Shania Twain Helped Inspire Avril Lavigne’s Career When She Was 14 Years Old
Shania Twain and Avril Lavigne are two Canadian artists with successful careers and a bevy of hit songs behind them. And when Lavigne was just starting out as a musician when she was a teenager, she looked up to singers like Twain — and even got to meet the Canadian country pop queen in her hometown.
Avril Lavigne performed with Shania Twain when she was an aspiring singer
By the time Lavigne was performing as a local singer, Twain had become a global phenomenon with hit songs. In a 2022 interview with rapper Rico Nasty for Alt Press, Lavigne shared how she crossed paths with Twain in the late 1990s.
“I met Shania Twain when I was 14,” she recalled. “This is before I had a record deal or anything. I won a f***ing contest at a local radio station to sing onstage with her.”
“I got to sing onstage with her at this sold-out arena in Ottawa, in Canada,” she continued. “She gave me an opportunity to get up onstage as a young kid, and that definitely helped me in my career. And she’s someone I’ve stayed in touch with. I did an interview with her the other day. She’s so epic — like her songwriting, writing from a woman’s perspective about things we go through.”
Avril Lavigne released her smash debut album ‘Let Go’ a few years later
The show took place in 1998. Twain was on her first-ever world tour, the Come On Over Tour, in support of her album of the same name, which contained the smash single “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!”
Lavigne continued to try to break into the music industry, eventually inking a recording contract and getting to work on her debut album, Let Go. The album was released in 2002 and Lavigne became pop punk’s newest superstar practically overnight.
The “Complicated” singer looked back on the journey to creating Let Go in a 2022 interview on The Kelly Clarkson Show. “I think making my first record was hard because I wanted to be a songwriter, and I was 15,” she said, adding that people didn’t take her seriously because of her age. “I’d go in the studio and they were just like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, little girl, you don’t know what you’re really doing.”
“They were throwing their songs at me and pitching their songs to me, which I really didn’t like,” Lavigne admitted. “So it was a fight to write my own music and then it was a fight to get the sound I wanted because I guess I was going for guitar-driven music. I was like, ‘I just wanna sound like a band! I wanna rock!’ And that was my challenge.”
Later on in the recording process, Lavigne started working with producers who let her take the lead and make the music that she wanted. “That album took a while and it was hard and I had to fight for being a songwriter, fight to have the sound that I wanted, sit with the producers.” She confessed she didn’t know any of the language used to describe certain sounds at the time, and just communicated with her collaborators that she wanted to make more guitar-based music.
Despite the ups and downs of the recording process, the final product was one that Lavigne was proud of: “I did make the record I did want.”
Avril Lavigne thanked Shania Twain for everything over 20 years later
Lavigne and Twain have stayed in touch over the years, and Twain has watched Lavigne’s rise to success firsthand. The two caught up in a 2022 interview for Home Now Radio on Apple Music Hits, and Lavigne personally thanked Twain for her support all those years ago.
“We heard an opportunity on the radio station to sing with you. [It was] the Come On Over tour, ‘Win a chance to sing with Shania onstage,’ and I happened to win that,” Lavigne remembered. “[I] met you, 14 years old, and I can’t thank you enough for that opportunity, because that was so life-changing for me.”
