Avril Lavigne

It is often said of Avril Lavigne that she could have been a one-summer phenomenon and that she nonetheless held on. The sentence is true and it hides the most important part: between her self-titled 2013 album and Head Above Water, released on 15 February 2019, there was no record because she was seriously ill with Lyme disease, and there was a stretch in which she herself thought she was dying. Those six blank years are the heart of her biography, and the album she came back with speaks explicitly about that. The rest has been in plain sight since 2002: a teenager from a small town in Ontario who arrived with a loose tie and guitars at a time when female pop was a parade of choreography, through the door Alanis Morissette had kicked open a decade earlier. The difference is that Lavigne had to defend her place twice: first from those who doubted the songs were hers, and then from an illness that almost took her out of the job.

Napanee, Let Go and three co-writers

She was born on 27 September 1984 in Belleville, Ontario, and grew up in Napanee, a town of some five thousand inhabitants that her first songs allude to without naming. Let Go came out on 4 June 2002, when she was seventeen — she turned eighteen that September — and its proposition was legible in ten seconds: guitars, direct choruses, lyrics about clumsy love and about not fitting in, and an image that looked like no pop star of those years.

Out of that album came "Complicated", "Sk8er Boi" and "I'm with You". The first two are credited to Lavigne together with The Matrix, the production and songwriting team made up of Lauren Christy, Scott Spock and Graham Edwards, and the real extent of her contribution has been publicly disputed by both sides over the years. It is worth putting it that way, without attributing exclusive authorship to her or taking it away from her, because that is exactly where the attack that followed Let Go was concentrated: the suspicion that the rebellion was a product designed by adults. The soundest answer did not come from the credits, but from the two decades that followed.

The album sold on a scale that forced categories to be invented. On 11 January 2003, Guinness recognised her as the youngest female solo artist to reach no. 1 on the British albums chart, at eighteen years and one hundred and six days; she was not seventeen when she managed it, although she was when she debuted. The record did not last long: Joss Stone took it from her in 2004. It serves all the same to measure the moment: a Canadian from a small town topping the UK charts less than a year after her first album.

Girlfriend, the lawsuit and the statement that cleared her

Under My Skin, from 2004, was darker and more rock, and The Best Damn Thing, from 2007, went back to direct energy with "Girlfriend", her most sung-along hit. That single brought her a court case: on 2 July 2007, Tommy Dunbar, of The Rubinoos, and James Gangwer sued for plagiarism, alleging that the song took from "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend", from 1979. Lavigne denied it and argued that this structure of guitar pop was common property, citing the Rolling Stones and the Ramones.

The case was resolved with an out-of-court settlement in January 2008, and that is usually where the story ends. But it has one more paragraph, and it is the one that almost always gets dropped: Dunbar and Gangwer later issued a statement in which they completely cleared Lavigne and the producer Dr. Luke of having copied their song. Anyone who repeats the lawsuit without that part is telling half of it.

Six years in which there was no album

After Avril Lavigne, from 2013, almost six years went by with no new album, and the explanation was not artistic. She believes a tick bit her in the spring of 2014; the diagnosis of Lyme disease came in December of that year, after months of symptoms that several doctors did not know how to read. She made it public on the cover of People in April 2015, when she was already saying she was "80% better".

What she told then is hard to summarise without her words: that she felt she could not breathe, that she could not speak and that she could not move, and that she thought she was dying; that there were weeks when she could not even shower because she could barely stay on her feet. With the time spent in bed one has to be careful, because the figure changed depending on who tells it: that People report from 2015 spoke of five months, while later accounts and her own interviews from 2022 describe around two years. What does not vary is the substance: it was a serious and long illness, not a voluntary retirement.

Head Above Water, released on 15 February 2019, is explicitly that episode put into songs. Lavigne has told how one night she thought she was dying, how her mother lay down beside her and how she prayed for help keeping her head above water; out of that phrase came the title of the album and of the single. It is the most exposed material of her career, and it arrived at a moment when nobody was demanding she prove anything.

A theory born in a Brazilian blog

While that was happening, a story about her was circulating on the internet that is worth dating properly, because it is almost always told wrong. The theory that Avril Lavigne died and was replaced by a double was not born on 4chan, nor in 2003, nor during her years of illness. It was born in 2011, in a Brazilian blog in Portuguese called Avril Está Morta, created by fans, which held that the singer had died by suicide in 2003 and that her place was taken by a stand-in named "Melissa Vandella". Its author later admitted that the whole thing had been a deliberate exercise, made to show how a conspiracy theory can come to look true.

