Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.
It was only a couple of songs into her set Wednesday night at the Saddledome when former teen sensation Avril Lavigne asked if anyone in the audience had to go to work tomorrow.
Perhaps the audience was on autopilot at this point or frozen in a perpetual state of teen fandom, but it prompted a curiously fervent cheer from the crowd. Lavigne proceeded to quiz us about our drinking preferences, proposed a toast and then launched into 2013’s wistful Here’s to Never Growing Up, which proved to be rather on-the-nose in summing up the vibe at the Saddledome on Wednesday.
This is not to say that there wasn’t a mix of young and old taking in Lavigne’s show, but there were many of us who probably didn’t need reminding that we would soon be required to return to the world of tedious adulting.
Calgary was the final stop of Lavigne’s Greatest Hits world tour. The singer-songwriter turns 40 in a little over a week, but maintained a forever-young glow throughout the concert. Of course, any Greatest Hits tour is designed to be a walk down memory lane, but Wednesday’s proceedings seemed an extra potent reminder of Lavigne’s past and — considering the near sold-out numbers at the Dome — current levels of stardom. For those of us who haven’t being paying close attention to her career as of late, it’s easy to forget how famous the Napanee, Ont.-raised singer-songwriter actually is. It’s been a long ride. She became a superstar right of the gate 22 years ago while still in her teens. She has been at it so long that she can now be inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and is only a few years away from being eligible for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She has survived some of the weirder vagaries of stardom — tabloid-baiting celebrity marriages, celebrity feuds, mysterious withdrawals from the spotlight, a dopey doppelganger conspiracy theory — but managed to emerge more-or-less unscathed.
It helps that many of the songs performed Wednesday still have sharp, endearing hooks, including openers Girlfriend and What the Hell and the melancholic My Happy Ending. She showcased some authoritative guitar-shredding while stomping across the stage during the grungy He Wasn’t and offered a nicely sung version of the mopey ballad Nobody’s Home.
She also hedged her bets with an exciting, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink stage design, a constant barrage of streamers falling from the rafters, neon pink hearts and skulls, confetti and explosive pyrotechnics that seemed designed to keep the night in a state of perpetual climax.
She brought out one of her biggest hits, Complicated — which was one of four tracks pulled from her 2002 debut, Let Go — early in the set. Lavigne doesn’t seem all that far removed from the over-stimulated mall rat featured in the 2002 introductory video for that song, which prompted Rolling Stone magazine to label her a “tiny terror.”
Sure, this could be considered a criticism when compared to other precocious young performers who have moved on. Tegan and Sara, for instance, maintain a certain teen brattiness in their singing voices but have evolved considerably as writers and performers in all other areas. On Wednesday, when Lavigne offered two songs from her 2022 album Love Sux — Bite Me and Love It When You Hate Me — they sounded like they could have sprang from one of her earliest efforts.
But why reinvent the wheel? Lavigne has earned a spot in music history by providing a blueprint for the commercially lucrative pop-punk sound. Her influence can be heard in bands such a California’s Girlfriends, who opened the show with an energetic set of motivational anthems and sour-romance bangers that sound like they could have been written in the early aughts.They were followed by Scarborough, Ont. singer-songwriter Fefe Dobson, who released her debut one year after Lavigne and mined a similar vein of suburban bubble-punk angst. Not unlike Girlfriends, she offered an assured set of catchy pop songs. At one point, Lavigne brought both acts out to help her sing a faithful cover of Blink-182’s pop-punk classic All the Small Things, which seemed more than appropriate.
Those who left early before Lavigne’s two-song encore missed one of the concert’s more surprising moments. The stage design briefly transformed into a more elegant backdrop that featured billowing silk as the singer walked out in a flowing gown to sing Head Above Water, a melodramatic but touching piano ballad that chronicles the singer’s battle with Lyme disease.
Still, she finished the night with I’m With You, a relatively subdued choice but still one that whisked the crowd back to her 2002 debut when she was the undisputed princess of pop-punk. That, ultimately, is what the thousands of fans were looking for.