Avril Lavigne: the young and the restless one

At 16, Avril Lavigne left her tiny Canadian hometown for a seedy Manhattan neighborhood, hoping to make it as a rock star. Suddenly, the fishing holes and hockey rinks of her childhood seemed worlds away. "I'd look out my bedroom window and all I'd see would be prostitutes," Lavigne, now 17, recalls. "It was crazy, but I had to do it. As strange as it sounds, I was ready." The driven prodigy was discovered in a New York studio and signed by Arista Records, but not without speed bumps. "They tried to have other people write for me," she says. "They thought I was a little pop girl, but that's not me."

What is her is Let Go, Lavigne's first album: Crammed with fist-pumping odes to defiance and skater boys, it's a marketer's dream hybrid of Dido and Linkin Park. "Why should I care?" she howls through clenched teeth in the album's first track, her adolescent angst drenching songs like a spritz of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" cologne in a Toronto mall.

"I've wanted to do this my entire life," Lavigne says. "If I wasn't a musician, I'd be a cop. I'm an aggressive person--it'd be cool to wear a uniform and have that kind of power. It's dangerous, but that's what makes it fun."

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