Avril Lavigne Interview: No Looking Back
It's not surprising that Avril Lavigne, at just over five feet and barely on the healthy side of 100 pounds, can almost fit into her luggage. What's remarkable is that the large black suitcase she clumsily hoists onto her bed carries all the clothes a 19-year-old girl will wear for the next six weeks.
"I'm not dissing them or anything, but people like Britney Spears and Beyoncé have wardrobe people," she explains as she begins to unpack. "I have a suitcase. I'm a bit lower maintenance."
Her guitarist Evan Taubenfeld may disagree. As she pulls one black boot after another from the bag and dumps them on the floor of her luxury tour bus — for a total of four pairs, including 20-eye Dr. Martens and a chrome-studded boot that would make Kiss' Gene Simmons jealous — she asks Taubenfeld to stow them in a closet. He dutifully obliges, mismatching every one in playful spite.
More essentials come out of the suitcase: a hairdryer, comfy blue slippers adorned with fluffy white clouds that she kept from a recent video shoot, a few belts, and what looks to be a leather dog collar attached to a long silver chain. "Accessories ..." she mumbles.
A pair of black pants with a skull-and-crossbones pattern down the legs — in pink — is next to emerge. These warrant elaboration. "Look at these," she announces. "My mom saw them and she's like, 'Why do you always have to be wearing those things?' My mom doesn't like when I wear skulls and crossbones. She thinks it's evil."
The bus has two bathrooms: one for Avril, the other for everyone else. "There's always piss on the floor with guys," she complains, disgusted. Taubenfeld just shrugs and moves toward the front of the coach to examine the TV.
For all the features on the bus, rented for her cross-country shopping-mall tour to promote her forthcoming album, Under My Skin, Avril's just glad it doesn't smell. "I think Korn just got off this bus, so they've given it a good cleaning," she laughs. "Sometimes you get on a bus and it smells like beer and marijuana smoke. Or just guys in general. It's pretty gross."
As the coach rolls closer to its first stop, Minneapolis' gigantic Mall of America, Lavigne quickly shifts gears to prep for the business ahead.
"When do we talk about merch?" she asks her manager.
Avril admittedly has grown up a lot since her last album. While maintaining a typically teenage personality — she's still shy in front of a camera and gets cagey when asked about her personal life — she takes her job very seriously.
"You do a lot more growing between the ages of 16 and 19 than you do from 27 to 30," she says with authority. "Sometimes I'm immature, but most of the time I've got a handle on things. Other people my age go to school, then pursue their career, then get a job, and I'm kind of there. I have a house. I have a job. It's like, 'What's next?' "
Two hours prior to showtime, most pop stars would be fretting over what to wear. Onstage Avril will don the same black pants, jacket and top she has on now. It's the same outfit she wore for a TV interview conducted an hour earlier at the five-star hotel she had stayed at the night before. And it resembles the clothes her fans, some of whom began lining up for the 5 p.m. show 11 hours in advance, presumably purchased at the Hot Topic franchise located yards away from the Mall of America stage, just past the Orange Julius.
"I just wear my clothes for everything," she says. "For my interviews and for stage and for hanging out, just like a normal person."
What annoys Avril more than anything? Plus, a boy asks for her hand ...
Most of the Mall of America appears empty and eerily desolate for a weekday afternoon. Camp Snoopy, America's largest indoor theme park, is about a hundred yards away from the atrium where Avril will perform. A roller-coaster zips around the marble-floored park, twisting and turning just a handful of riders over closed funnel-cake shops and chained-up kiddie rides. The strange, "Dawn of the Dead"-like feel, however, doesn't carry over to where hundreds of kids are waiting for Avril to take the stage.
That area is intense. Each female fan more closely resembles Avril than the last. Some hold up signs reading, "Avril, We Love You," others have homemade photo collages. One pimply faced boy's placard asks, "Will you marry me?" while an overweight girl with an equally bad complexion carries one that reads plainly, "F--- Me, Evan!"
Mall police line the path from the parking garage to the atrium. Backstage are the local radio jock emceeing the event, crew members, a high-ranking officer of the mall PD and his family, the shopping center's owners and their kids, and some press.
"I'm very anxious to get out there, see my fans again and play new music," Avril says. "We played Let Go for two years, every day. I'm ready for a change."
