A fifteen-minute audition turned a small-town Ontario teenager into Avril Lavigne
In November 2000, the head of Arista Records heard a 16-year-old from Napanee, Ontario, sing for a quarter of an hour and signed her on the spot: $1.25 million for two albums. Her debut, Let Go, became the best-selling album of the century so far by any Canadian artist.
Lavigne was born in Belleville, Ontario, on September 27, 1984, and her name is the French word for April. Raised in an evangelical family, she was singing in church by two, and after a move to Napanee, a town of around 5,000, her father turned the basement into a studio with drums, keyboards and guitars. She sang Shania Twain and Garth Brooks covers at country fairs and, in a boys' hockey league, was twice named most valuable player as a right winger.
Breaks came fast. In 1999 she won a radio contest to duet with Twain in front of 20,000 people in Ottawa and told her idol she wanted to be famous. That December a manager spotted her singing country songs in a Kingston bookstore and mailed VHS tapes of her basement performances to the industry. After months of songwriting sessions in New York that never quite fit her voice, a trip to Los Angeles in May 2001 with the Matrix production team produced Complicated, and the label knew it had found her sound.
Let Go, released in 2002, reached number one in Canada, Australia and the UK, making her at 17 the youngest female soloist to top the British album chart at that time, and it passed 16 million sales worldwide by 2009. Her skater image earned her nicknames like Pop-Punk Princess, and she is credited with popularising punk-tinged pop fronted by women.
The success continued. Under My Skin debuted at number one in five countries including the US, and in 2007 Girlfriend became her first American number one; recorded in eight languages, it was the world's most downloaded track that year. She also co-wrote Kelly Clarkson's hit Breakaway, and she returned to pop-punk with Love Sux in 2022.
Source: Avril Lavigne
