Idol Castoff Carly Smithson Hooks Up With Evanescence

American Idol's season seven Irish rocker finalist joins former rockers as frontwoman for new group the Fallen

Adam Lambert's not the only American Idol finalist to field offers about fronting an established rock band.

Season seven's sixth-place finisher, Carly Smithson, is eschewing a solo career and taking a stab at becoming a frontwoman, establishing herself as the lead singer of the Fallen, a rock group that teams her with three original members of Evanescence. (Incidentally, Fallen was also the name of the now disbanded group's hit 2003 album.)

"I kept getting told that 'you don't have the rock voice, you can't do rock music,' " Smithson told the Los Angeles Times, which first reported the group's formation.

"But it's everything I am. It's everything I listen to. I'm not the regular girl next door."

The Irish rocker will be the de facto Amy Lee of the group—bearing a resemblance to the Evanescence frontwoman both physically and vocally—and joins the lineup of guitarist and songwriter Ben Moody, drummer Rocky Gray, guitarist John Lecompt and bassist Marty O'Brian, the sole non-Evanescence alum.

In another coincidence, during last summer's now customary American Idols Live! tour, one of Smithson's regular numbers was "Bring Me to Life," the song Moody & Co. used to audition potential frontwomen.

Moody, who has previously worked with Idol alums Kelly Clarkson and Chris Daughtry as well as Avril Lavigne and Celine Dion, told the L.A. Times that he and his bandmates set out to find their musical soul mate and undoubtedly did in Smithson.

The rocker said he and his Fallen comrades "had been planning all this stuff on one side, and Carly's been planning it on the other and they just happened to be literally identical."

"And I don't mean, like, Oh, they were kind of the same. I mean, an uncanny amount of detail being identical. And it was just clear to me that we had found our better half."

The group formally debuts on Monday, when the band's first single will be available for free download on wearethefallen.com. The band won't release an album right away, but plans to tour nationally for a year and a half and will release songs, two at a time, online.

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