“I would come into the studio with my guitar and notepad and people didn’t want to listen to me. They tried to just give me songs – and I hated that”: Avril Lavigne’s fight to create the smash hit that would inspire Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish
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Complicated by Avril Lavigne sits as one of the most successful debut singles of all-time.
With this song – and follow-up single Sk8er Boi – the Canadian singer-songwriter sealed her place as one of the most talked-about artists of 2002. And while it seems like her journey to stardom was fairly straightforward, the material that ended up on her very first full-length, Let Go, was actually a few years in the making.
In 2000, Lavigne’s 15-minute audition with the head of Arista Records lead to a $1.25 million two-album deal, with nearly a million on top as her publishing advance.
The label, however, also had strong opinions on what kind of debut album they’d be releasing for her, and over two years passed before she found the right team to fit around her.
“They [the label] didn’t care what I had to say; they had their own style and didn’t bother to look at me and try to let me lead,” Lavigne told The Guardian in 2022. “I was very clear on what I wanted to do and what I didn’t want to do.”
She continued: “I wanted to be angsty and to sound more like a band; I didn’t want to be all bubblegum pop. I wanted to turn my emotions into lyrics. I was honestly just very, very pure.”
Also in 2022, Lavigne told The I Paper of her frustrations during those early sessions: “I would come into the studio with my guitar and notepad and people didn’t want to listen to me,” she said, explaining: “They tried to just give me songs and I hated that.”
Thankfully she ended up being introduced to American/British songwriting and production trio The Matrix, who quickly realised she was naturally much more suited to pop-punk than country pop.
They told her to come back the following day and in the meantime wrote the bones of what would become her debut single, which would be released when she was just 17 years-old.
Together they completed the song, with the writing credits being shared between Lavigne as well as Lauren Christy, Scott Spock and Graham Edwards of The Matrix.
The results were so impressive, The Matrix ended up co-writing and producing five songs in total for the debut.
The success of Let Go also kick-started the production trio’s career in the music industry, paving the way for them to work alongside A-listers like Britney Spears, Rihanna and INXS, as well as American nu-metal pioneers Korn.
“Complicated literally changed my life,” Lauren Christy told Music Week in 2018. “I went from having $180,000 worth of debt and being pregnant at the same time, to just going, ‘You mean it’s all going to be OK!?’ It was so incredible.”
The lyrics to Complicated describe a coming-of-age scenario that many teenage girls can relate to – a boyfriend that’s wonderful when he’s “talking to me one on one” but then becomes “somebody else around everyone else”.
In the pre-chorus, Lavigne delivers a brutal 12-word assessment of the person she’s referring to by singing “you try to be cool, you look like a fool to me”.
The song is in the key of F Major, with the verse chord movements being F/Dmin/A#sus2/C and the chorus progression being Dmin/A#sus2/F/ C – the exact same shapes played in a slightly different order.
For the fourth and final run, the chords are switched to Gmin and A#sus2, played for twice as long.
The electric guitars at the beginning spell out the D Minor mode, which is the song’s opening chord and the relative minor to the F Major parent scale.
There’s also an electric guitar in the chorus sections playing fifth chords one note at a time. It starts with the 5th fret of the A-string and the 7th fret of the D-string, then the 6th fret of the low E-string and the 8th fret of the A-string, the 8th fret of both the low E and A strings before moving just the A-string up to the 10th fret.
Complicated topped the charts in Australia, peaked at No.2 on the Billboard Hot 100 – selling over 1.1 million copies in the US alone – and also finished in the top five across most of Europe.
A 20th anniversary edition of Let Go was released in 2022, remixed by super producer John Feldmann.
Complicated has been famously covered by Olivia O’Brien and Weird ‘Al’ Yankovic.
Lavigne has been cited as an influence for Gen Z pop stars like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, the latter of whom has regularly covered Complicated and invited Lavigne – a musician who she introduced as “the pop-punk princess herself” – to join her at a 2022 show in Toronto.
“[The fact] that younger generations are discovering my stuff and that Billie, Olivia, and Willow [Smith] go out into the world and continue to shatter the mould like I did 20 years ago is super-inspiring,” Lavigne told The Guardian in 2022.
The resurgence in emo nostalgia also led to the creation of the When We Were Young festival in Las Vegas, which Lavigne has performed at several times – further cementing her legend in pop-punk history.
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