While Lavigne’s ascent from local radio contests to the top of the charts seems rapid in retrospect, her career took shape in fits and starts. It boasts a handful of genre-changing smashes and mood swings that’d put a high school sophomore to shame.

The reaction between Lavigne’s volatile energy and the music industry’s commercial imperative produced her 2002 debut Let Go, a rebuttal of Spears-Aguilerian pop-overtly sexual, vaguely urban, hyper-processed-churned out by the exact same kind of hit factory. She wasn’t disingenuous or calculating she was a teenager, one whose formative experiences and changes in taste were taking place while she navigated the expectations that come with a major-label record deal. Lavigne had no idea how quickly her dream would come true: Within a few years, she’d be sneering on the cover of Rolling Stone in a black tank top and a curt plaid skirt, winkingly labeled “the Britney slayer.” The onetime country-pop princess who performed hits by Faith Hill and Sarah McLachlan at an early record label audition had become a gleeful anarchist, a pop-punk supernova who skated through videos for hits like “Complicated” and “Sk8er Boi,” causing chaos in ratty T-shirts and neckties. At the time, Lavigne told Twain she wanted to be “a famous singer.” Lavigne didn’t just acquit herself: She won the damn thing, which meant driving two-plus hours to the nation’s capital and belting Twain’s brassy 1993 hit “ What Made You Say That” in front of a packed Ottawa hockey arena. When the nearest big-city country station held a singing contest, a 14-year-old Lavigne sent in a tape for a chance to sing with none other than Shania Twain, the Canadian country-pop superstar.

It was little more than an average, provincial life.

She sang Pentecostal hymns in her family’s church and performed in local productions of Godspell and You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. She grew up in Napanee, Ontario, a small town best known for its proximity to the country’s largest highway and its selection of fine truck stops. Avril Lavigne’s origin story would be the perfect American fairytale if it wasn’t so undeniably Canadian.

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