Avril Lavigne

• 1. Introduction

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  In November 2000, Avril Lavigne stood in a Manhattan recording studio and sang for Antonio "L.A." Reid, then the head of Arista Records. The audition ran for just 15 minutes. Lavigne, a Canadian singer and songwriter, was 16 years old. She would go on to sell tens of millions of records, and critics would keep arguing over whether she was really punk at all. Her story raises three questions. How does a teenager from small-town Ontario end up singing for a record executive? What sound did she and her collaborators build to launch her? And who actually wrote the songs that made her famous?

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• 2. Napanee Basement

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  Avril Ramona Lavigne was born on the 27th of September 1984 in Belleville, Ontario. Her father chose the name Avril, the French word for April. French roots ran through the family. Her grandfather Maurice Yves Lavigne, born in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, served in the Royal Canadian Air Force and married a Frenchwoman, Lucie Dzierzbicki, in 1953. Their son Jean-Claude, Avril's father, was born in 1954 at an air force station near Grostenquin in Lorraine. He grew up in Ontario and married Judith-Rosanne, known as Judy, Loshaw in 1975.

  At the age of two, Avril was already singing "Jesus Loves Me" in the car on the way home from church. Her parents noticed her voice that day. The family was evangelical Christian, and her father often played bass at the Third Day Worship Centre in Kingston. Her older brother Matthew and younger sister Michelle teased her about the singing. "My brother used to knock on the wall because I used to sing myself to sleep and he thought it was really annoying."

  When Avril was five, the family moved to Napanee, a town of roughly 5,000 people at the time. Her father bought her a microphone, a drum kit, a keyboard and several guitars. He then turned the family basement into a studio. At 14, she began going to karaoke sessions with her parents. She sang at country fairs, covering Garth Brooks, the Chicks and Shania Twain, and she started writing her own material. Her first song, "Can't Stop Thinking About You", was about a teenage crush. She called it "cheesy cute".

  Lavigne also played ice hockey in high school. As a right winger in a boys' league, she was named most valuable player twice. In 1999, a radio contest would put her on a stage beside one of the singers she covered at those country fairs.

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• 3. Getting Noticed

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  In 1999, Lavigne won a radio contest, and the prize was a duet with Shania Twain at the Corel Centre in Ottawa. The crowd numbered 20,000. They sang Twain's "What Made You Say That", and Lavigne told her idol that she wanted to be "a famous singer".

  Closer to home, folksinger Stephen Medd spotted her during a performance with the Lennox Community Theatre. He invited her to sing on "Touch the Sky" for his 1999 album, Quinte Spirit. She returned for "Temple of Life" and "Two Rivers" on his follow-up, My Window to You, in 2000.

  In December 1999, a man named Cliff Fabri heard her singing country covers at a Chapters bookstore in Kingston. He became her first professional manager. Fabri mailed VHS tapes of her home performances to industry contacts, and several executives came to see her. One of them was Mark Jowett, co-founder of the Canadian management firm Nettwerk, who received karaoke recordings made in her parents' basement. Jowett set her up with producer Peter Zizzo in New York during the summer of 2000. There she wrote a song called "Why", and Arista Records took notice of her on that trip.

  A few months later, Arista A&R representative Ken Krongard brought Reid to Zizzo's Manhattan studio to hear her. Reid was "so impressed" that he signed her immediately. The deal was worth $1.25 million for two albums, plus a $900,000 advance on publishing.

  Back in Ontario, Lavigne had found her place among the skater clique at her high school. That look would carry into her first album. School still left her feeling insecure, so with her parents' support she left to focus on music. Nettwerk then chose her backing band, mostly members of Closet Monster, because it wanted young players from the Canadian punk scene who suited her personality.

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• 4. Finding the Sound

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  Joshua Sarubin, an A&R executive at Arista, was handed the job of shaping Lavigne's debut. He told HitQuarters that the early months went badly. They spent several months in New York trying out co-writers, including Sabelle Breer, Curt Frasca and Peter Zizzo. Some good songs came out of those sessions, but none of them suited Lavigne or her voice.

  The turning point came in May 2001 in Los Angeles. Working with the production team the Matrix, Lavigne wrote two songs, among them "Complicated". The label saw it as her real breakthrough, and it became her debut single. She also worked with singer-songwriter Clif Magness, and recording of the album, Let Go, wrapped in January 2002.