The exercise worked better than its creator intended. It went viral in October 2015, when a BuzzFeed journalist tweeted about the blog, and it blew up again in May 2017 with a thread retweeted more than two hundred and fifty thousand times. Lavigne has had to answer for it in interviews for years. It is a case study in how a belief is manufactured online, and it is worth remembering that the most widely spread hoax about her is, in its own origin, a demonstration that hoaxes spread.

What to remember

Avril Lavigne opened a concrete door: with Let Go she showed that a seventeen-year-old girl with a guitar could top the charts without passing through the pop diva mould, and a good part of the female pop-punk that followed cites her as its starting point. The close of that story has a symmetry of its own: when the genre came back into fashion, she came back with it. Love Sux came out on 25 February 2022 on DTA Records, the label of Travis Barker, the drummer of blink-182; then came a Greatest Hits on 21 June 2024, a tour between 2024 and 2025 with Simple Plan, Fefe Dobson and We The Kings, two dates at the Warped Tour on 14 and 15 June 2025 and the single "Young & Dumb" with Simple Plan, on 9 May 2025. Along the way she accumulated several Grammy nominations and no wins, which says more about the award than about her.

But the sentence that fits her best is not the one about the pioneer, it is the one about the stretch that does not appear in the summaries. Between 2014 and 2019 she was not taking a break: she was ill, and she spent a time she herself describes in years without being able to stay on her feet. That the comeback album should be a song about not sinking is the most coherent thing in her whole discography. And if somebody is at that point — the point of thinking they cannot take any more — in Chile there is the Ministry of Health's *4141 suicide prevention line, available twenty-four hours a day: a head above water does not always stay there on its own.

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Sources

Avril Ramona Lavigne was born on 27 September 1984 in Belleville, Ontario, Canada, and grew up in Napanee, in the same province. Her debut album, "Let Go", was released on 4 June 2002, when she was 17, and included "Complicated", "Sk8er Boi" and "I'm with You"; "Complicated" and "Sk8er Boi" are credited to Lavigne together with the team The Matrix, made up of Lauren Christy, Scott Spock and Graham Edwards, and the extent of her contribution has been the subject of conflicting statements from both sides. On 11 January 2003, Guinness World Records recognised her as the youngest female solo artist to reach no. 1 on the British albums chart, at 18 years and 106 days; Joss Stone beat that mark in 2004. Her following albums were "Under My Skin" (2004), "The Best Damn Thing" (2007, with "Girlfriend"), "Goodbye Lullaby" (2011), "Avril Lavigne" (2013), "Head Above Water" (15 February 2019) and "Love Sux" (25 February 2022). On 2 July 2007, Tommy Dunbar, of The Rubinoos, and James Gangwer filed a plagiarism lawsuit against "Girlfriend", alleging similarities with "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" (1979); Lavigne denied the accusation and cited the Rolling Stones and the Ramones as common references of the genre. The case was resolved through an out-of-court settlement in January 2008 and, subsequently, Dunbar and Gangwer issued a statement in which they completely cleared Lavigne and the producer Dr. Luke. Between the albums of 2013 and 2019 she released no records for health reasons: she attributes her infection to a tick bite in the spring of 2014 and received the diagnosis of Lyme disease in December 2014. She made her condition public on the cover of "People" magazine in April 2015, where she stated that she felt she could not breathe, speak or move and that she thought she was dying, that there were weeks when she could not shower because she could barely stay on her feet, and that she was by then "80% better". The figures for the time she spent in bed differ: the 2015 "People" report mentions five months, while later accounts and statements of her own from 2022 refer to around two years. "Head Above Water" deals explicitly with that illness; Lavigne has recounted that one night she thought she was dying, that her mother lay down beside her and that she prayed to keep her head above water, a phrase that gave rise to the title. The conspiracy theory according to which Lavigne died in 2003 and was replaced by a double named "Melissa Vandella" originated in 2011 in the Brazilian blog in Portuguese "Avril Está Morta", created by fans, whose author later admitted that it was a deliberate exercise to demonstrate how a conspiracy theory can appear plausible; it went viral in October 2015 from a BuzzFeed journalist's tweet and again in May 2017 through a thread retweeted more than 250,000 times. There is no documented link with the site 4chan, to which its origin is often wrongly attributed. "Love Sux" was released on DTA Records, the label of Travis Barker; it was followed by the compilation "Greatest Hits" (21 June 2024), a tour between 2024 and 2025 together with Simple Plan, Fefe Dobson and We The Kings, two appearances at the Warped Tour on 14 and 15 June 2025 and the single "Young & Dumb" with Simple Plan, released on 9 May 2025. Lavigne has received several Grammy award nominations without obtaining any wins. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, People, Billboard, Guinness World Records and other coverage.