“I write it and I put it out there, and people can interpret it the way they like.” It is hard to talk about the music when the music apparently speaks for itself. “That’s the thing about my music,” she says, exasperated. “I appreciate you trying to really get the juice,” she says mockingly, “but I’m not gonna go there.” I explain that I’m not looking for gossip, but context for her most personal album. All Lavigne will say is that my assumption is “obviously” correct and that they’re categorically not about her second ex-husband, Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger they have a “great relationship” (he worked on the album). Other songs allude to a toxic relationship. She keeps saying how “meaningful” the music is, but won’t go deeper. This is the kind of dry “focus on the music” Lavigne prefers. “I didn’t want to do what everyone was doing,” she says, mentioning a need for “organic musical realness” and constructing songs around her vocals “versus building this crazy loud track and just burying a vocal in it”. But keeping pace with pop wasn’t Lavigne’s concern. Empowerment anthems like this were everywhere a few years ago, but have been replaced by stark admissions of vulnerability and nihilism. Inner strength is the prevailing theme of the eight songs I heard, which often evoke Lana Del Rey’s moody epics. She started writing on guitar in bed, graduating to piano when she felt stronger. “The emotion was so raw.”ĭespite Lavigne’s illness, she says she never doubted her capacity to commit to a whole album. “It just felt really good to be singing,” she says. It is her best song in years, an emphatic, gothic ballad that is doing well on the US Christian singles chart and has 57m YouTube views. But it is hard to separate Lavigne’s illness from her sixth album, Head Above Water, named after a song that came to her as she lay in her mother’s arms, feeling as if she was drowning. Who cared for her? Her manager interrupts and insists we “really focus on the music”. “I was like: ‘OK, now I can at least start treating something.’” She was treated at home. “It was a relief” to get the diagnosis, she says tersely, calling from Los Angeles. What happens when a teenage immortal faces death? Lavigne, now 34, doesn’t want to talk about that. But there is no shame in being a gateway artist, a role Lavigne seemed surprisingly happy to keep playing. It was music many quickly graduated from, to acts whose credits didn’t list multiple co-writers: the drug of authenticity hooks teenagers fast.
AVRIL LAVIGNE MUSIC TYPE HOW TO
Then 13, I was one of them I wore Dad’s tie to the shops and wasted hours learning how to copy her handwriting.
Her alternately fun, angsty debut album, Let Go, seemed authentic enough – she played guitar! The lyrics were handwritten! – to convince a generation of teenage girls that she, and by association, they, were more credible than Britney. It’s that she never seemed to want to grow up. It’s not that she didn’t have an indelible look: her low-slung skate pants, tie and ramrod-straight hair are an enduring fancy-dress costume. Somehow, this tension never affected Avril Lavigne, the Canadian pop-punk star who arrived in 2002 aged 17 with the brilliant Complicated, a heaving teenage sigh directed at some poseur boy. Breaking the ice usually involves a bad-girl reinvention, if not a genuine breakdown.
P op stars – especially women – are frozen at the age they become famous.
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