  Let Go came out in June 2002 and reached number two on the Billboard 200 in the US. It hit number one in Australia, Canada and the UK. At 17, Lavigne became the youngest female soloist to top the UK albums chart at that time. By the end of 2002, the album was four-times Platinum in the US, which made her the bestselling female artist of the year. In Canada it passed 1 million sales by May 2003 and earned a diamond certification. By 2009 it had sold over 16 million copies worldwide, and by March 2018 the RIAA certified it seven-times Platinum.

  The singles carried it. "Complicated" reached number one in Australia and number two in the US. "Sk8er Boi" and "I'm with You" followed into the US top ten. That made her only the second artist to place three top-ten songs from a debut album on Billboard's Mainstream Top 40. In 2002 she won Best New Artist at the MTV Video Music Awards. In 2003 she won four Juno Awards from six nominations, and eight Grammy nominations arrived too.

  Lavigne herself felt differently about her breakthrough songs. She said the Matrix songs were good for a first record, but she did not want to be "that pop" anymore. She named "Losing Grip" as a track she preferred over the radio singles.

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• 5. Worldwide Reach

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  Under My Skin reached stores in May 2004 and debuted at number one in Australia, Canada, Japan, the UK and the US. It has sold 10 million copies, 3.2 million of them in the US. Lavigne wrote most of it with Canadian singer-songwriter Chantal Kreviazuk. Kreviazuk's husband, Raine Maida of Our Lady Peace, co-produced it with Butch Walker and Don Gilmore. In September 2004 Lavigne began the Bonez Tour, her first world tour, which lasted a year.

  In April 2007, The Best Damn Thing debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 in the US. Its lead single, "Girlfriend", gave her a first number one on the Billboard Hot 100. It also topped the charts in Australia, Canada and Japan. Lavigne recorded it in English and in seven more languages: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Japanese and Mandarin. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry ranked it the most-downloaded track in the world for 2007, at 7.3 million copies across all eight versions. The song also made her the first person to reach 100 million views on a YouTube video.

  In December 2007, Forbes ranked her eighth among its top earners under 25, with annual earnings of $12 million. Her reach in Asia grew too. Her 2008 tour made her the first western artist to play a full tour in China. She is considered the biggest western artist in Asia. In Japan, her first three albums have sold more than 1 million copies.

  Not every stop went smoothly. In mid-August 2008, Malaysia's Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party tried to ban her Kuala Lumpur show, judging her stage moves "too sexy". The concert was set for the 29th of August, two days before Malaysia's Independence Day, and the party feared it would promote wrong values. On the 21st of August 2008, MTV reported that the government had approved it.

  Sport gave her another stage. Lavigne is the only artist to have performed at three different multi-sport events. She sang at the closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Torino in 2006 and in Vancouver in 2010. In 2015 she performed at the opening ceremony of the Special Olympics World Summer Games.

  Her later albums came at a slower pace. Goodbye Lullaby arrived in March 2011 and Avril Lavigne in November 2013. Head Above Water followed on the 15th of February 2019. Love Sux, released on the 25th of February 2022, returned her to pop punk and debuted at number nine on the Billboard 200. On the 30th of June 2024, she played Glastonbury Festival in England for the first time and drew one of the largest crowds the Other Stage has seen.

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• 6. The Punk Question

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  Evan Taubenfeld, Lavigne's first guitarist and close friend, called the punk label a very touchy subject. In his words, "Avril isn't punk, but she never really pretended to claim to come from that scene. She had pop punk music and the media ended up doing the rest." Lavigne agreed with part of that. "I have been labelled like I'm this angry girl, a rebel... punk, and I am so not any of them." Yet she also said she listens to punk rock and that her music shows its influence.

  Her record collection explains the confusion. Early on she loved Garth Brooks, the Chicks, Shania Twain, Alanis Morissette and Lisa Loeb. By the time she left school she was drawn to Blink-182, the Offspring, Sum 41, NOFX and Green Day. She named the debut album by Third Eye Blind as one of the biggest influences on her career.

  Her clothes did the rest of the talking. At first she wore neckties over tank tops, baggy clothes, skater shoes or Converses, and wristbands. Sometimes she wrapped shoelaces around her fingers. Press and fans called her the "anti-Britney". Lavigne pushed back: "I'm not made up and I'm not being told what to say and how to act, so they have to call me the anti-Britney, which I'm not." By November 2002, she had dropped the ties because she felt she was "wearing a costume".

  The look kept changing. For Under My Skin she traded skating outfits for black tutus and an image marked by angst. During The Best Damn Thing years she dyed her hair blonde with a pink streak and wore tight jeans and heels. She also modelled for Harper's Bazaar. Of the old ties and tank tops she said, "It had its time and place. And now I'm all grown up, and I've moved on."

