When Amy Lee of Evanescence [ tickets ] penned "Call Me When You're Sober" about her ex-boyfriend, Seether [ tickets ] frontman Shaun Morgan, it left the South African musician wide open to criticism, he said.

"What she didn't factor into the equation of Amyland is I now have to deal with idiots on a regular basis that take her word as gospel," Morgan said during an interview with LiveDaily. "I have to now deal with morons like that. The other night, I walked out of a hotel in Toronto and someone was blaring 'Call Me When You're Sober' parked right in front of the hotel. They started playing it as I walked out of the hotel. I don't know what they were trying to prove, or what their motivation was. I know it certainly wouldn't have been the case if she hadn't gone and told everyone, you know what I mean? It's like kicking someone when they're down, but she's good at that. Whatever."

Morgan didn't mince words during the interview, but he took the relative high road musically with his latest album, "Finding Beauty in Negative Spaces." He said there isn't one direct response to Lee on the album--however, the song "Breakdown" approaches that: "So break me down if it makes you feel right/And hate me now if it keeps you all right."

"I wanted to write something back that wasn't on quite the same level," said Morgan, whose band recorded the duet "Broken" with Lee. "Honestly, I'm still trying to understand what I did to her that was so bad."

The last couple years have been rough for Morgan. Besides the implosion of his relationship with Lee, Morgan went through rehab about the same time that "Call Me When You're Sober" was released. He also lost his brother, Eugene "June Ra" Alain Welgemoed, to whom "Finding Beauty in Negative Spaces" was dedicated, to suicide. Writing the album was cathartic for Morgan.

"I think it makes everything better to deal with," Morgan said of the creative process. "There was a lot of stuff that this album touched on, like when Amy released 'Call Me When You're Sober.' There [were] little pieces from the past year. I wrote about 60 songs, and there were certainly some very angry ones and certainly some very, very mellow ones. There were phases I was going through as I was writing. This album represents a little piece of all of those phases, I think."

Choosing 12 songs out of 60 wasn't difficult for Morgan, his bandmates, management, the record company and producer Howard Benson--for the most part. However, Morgan particularly campaigned for "Like Suicide," the album's opening track.

"The band wanted 'Like Suicide' on the album and the label didn't," Morgan said. "We said, 'Fine. We'll make it a single. We'll make it indispensable to the album.' We started filming it and putting it on YouTube and putting it on MySpace. We went through the whole phase of writing it and rehearsing it to recording the drums, bass, guitar solos and vocals. I think it was cool. If we play it now, a lot of people recognize it. Usually, it takes a couple months for new songs on new albums to start picking up. But this one has been getting a response since day one. We had done that guerrilla marketing tactic of our own. I'm just glad it made it to the album. Then, after we finished recording it, [the label] said, 'Oh, you're so right.'"

One choice that was unanimous was the first single "Fake It," which Morgan describes as a "sexy angry" song.

"I've been in a couple relationships lately," Morgan said. "When you get to the end of a long relationship and you get surprised by somebody's personality, that's quite something. If you spend in excess of a year with somebody, you would assume that a year is enough time to figure out who somebody is. To have that happen back to back, that's pretty bizarre. I don't know if society teaches people to be that way. I just haven't met anyone cool."

The song also is an ode to his relationship with the city of Los Angeles, where Morgan now lives.

"I certainly don't intend on staying there much longer. It's probably about the relationship with Los Angeles itself. It's probably about society in general and how kids today have no respect for creativity or have no aspirations beyond being like Hollywood celebrities. [Celebrity magazine] subscriptions are through the roof. Guitar magazines that teach you how to play--something of value to offer--are on the decline or disappearing. Art magazines are disappearing. The art section in the library is getting smaller. Barnes and Noble are getting smaller. The brain stuff is getting smaller. But the materialistic stuff is getting bigger. I think it's a combination of all those things. If you dumb everything down, that's what kids are into. It's annoying. This is certainly not the renaissance we're in right now. There's no celebration of great minds. There's a celebration of drunk chicks with no underwear on. It's quite bizarre."