Ex-Evanescence Members Debut We Are the Fallen With Smithson

We Are the Fallen — the new band comprised of onetime American Idol hopeful Carly Smithson and former members of Evanescence — made their debut in L.A. yesterday, performing two songs: their original first single "Bury Me Alive" and Evanescence's "Going Under." The band has already had to change their name due to a potential copyright issue (they were "The Fallen" earlier this week), and Buzznet reports that at a Q&A following the gig, guitarist Ben Moody said the moniker "seemed like a really good idea to encompass all of our fans that we already had with our previous band and I guess make it more of an inviting thing for all the fans to come in and be a part of something rather than just be a fan of a group." Video of the press conference is posted at Blabbermouth.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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