Making all your early aughts pop-punk dreams come true, Audacy is checking in with Avril Lavigne, to get into details about her new single “Bite Me,” her recent signing to Travis Barker’s DTA Records, and more.
It’s been less than a week since Avril shared the exciting news on Instagram, writing, "Let’s f*** s*** up! Just signed a record contract to Travis Barker’s record label DTA Records!," alongside a series of photos that included shots of Avril signing her contract, as well as pics of her and Barker smashing cake in each other's faces and popping champagne.
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The last time we got a chance to talk with Avril was when she crashed our studios with her beau MOD SUN, stealing wine and dropping F-bombs like a boss. “What else is new?” was her response to that perfect setup from Audacy host Kevan Kenney.
Admittedly a stats nerd, Kevan was interested to find out that Avril’s debut album, 2002’s Let Go, which turns 20 next year, is the best-selling record by a Canadian artist in the 21st century. Keep in mind, this is from a country that has brought the world Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, Drake, and Shawn Mendes. “That’s crazy… That’s so gnarly,” Avril says, obviously impressed as well. “I remember, I was so young. Like, I was sixteen when I wrote that record, seventeen when I put out my first single, ‘Complicated,’ then ‘Sk8er Boi,’ and all that took off right away. I had no idea what I was even doing, I just knew that I loved music. I didn’t even totally get it when I went to Hollywood to write… I didn’t live at home in Canada and go, ‘oh I want to go to Hollywood, I wanna make it.’ It was just like, ‘I just want to sing.’”
At such a young age, hit singles and number one albums barely registered to her. The most exhilarating experiences for her during those early years came from hearing herself on the radio. “It still is to this day,” she says. “If I’m in the car and I hear myself on the radio, I’m like, ‘I MADE IT!’”
Looking back on her early years and the album cycles that followed, she now finds it, “weirdly kind of pure and innocent. I didn’t know what a lot of it meant,” Avril admits. Traveling to New York to perform and write, eventually getting discovered by super-producer L.A. Reid, “it sounds kind of crazy,” Avril says, “but I kind of didn’t even know what a record deal was… all these terms were getting thrown around. I was just a girl with a guitar… it was just very natural. There was just this love and passion for it and I just wanted it really bad, but I feel like it was supposed to happen. So, I didn’t know a lot that was going on around me at the time, because I was so young. I was really just focused on getting up on stage playing guitar, or sitting in my hotel room with a guitar writing songs. I kind of just lived in my own world.”
A venture into the world of Rock, after coming up as a young singer of Country and Pop songs was something that Avril gradually grew into as she began her rise to stardom. After begging to be given a chance at the age of five, she finally got her start singing in general in her church choir once she reached the proper age – and finally realizing she had promise, the church welcomed her back to sing for the next few years. Performing at fairs and banquets around her hometown was the next step Avril took. “I actually liked Country music,” she admits. “I’d come home and watch music videos after school… I would cover the Dixie Chicks, Faith Hill, Deana Carter, and then I do remember hitting a point, an age where I was around fifteen, and I was like, ‘ehhh, I just don’t want to sing Gospel music and Country music.’ I was becoming a teenager, and growing into who I was as a person. I was getting a little rebellious, I entered high school, I was wearing baggy clothes, I started drinking beer and skateboarding… I told my parents, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore, like that.’”
“That could have been a gnarly moment where I stopped,” Avril has come to believe. “But what actually happened, that’s when I grabbed the guitar and started to write my own songs without even really knowing what I was doing. That’s when I started writing the songs that are my songs, my style. When I got into high school I was into bands like blink-182, and Green Day, and NOFX; started skateboarding and hanging out with skaters and going to cool high school band events. That’s when it all sort of changed, when I went from a young girl… to first year of high school.”
Luckily, Avril did continue on rather than pack it up and in the process became a female singer, like her Country icons before, for a whole new generation of girls gravitating toward the Pop punk scene. Although she still considers herself a fan of all genres of music, her heart, once she hit high school, was all-in on “pop punk bands and wearing my guitar super low,” as well as buying her own clothes in skate stores. She’s still sentimental about those times, finding old hoodies at the bottom of her closet brings back memories and the wish to introduce those ‘90s looks on an upcoming red carpet appearance, music video, or television performance of her new single.
“I always knew what I liked and what I didn’t like,” Avril says about her time coming up in the age of Britney Spears’ and Christina Aguilera’s. Always one to buck those norms and travel her own path, she admits she was “always like a tomboy, and wanted to play more guitar driven ‘Rock’ music. At the time, the bubblegum pop with the headsets and background dancers was what was ‘in’ – that definitely wasn’t me, so I just had to voice that.” Meeting L.A. Reid in NYC at the age of fifteen, could have taken her into that world, but Avril remembers that the producer recognized then that she “had her own thing going.”
Avril had no idea what he meant by that back then, aside from the fact that it seemed like she could continue wearing the baggy clothing her parents had been trying to get her away from. “L.A. Reid really got me,” she says. Unfortunately, the person she was teamed up to record with in New York absolutely did not. Moving to Hollywood turned out to be what she needed. “I wanted to rock, so that was my fight. My fight was to make rock inspired music… I was in an angsty place. When have I not been?”
Avril’s newest offering, "Bite Me," dropped today, November 10, her first single after signing to Travis Barker’s DTA Records. Check out the full interview with Avril above, and hear the brand new single below.
While you're in the mood, listen to Audacy’s The Millennium exclusive station to throw it back -- From Avril to Z -- to the simpler time of the early aughts when Pop was perfect and this is how we spelled “Sk8er Boi.”
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