Hale, who leads hard-rockers Halestorm.

Evanescence is touring behind emotionally charged fifth album "The Bitter Truth," the band's new first material in 10 years. Halestorm just came out roaring with "Back From The Dead," the first single from a new album coming in 2022.

The two singers jumped on a recent Zoom call to talk about the tour.

———

Q: So, you've been out on this tour for a while. How is it going?

Hale: It's amazing. It's so very magical and it feels so great to be back on stage. Nobody's holding anything back, we're living every moment like it could be taken away from us ... again.

Lee: Totally. It's amazing to be back and it's amazing to be back with people we love hanging out with and are inspiring to watch.

Q: Tell me how you got to know each other. It goes back to back to 2012, right?

Hale: Yeah, we met back on the Carnival of Madness Tour. Obviously, we had heard of each other before then but had never gotten the chance to meet. As all of us touring bands get to do, unlike normal people, we met on the road and we hit it off instantly. It was amazing to find a comrade, because we have very similar paths. Even though the boys in our bands are all allies, they don't have the same timeline as we do. It was very fulfilling, and we've kept in touch ever since.

Q: What are those similarities, other than being women running bands with a bunch of guys?

Lee: Both of us have musician dads and got into music through our parents. My dad was a radio DJ for 30 years and also played guitar and stuff and made it a point to get me excited about music and let me play with his records at work and teach me how to play guitar a little bit. Just being who we are and getting into music and, yeah, being a little bit different for being a female, I really saw that as a strength and something that would make us different, and that's good. It's interesting when you see other people's perspective, of seeing different as a bad thing, that industry mindset of, "Well, if it's not like something else, we're afraid of it," because all my favorite bands and artists did something that stood out, that was unique and different. They weren't following in somebody's footsteps, exactly. You need to be who you really are, so both of us, I think, we had to fight our own fight that way. ... And we both won.

Q: Do you have shared influences, or do you come from different musical worlds in that way?

Hale: Some shared but some are completely different. We both love the Beatles! And Janet Jackson. The full array. No, Amy has introduced me to a lot of things. During the '90s I was kind of a weird kid. I was listening to Alice Cooper and Dio when I was like 11 — again, my dad's influence. He was a bass player back in the day. But Amy and I both own this genre because it's what we like to listen to. It has nothing to do with gender. It's nice to have a friend that understands that, being a woman and owning this hard rock genre. My first influences were like a lot of '80s dude rock, and then I kind of missed the '90s so I went right from the '80s to early 2000s rock. And then when I met my guitar player he was like, "Dude, you gotta listen to Soundgarden and STP," and it was like, "Oh this is rad." So, I have some kind of a strange timeline.

Q: I've asked a lot of female artists about their influences and you expect them to say, like, Grace Slick or Ann Wilson or Stevie Nicks, and they so often will say, like, Robert Plant, or you, just now, the Beatles.

Lee: It's what Lzzy said. It's not about gender. Those women are empowering and are part of the reason that we're here, and totally rad. But it's more about the music than anything so superficial or physical as what you look like or what you come from, necessarily. It's cool what Lzzy said, because I was a weird kid, music-style wise, growing up too but in a very different way, because I was super grunge. I loved alternative music — big-time Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, Veruca Salt, Garbage. Bjork is my favorite artist of all time. But also I was inspired by very dramatic classical music, big into Beethoven and Mozart and was studying classical piano, so I was a nerd on that level. I went to a prep school and I was one of the only kids who liked what I liked at all. It's interesting how that is, when you have that feeling that you have something that's just your own, your own discovery with music. It makes it special.

Q: Amy, there was a long wait for new Evanescence material, and then you got this album out in March. How do you define this record, and was it a relief to get it out?

Lee: It's been very life-giving, all of it, the whole creation of it, and during a time when there has been so much anxiety and uncertainty and frustration and angst. There were so many things that we needed to get out, that I needed to get out. We started making the album in 2019 and we had a few songs. We had started recording in 2020, and we had recorded four, but we didn't have the rest of it written. We blew all our rules out the window and said, "Let's just go in and record some, go out on tour for a while, come back and write some more," and I'm so glad that we did that. I'm into reinventing the process to keep things fresh and exciting, and we have done that in a lot of ways this time, and we did it because we had to do it. It was the pandemic and we were all stuck apart, living all over the world, and the isolation for me is part of my process. We all kind of used it to pour all those big feelings into the music, and for me this album has a new sense of purpose that's beyond myself, because I have just been feeling the weight of the world and also a communion with other humans, as we have all been fighting against, really, the same thing through this pandemic and just feeling connected to people through the sense of loss. Because I have experienced that before in my life, in a very great way. I just lost my brother in 2018 and was really still processing that big time through the writing of the album. The music on this album is about connecting with myself, with each other, with my band, also just with other people all over the world.

Q: What was it like to get back on stage?

Lee: It was just really the best release. It felt so good. We were all nervous. We were all hitting the gym hardcore that week and walking on stage like, "Oh God. I hope I can still do this ... after wearing sweatpants for two years."

Q: Lzzy, what's going on with Halestorm? You came out strong with "Back from the Dead."

Hale: Very similar to what Amy was saying, we started writing for this album before lockdown and then after the pandemic hit, really, all those songs just seemed very unimportant, just a little trite, so we kind of went back to the drawing board, and what you'll be hearing — we're done with the album and we're actually getting mixes daily as we speak — is everything that we were feeling, this roller coaster ride of emotions I was going through, mental health-wise when all of a sudden, this thing, this touring life that was 90% of your identity was stolen from you, and you have to put all that energy somewhere else, so we just put all of that into the record. And I hate saying this out loud, but I feel like this is the best record we've done, because we didn't have the other thing to fall back on and we were faced with an unknown future, so it's just is this roller coaster of loss and how to find yourself again and how do you use that as your superpower. I think for the fans and anybody who gets this record, I think they're going to be able to see themselves in that same ride that we were all on, because we're just writing very much in the now. We also switched up the recording process, where I did all my vocals first and we ended up building the tracks around that, so it has a different energy to it, because I guess we were kind of building the pyramid upside down, and I'm just leading the charge, and it's really fun to listen to it that way. Also, my little brother's in the band and our crazy drummer, and we just all went for "Go big or go home," because we weren't sure if we were going to be able to go out and do this the normal way again. So it's a banger of a record and I cannot wait for it.