Amy Lee and Ben Moody meet at a Christian youth camp

Singer and pianist Amy Lee and guitarist Ben Moody met in 1994 in Little Rock, Arkansas at ages 13 and 14, when the two were at a Christian youth camp where Lee played piano during sport activities and Moody played acoustic guitar and she thought they could play music together. Lee thinks what drew them together at the time was that they “didn’t fit in that well” and were “out of [their] element in this silly camp environment”. Within a month of meeting, Lee brought Moody a cassette tape of her playing guitar and singing a song she wrote. They became musical collaborators, playing and working on music at Lee’s home, and were soon performing acoustic sets at book stores and coffee houses in the Little Rock area. Lee said their music at the time “sounded different because we didn’t have the means to make it sound like we wanted”. Strings, choirs, and “dramatic, cinematic” sounds were musical desires they couldn’t materialize as they were “just two kids in a basement”. Lee had a 16-track recorder and she and Moody would use it and Pro Tools , “fake strings and choirs” on her keyboard, and layer sounds and beats for their early material, which they mixed and produced. “We were basically just putting it down to remember what we wanted”, Lee said.