The one-two punch of debut single Complicated and follow-up track Sk8er Boi helped turn Avril Lavigne into one of the biggest rising stars of 2002.
As a result, her debut album Let Go ended up selling millions of copies worldwide, topping the charts in the UK, Ireland, Australia and Singapore.
It would eventually become the best-selling album of the 21st Century by a Canadian artist. And though it may have looked like overnight success from afar, it wasn’t exactly plain sailing in terms of the creative process leading up to it.
Lavigne was signed up by Arista Records CEO Antonio Reid in November 2000, but after a year of writing she was still struggling with music for the album. As the threat of losing her label deal grew, she was eventually introduced to three-piece production team The Matrix, who wanted to focus on her punk rock influences.
Following the highly fruitful early session for Complicated, they set to work on what would eventually become Lavigne’s defining track.
After some careful deliberation, the label decided that Sk8er Boi would be the correct choice as the follow-up single.
“Some people just really didn’t get that,” Antonio Reid told Entertainment Weekly. “And with the first video, there was some concern that maybe because it’s so young and so playful, it might alienate more serious music lovers.”
The risk, however, paid off. With a song clocking in at just under three and a half minutes, Lavigne had captured the zeitgeist of the burgeoning pop-punk movement of the early noughties.
The lyrics tell the story of a girl who rejects a punk rocker, partly because “all of her friends stuck up their nose, they had a problem with his baggy clothes”. But five years later, “she turns on TV, guess who she sees, skater boy rockin’ up MTV”. Eventually the girl goes with her friends to see him perform and “looks up at the man that she turned down”.
As Lavigne herself once admitted, the song is about “a missed opportunity at love”.
The twist in the story comes in the bridge section when the narrator admits “sorry girl, but you missed out” and “tough luck, that boy’s mine now”, criticising the girl for not being able to see “the man that boy could be”.
A lot of Lavigne’s music came from real-life situations and personal experiences. Some even believe the skater boy is in fact her, and she swapped the genders round to keep people guessing.
“Sk8er Boi is a super special song to me,” she once revealed, in an interview with MTV News. “I wrote it about my high school experience. Sort of, like, different groups and cliques and stuff. And I was obsessed with skaters… skater boys.”
In a guest appearance on iHeartRadio’s She Is The Voice podcast, Lavigne went on to reveal how “the skater boy is in love with the preppy girl and she’s too cool for him” but later “down the road she wishes she had followed her heart and not society’s expectations”.
However, Lauren Christy of production trio and co-writers The Matrix revealed that the song was also about her own teenage life in a video posted onto her YouTube channel last year.
“Avril and I thought ‘Let’s just make up the most stupid opening line for a song’,” she revealed, adding “I grew up doing ballet and my boyfriend was a bass player… and my parents really didn’t want me to be with a musician.”
She went on to explain: “Avril was a skater girl and she had a crush on a skater boy, so we combined our lives and our stories together. That’s how we came up with that song and now Avril and I are forever bonded as sisters.”
For the song's intentionally stupid opening lines, Lavigne and Christy settled on: “He was a boy/She was a girl/Can I make it any more obvious?”
The song is in a Drop-D tuning with the verse riff moving through the power chord progression D/A/B/Bb – which gives it all a major feel until that last chord, which is the minor sixth of D.
The chorus, however, is a purely major movement running down the F scale F/C/Bb/A . Before the bridge section that final chord is substituted for Db power chord stabs, once again introducing the minor sixth.
The success of Sk8er Boi and Let Go led to five Grammy nominations for Lavigne the following year. Around this time, Paramount Pictures announced that it was working on Sk8er Boi the feature film, though the project never came into fruition.
Lavigne, however, has not ruled out a cinematic adaption of her early hit single.
“Everyone my entire life has brought up turning Sk8er Boi into a film,” she once told MTV News. “I’ve had so many people pitch the idea to me and then finally I’m like, ‘Okay, it’s time!’ We’re gonna make a Sk8er Boi film. And I’m in the process right now of producing and developing.”
She added: “I’ve got a director and a writer and we’re making a script right now, it’s really exciting. And what’s cool about it is I think I’ll get to have a lot of my friends in the music scene make dope cameos and stuff. It’s going to be so fun.”
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.