With Taubenfeld at her side, Avril started working on new material before her debut album was even released. From the onset, Avril always prided herself on having an actual band, and not a bunch of faceless touring musicians backing her up.
"That's one of the reasons why I took this gig in the beginning," her guitarist explains. "She was like, 'I want a real band, and I want to play our music. I don't want to lip-synch, I want to do it live and I want you to be my band.'
"She's great to work with because she's honest," Taubenfeld continues. "I'll start playing something and she'll go, 'Nope, something else.' And you're on the spot. It's not like we had weeks booked out. When she worked with other writers, it was like that. But we did it in a hotel room, so it was like [snaps fingers], 'No, that's not good,' or, 'You need to come up with a new bridge, let's see what you got.' "
Like its title's double meaning suggests, Under My Skin is an album filled with both introspection and a catalog of things that annoy Avril. While she explains her personal songs alternately as dark, deep and weird, she rolls her eyes when asked what bothers her most.
"Guys," she mutters.
Her new song lyrics better illustrate her laments. On "He Wasn't," Avril dumps an inconsiderate dude because he wouldn't so much as open the door for her. On "My Happy Ending," a relationship doesn't exactly turn out as planned because her guy isn't who she thought he was. "Forgotten" tells the tale of a broken heart slowly on the mend. And the album's first single, "Don't Tell Me," is an empowering anthem for girls dealing with guys only after one thing.
"Some guys kind of pretend they're nice and sweet, just to get a piece, or whatever," Avril says. "I think it's a good song because it tells girls not to throw themselves at guys. It has a good message."
Along with its moral, Avril is proud of how the song came to be. Before Let Go's release in June 2002, she and Taubenfeld penned the tune one night in a hotel room, without any prodding from her label or management. Unlike the Let Go sessions, which were basically scheduled studio appointments with a team of pro songwriters that included the Matrix, "Don't Tell Me" happened organically, and set the precedent for the other 11 songs on Under My Skin.
'Why do we even have to talk about them?' Avril snaps ...
From the beginning Avril wanted to write her own songs with her own band and stay as far away from being seen as a prefabricated pop-culture construction as possible. Working with the Matrix for her first album didn't help her cause. And when the songwriting/production trio, who have gone on to pen songs for Britney Spears and Hilary Duff, said in an interview that they basically wrote all of Avril's breakthrough hit, "Complicated," save for a word or two, Avril took it personally.
"Why do we even have to talk about them," Avril snaps at an observation that the Matrix are nowhere to be found on her new album.
It's safe to say "Complicated" isn't one of her favorite songs. And it certainly doesn't top Taubenfeld's hit list. Even though it launched their careers, resentment is apparent when talk of the track comes up. While joking that Avril should get "Complicated" tattooed on her arm, Taubenfeld stops himself and says she'd never do that because, he mouths silently, " 'Complicated' sucks."
Much like Pink and Christina Aguilera employed the services of Linda Perry for their second, more personal albums, Avril found her mentor in Chantal Kreviazuk, a Canadian singer, pianist and songwriter who's released three albums since 1997. They initially never intended to write a dozen songs together — five of which made the album — it just happened naturally after a one-off collaboration hatched over lunch turned into a two-week songwriting spree.
"We're like sisters," Avril says of her relationship with Kreviazuk. "She kind of is like my mom sometimes, too. We're just really good friends, so I believe God put her in my life for a good reason."
As opposed to the Let Go songwriting sessions, the more casual creative environment Avril had with Kreviazuk allowed her to test her songwriting skills and open up in ways she never could before.
"We had so much fun writing together," Avril explains. "If I came up with something, she'd be like, 'Eh, that sucks.' And I'd do the same to her. With the last record I felt like I was put with somebody, and it's kind of weird to say to them, 'Oh, that sucks.' When [Chantal and I] are together, we can say that. I can totally put out all my ideas and I don't feel stupid and I don't hold anything back."
If Kreviazuk is like Avril's mentoring older sister, former Evanescence guitarist Ben Moody is her reckless, rock-and-roll older brother. While recording her new songs in Los Angeles with Kreviazuk's husband, Our Lady Peace frontman Raine Maida, in the producer's chair, Avril met with Moody on a recommendation by another one of Under My Skin's producers, Don Gilmore (Linkin Park, Good Charlotte). Not only did they write a slew of songs together, they too became pals.
— by Joe D’Angelo, with additional reporting by Shari Scorca
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