Proving he has no delusions of grandeur, John LeCompt knows full well that Evanescence is all about one person: Amy Lee. So even though the guitarist has been by the singer’s side since before the band had a record deal, he in some ways still considers himself hired help.

“Evanescence is Amy’s band,” the easygoing LeCompt says matter of factly, on the line from an Ottawa tour stop. “She’s the head of the whole deal and we all respect that. And that makes it fun for me. We’re doing so well that we are all totally taken care of on the road—we have all these people whose jobs are to make sure we’re happy. At home I’m a husband and a father of two, so I have to be a grownup. Out here I don’t have to be a grownup. I can just do the rock-star thing, and that’s totally cool.”

As the raised-on-death-metal guitarist notes, Evanescence is indeed doing well these days, something that—considering the drama of the past couple of years—few would have predicted. The soap opera started in the months after 2003’s Fallen rocketed up the charts, transforming the Little Rock, Arkansas, band from DIY nobodies into one of the decade’s biggest success stories. As students of ancient history know, Lee had a major falling out with founding guitarist Ben Moody, leading to his abrupt departure mid-tour. Considering that Moody cowrote most of Fallen with the singer, all but the faithful were ready to write Evanescence off as a one-hit wonder. Seeing how the debut album sold 14 million copies, few could blame them.

Initially determined to go it alone, Lee teamed up with Moody’s replacement, guitarist Terry Balsamo, to dream up The Open Door, a dark-skies fusion of nü-metal, coffin-black goth, and ethereal rock that shipped platinum right out of the box. Nothing—including the departure last year of long-time bassist Will Boyd and a mild stroke suffered by Balsamo—has slowed the band down. Whether you’ll argue the group is a one-woman show or not, there’s no disputing that Evanescence is now one of rock ’n’ roll’s few legitimate superstar acts. For LeCompt, who contributed to the writing of both Fallen and The Open Door, that means he’s achieved—and maintained—a level of success he never dreamed of back in the ’90s, when he played with a string of go-nowhere metal acts.

“Most of the guys that I hung out with were always like ‘Dude, we’re going to make it by putting a band together and playing music,’” he relates. “I was always like ‘Dude, that’s never going to happen—it’s a huge world, we all live in a small town. Just play for the love of playing.’ It’s funny, but none of those guys play anymore.”

In some ways, however, the legacy of Little Rock’s now-retired rivet-heads lives on. LeCompt argues that Evanescence was strongly influenced by the metal bands that he and drummer Rocky Gray did time in during their younger years. That was especially true on Fallen.

“I definitely feel a lot of my spirit all over that record,” he says. “Ben Moody was so much younger than me—he kind of grew up watching bands that me and Rocky were in. He took a lot of influence from our playing, and he actually played guitar a lot like me because he learned from me.”

As much as he loved Moody, LeCompt figures that he has more in common with Balsamo, which meant that everyone in Evanescence was more or less on the same page when they were recording The Open Door. For proof of that, check out “Lose Control”, which counterbalances Lee’s funereal vocals with brute-force blasts of metal-church guitar.

“We’re the same age, so we have the same influences,” he says of Lee’s new right-hand man. “All the death metal bands that I like, he liked. We basically grew up in the ’80s in two different places but with totally similar tastes. Although we never met each other until the band [Evanescence], we just clicked automatically.”

Like both Balsamo and Lee, LeCompt realized that Evanescence had plenty at stake on The Open Door.

“It dawned on me that we could be one of those one-hit-wonder bands,” he admits. “But at the same time, I wasn’t really feeling that that was going to happen. Looking at the Internet and stuff, kids are really avid fans of the group. They don’t just like it because they like the songs, they like the whole thing: Amy’s beauty and where she’s coming from and the darkness of the band. So I figured we’d be around for a while, rather than people going ‘We’re tired of you—let’s move on to Fall Out Boy.’?”

Evanescence gives its Goth Talk–fixated disciples plenty to be captivated by on The Open Door. Featuring what sounds like a 100-strong chorus of fallen angels, “Your Star” drags classic rock through the fields of the Nephilim, while “Weight of the World” boasts enough bone-crushing riffage for the most loyal of Ministry fans. There are moments of obscene beauty (the black-skies ballad “Good Enough”) and moments that will convince you Lee is every bit as tortured as she makes herself out to be (the ode-to-the-afterlife “Like You”). Goth rock’s reigning Queen of the Damned is at her best on “Lacrymosa”, an operatic wonder that is equal parts Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Danny Elfman, and, of course, the band that made Little Rock famous.

“Terry and Amy had a lot of fun doing it [‘Lacrymosa’],” the guitarist reveals. “They were, for lack of a better way of putting things, going ‘What’s the most ridiculous thing that we can do?’ I mean, how do you expand upon Mozart, who was sort of like the metal god of his day? I don’t know if we made him sound better or cooler, but it definitely was as over-the-top as possible.”

Clearly vintage death metal and bombast-?injected goth aren’t the only things rocking Evanescence at the moment, which may explain why the band has never sounded grander.

Evanescence plays the Pacific Coliseum tonight (January 18).