When I stupidly express surprise that Lavigne now composes music on the piano, she rolls her eyes: “I can play my own shit. “Part of my growth process was learning to speak up,” says Lavigne of making sure she could continue to write her own music, which she had been doing for years.
When Antonio “L.A.” Reid signed Lavigne two years later, Arista foisted prefab songs on the teenager. Lavigne hops down and bops her cutoff-clad hip, re-enacting the 1999 performance of a lesser-known entry in the Twain canon at the Corel Centre in Ottawa: What made you say that? Was it the moonlight? Was it the starlight in your eyes? Lavigne adds an original verse to convey her 14-year-old inner monologue: Why am I singing this song? What am I doing? What if I got my own concert?Īvril Lavigne: Photos From the Billboard Cover Shoot
“I won a local radio contest by submitting a tape of me singing.” “No shit, I sang with Shania Twain when I was 14,” she says from her seat next to a tray of nips. Perched on the kitchen bar under a sign that reads, “Wine! How classy people get wasted,” Lavigne recalls an even earlier phase of her career. Today, she adds to the look a baggy pink sweatshirt screen-printed with rib bones. It’s more than 10 years old, but aside from some additional tattoos on her forearms, Lavigne looks the same, with Courtney Love-vaping-in-the-bathroom eyeliner smudged around her blue eyes, blond hair somewhere between Rapunzel’s and Sebastian Bach’s in length and a dearth of fucks given. David NeedlemanĪ framed copy of Lavigne’s last Billboard cover hangs on a wall. Lavigne wears a re:named slip, 8 Other Reasons necklace and Luv AJ rings. It appears that she (like me) simply has resting bitch voice.Īvril Lavigne photographed on Aug. When Avril Lavigne is excited, her tone retains its say-something-nice-to-your-sister reluctance but adds exclamation points of shrieks and giggles. She informs me that later in the evening I will be sabering a celebratory bottle of champagne in the house, using a large sword she pulls out of a box and brandishes at me. But Lavigne wants it to be known that at her castle, outdoor activities are allowed - encouraged, even! - indoors. Lavigne’s mom and stepfather, visiting from Canada, lounge in the backyard next to a menagerie of inflatable pool animals. She soon swaps her Emergen-C for the rosé, mounts a pink skateboard in her pink Vans and zooms down her vaulted hallway. The esprit de brat still lives in Lavigne. Does the motherfucking princess even want the motherfucking crown anymore? Who, exactly, would be her acolytes if she decided to seize it? And why did she disappear four years ago? When Lavigne tells me how excited she is to be doing this story, the words are delivered in her apathetic mall drawl, dragged out of her babydoll mouth like a child frog-marched through a museum tour.
It’s all just so… grown-up, a categorization Lavigne had given a hard pass to as recently as her last album, 2013’s Avril Lavigne, where she insisted, in Peter Pan bangers like “Seventeen” and “Rock N Roll,” that we “still love it.” (“It” presumably referring to Lavigne’s penchant for lyrics about spontaneous day drinking.) Between then and the September drop of “Head Above Water,” we heard from Lavigne only a handful of times: when she popped up on Good Morning America in summer 2015 to say that she had been diagnosed with Lyme disease, when she got divorced from Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger later that year and when, in between those dual bummers, Taylor Swift brought her out in San Diego as part of the 1989 World Tour’s parade of admirable women, to perform her then-13-year-old debut single, “Complicated.” Lavigne says that at one point, she thought, Oh, I guess I’m done with making music.Īnd indeed, the calm 34-year-old woman sitting before me on her suede couch does not exactly seem ready to rock. 13, 2018 in Los Angeles. Lavigne wears a Paul Smith sweater and What Katie Did tights.