Avril Lavigne: Complicated Princess With the release of her smash debut, things are getting complicated for 17-year-old Avril Lavigne. Seventeen-year-old singer-songwriter Avril Lavigne is holed up in Vancouver, British Columbia, rehearsing a new band for her first-ever promotional tour, where she'll be playing for radio stations and appearing on TV shows. Lavigne can't remember when the tour begins, exactly ("Um, it's next week, but I'm not stressed. I'm a laid-back person."), but with the release of her debut, Let Go, a few weeks in the offing, she has other things on her mind. Let Go's lead single, "Complicated," is a vivid blast of pop-rock currently tearing up radio station play lists. The track's fire-in-the-belly directness has already earned Lavigne frequent comparisons to fellow Canadian Alanis Morissette. "I get that a lot," Lavigne says. "I don't mind that, because she's awesome." Michelle Branch comparisons are slightly more troubling. "I am going to be compared to her because of our age, we both write our songs, and both play guitar. But we're pretty different. I just really want [folks] to know who I am. "I went to church all my life," says Lavigne, who was raised in Napanee, Ontario (population 5,000). "That's where I got my start. At concerts at the church, I would sing at a really young age." She never joined the choir, though, thanks to a lifelong aversion to being part of the pack. "I wanted to sing on my own," Lavigne remembers. "I hated singing with other people." Under the guidance of manager, producer, and songwriter Peter Zizzo, Lavigne was invited to New York City to write songs when she was 16. The trip not only honed her raw writing skills, it earned her a deal with Arista Records. Though three songs from the Zizzo sessions would end up on Let Go, Lavigne's other collaborations there proved stifling. She headed to Los Angeles in search of different writing partners. "I went and worked with a whole bunch of different people in L.A., and only got on with two, The Matrix and Clif Magness," she says. "That was like the weirdest thing, going on this trip to L.A. and writing with people on the first day that you've never met." The latter collaborations comprise the majority of Let Go, which for all Lavigne's ostensibly alternative, skater-gurl inclinations, is a punchy, melodic pop affair, strong on opinion, but easy on the senses. "I couldn't go as alternative on this record as I wanted to, but I just didn't want to be bubblegum pop," she says. "I'm happy with the way it turned out. [But] my attitude, my songwriting is constantly always changing. I'm still growing up; I'll be changing." By Linda Laban, CDNOW Contributing Writer