Earlier this month, EVANESCENCE postponed the remaining five shows on its U.S. tour with HALESTORM due to multiple COVID-19 cases within the touring party. The concerts in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Camden, Newark, and Worcester, which were originally scheduled to take place between December 12 and December 18, will now happen at the end of January.
Speaking to the Philadelphia radio station 93.3 WMMR about the shows postponements, EVANESCENCE singer Amy Lee stated (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "There [were] a few COVID cases in our touring party, like has happened to so many people. And we just knew that right away the safe thing to do was to hit pause and shut it down and keep everybody safe. Fortunately, we were able to reschedule our last five dates for January right away, so that definitely felt better.
"In these times, you've just gotta do your best, do everything you can to protect yourself and then be flexible, because there are some things about it that are just kind of out of your control," she said before adding: "It is pretty wild — unlike any time I've ever lived through."
Asked if everyone in EVANESCENCE and the band's crew was vaccinated before hitting the road, Amy said: "Totally. I think what being vaccinated really does is keep you from having really severe reactions and potentially dying. So it can save your life. And I hope that people will just understand that even if it's not you or the person next to you, you can still catch it and pass it. Vaccinated or not, we should still be masking up, we should still be very careful; there's a new variant around.
"But, yeah, we were all testing daily, actually, on top of being vaccinated and wearing masks all the time — except when we're at the end of the day in your bus, like, 'Okay, finally I can chill.' Or on stage. So, even with all those precautions in place, we're still having to travel from place to place and going to venues and there's a crowd there and everything else.
"Just in whatever any of us are doing, I definitely in every way would advocate get the vaccine," she added. "And beyond that, especially now, heading into the winter time and the holidays and everything, be careful. Care for the ones you love. [Take] the test when you first get together. That's definitely something that helped us because we were able to catch it immediately and stop any spread from happening with us and stop the whole thing. But we are really grateful. We've had a gorgeous, beautiful tour, and it's the first one back since all this madness. It's just been something that we are so, so grateful [for]. I am so grateful to do this for my job. We had time to make this gorgeous album and beautiful production, and I'm just really happy we're gonna be able to pick it back up again next month."
New EVANESCENCE + HALESTORM dates:
Jan. 14 - Cincinnati, OH @ Heritage Bank Center (postponed from Dec. 12)
Jan. 16 - Camden, NJ @ BB&T Pavilion (postponed from Dec. 17)
Jan. 17 - Pittsburgh, PA @ Peterson Events Center (postponed from Dec. 14)
Jan. 20 - Worcester, MA @ DCU Center (postponed from Dec. 18)
Jan. 21 - Newark, NJ @ Prudential Center (postponed from Dec. 15)
EVANESCENCE and HALESTORM's tour kicked off on November 5 at in Portland, Oregon and was scheduled to run through December 18 in Worcester, Massachusetts.
EVANESCENCE and HALESTORM first toured together in 2012. Lee later guested on the track "Break In" on HALESTORM's 2020 "Reimagined" EP and HALESTORM frontwoman Lzzy Hale lent backing vocals to the EVANESCENCE song "Use My Voice" and appeared in the accompanying music video.
EVANESCENCE was on tour supporting this year's "The Bitter Truth" album. HALESTORM was promoting its latest single, "Back From The Dead", which recently became the band's sixth No. 1 at rock radio.