  A stranger story grew around her image. A conspiracy theory claims she died in 2003 and was replaced by a body double. It began as a joke on a Brazilian blog, though some theorists took it seriously. When an Australian radio station, KIIS 106.5, asked her about it in November 2018, she said, "Some people think that I'm not the real me, which is so weird!"

  Her influence reaches far from where she started. Lindsay Lohan said her role as Anna Coleman in the 2003 film Freaky Friday drew on Lavigne's style and attitude. Rapper Rico Nasty named one of her alter egos Trap Lavigne. She explained, "she hated the term punk, but she was so punk rock."

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• 7. Whose Songs

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  "I am a writer, and I won't accept people trying to take that away from me." Lavigne said this about the media's attitude toward her songwriting, and added that she had been writing full-structured songs since she was 14. Her career has been shadowed by doubts about it anyway.

  The first dispute involved the Matrix. The trio said they were the main writers of "Complicated", "Sk8er Boi" and "I'm with You". Lavigne said she was the primary writer of every song on Let Go. "None of those songs aren't from me," she said.

  In 2007, Chantal Kreviazuk, who wrote with her on Under My Skin, accused Lavigne of plagiarism. She also said, "Avril doesn't really sit and write songs by herself or anything." Lavigne rejected the claim and considered legal action for what she called "clear defamation". Kreviazuk later apologized. She said, "Avril is an accomplished songwriter and it has been my privilege to work with her."

  Shortly afterward came a lawsuit. Tommy Dunbar, founder of the band the Rubinoos, sued Lavigne, her publishing company and Lukasz "Dr. Luke" Gottwald. He alleged that parts of his song "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" had been taken for "Girlfriend". Gottwald defended her, saying that he and Avril wrote the song together. He argued the chord progression matched ten different Blink-182 songs and "It's the Sex Pistols, not the Rubinoos." In January 2008, the parties reached a confidential settlement.

  Lavigne described her albums as uneven in how personal they were. Of Under My Skin she said, "each song comes from a personal experience of mine, and there are so much emotions in those songs". The Best Damn Thing was different. "Some of the songs I wrote didn't even mean that much to me," she said, and her goal was to "make it fun". Goodbye Lullaby, by her account, was "more stripped down, deeper".

  The song with the most unusual afterlife may be "Breakaway". Lavigne co-wrote it, and Kelly Clarkson recorded it for The Princess Diaries 2 soundtrack in 2004. It became the title track of Clarkson's second album. In June 2022, the 20th anniversary edition of Let Go finally put Lavigne's own version on record, among six previously unreleased bonus tracks.

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• 8. Beyond the Stage

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  Over the Hedge, which opened on the 19th of May 2006, gave Lavigne her feature film debut. She voiced Heather, a Virginia opossum. Recording came easily, but she kept gesturing and hitting the microphone stand, so the director and screenwriter asked her to hold still. The film made $38 million in its opening weekend and $336 million worldwide. She also played Alice, a student set on freeing cows, in Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation. That film opened on the 17th of November 2006 and earned about $2 million. Both premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Earlier she filmed a single scene as Beatrice Bell in The Flock, and Richard Gere gave her acting tips between takes.

  In July 2008, Lavigne launched the clothing line Abbey Dawn, named after her childhood nickname. Kohl's was its exclusive US retailer. "I actually am the designer," she insisted, saying she tried on everything herself. Her first fragrance, Black Star, came out in summer 2009. Forbidden Rose followed in July 2010 and Wild Rose in August 2011.

  On the 14th of September 2010, she introduced The Avril Lavigne Foundation, which helps young people with serious illnesses and disabilities. Her work with Make-A-Wish inspired it. "I just really wanted to do more," she said. In 2014 she raised money for the Special Olympics through a campaign called Team Rockstar. The athletes it sponsored starred in her music video for "Fly".

  In April 2015, Lavigne told People magazine that she had been diagnosed with Lyme disease after her 30th birthday in 2014. The illness inspired the title single of Head Above Water. On the 25th of October 2020, she held the #FightLyme livestream concert, with proceeds going to the Global Lyme Alliance and her own foundation.

  In June 2024, she was conferred with the Order of Canada. The next spring, on the 9th of May 2025, she released "Young & Dumb" with Simple Plan. The song was inspired by the band's time on her first tour, which ran from 2002 until 2003.

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