Little Miss Can't Be Wrong

Still, Reid contends that "there are no guys in suits that can manufacture artists like Avril Lavigne. I wish there were. God knows the record business needs them right now."

If the response in Asia is any indication, Lavigne's fans are way more vocal than her detractors. In Singapore, she had an experience that might remind her of the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night, if she has ever seen the film. "I got attacked at the airport," she says while browsing through racks of vintage T-shirts at a thrift store in the Shibuya section of Tokyo. Run-DMC's Raising Hell is blaring in the background. "There were, like, 300 people waiting. And we had to run and jump into the car, and they threw presents in on top of us. Then we looked in one of the bags, and there were these two bunnies in there!" She shops like a dude -- moving quickly and zeroing in on only what she came to buy. We spend three hours traipsing from store to store, stopping longest in a hat shop, CA4LA, where Lavigne buys a new "disguise" hat. With her hair in a messy ponytail, her face free of makeup and wearing a hooded bomber jacket, she is already in full disguise, and only a few kids seem to recognize her.

But at our hotel, well-behaved young fans -- mostly girls -- wait in the lobby from morning to night, hoping to catch a glimpse of Lavigne or one of the cute band boys. Most of them carry cameras and small gifts. One woman, a dowdy-looking thirtysomething, is waiting nearby when we head for the elevators. She politely hands a paper bag to Lavigne, who flashes a halfhearted smile and murmurs, "Thanks." Once we are out of earshot, she says to her assistant, "That's the one. She's here waiting every day." Lavigne looks in the bag, suspiciously eyeing the candy and snacks inside. "Eww," she says. "Why would she give me food?" She opens one of the packages to find crispy fried potato sticks, and, suddenly, the fear of poisoning vanishes as she digs in.

Lavigne never doubted she'd be a star. She has always believed she was destined to be a famous performer. As a child growing up two hours east of Toronto, in the tiny town of Napanee, Ontario (population 5,000), she would stand on her bed and pretend to be playing for a crowd of screaming fans. "We knew she was talented, but we didn't realize how talented," says Judy Lavigne, Avril's stay-at-home mom. Avril was the middle child of three -- she has a brother, Matthew, who's almost two years older, and a sister, Michelle, who's three years younger. Judy and husband John became aware of Avril's singing ability when she was only two years old. "One day I started singing 'Jesus Loves Me,' and I couldn't believe it when she sang along," Judy says.

The Lavignes are devoutly Christian; some of Avril's first singing appearances were in church, and her earliest recordings were with Christian singer-songwriter Stephen Medd on tracks such as "Touch the Sky." Though she has always been a mischievous kid, Lavigne says that her core values were shaped by growing up in a religious household. "My mom wouldn't even let me sing [the country song] 'Strawberry Wine,' because it said 'wine' in it and I was this little kid," she remembers. "She protected my image. And that's not the only reason why I don't dance around like a ho onstage, but it definitely has something to do with being brought up with tons of morals. And I'm not saying I'll never write a song with a curse word, because there's definitely been times when it's like, 'Aww, man, "fuck" would sound so good there!' But then I think about my mom, and how it would probably hurt her," she says, laughing quietly. "So I just say 'frig' instead."

Lavigne never listened to much music until she hit puberty, and even then it was mostly country divas such as Shania Twain or mainstream rock bands like the Goo Goo Dolls and Matchbox Twenty. Which is one reason she had never seen David Bowie's name when it came time to read it off a list of nominees at a Grammy press conference in January. (She pronounced the "bow-" like "bow-wow" rather than "bow-tie.") "Did people think that was bad?" she asks coyly. "What's the big deal? I was born in 1984 -- why would I know who he is? My parents didn't bring me up listening to him. Besides, people mispronounce my name all the time."

Things took off for Lavigne after a Canadian label representative sent New York songwriter and producer Peter Zizzo a home video of her singing karaoke. "She was singing without any affectation," says Zizzo, who has written songs for Celine Dion, Jennifer Lopez and Vanessa Carlton. "She was, like, fourteen and wearing these fuzzy bunny slippers, and she had a bandanna around her head. I called back and said, 'Get her to New York.' " Lavigne moved to Manhattan with her brother and took up temporary residence in a West Village apartment. "She really wanted this to happen," Zizzo says. "She was living to have a career as a singer-songwriter."

She landed a deal with Arista after Reid watched her perform in Zizzo's studio one evening in December 2001. "It was her voice and her songwriting," says Reid, explaining what sold him on Lavigne. "And she's a dynamite-looking girl with an amazing attitude." During the next several months, she worked with an assortment of producers but struck pay dirt with Los Angeles hitmaking trio the Matrix, who wrote and recorded five of the songs on Let Go, including the first three singles, "Complicated," "Sk8er Boi" and "I'm With You."