Arista was ready to let her go. A teenage signing from small-town Ontario, not landing, the deal close to dead. Her manager made one more move: he put her in a room with a writing-and-production trio called The Matrix.
The room was a bedroom. A studio house on St Clair Avenue in Los Angeles, three writers and one nervous seventeen-year-old, an afternoon to make something. It was the second song they wrote together; the first had been finished the day before. Avril brought the title and the hook line. The rest came fast. By the end of the afternoon it existed. She cut the vocal in one take.
Sit with that for a second, because the song is a sneer at fakeness. At people who perform a version of themselves, who say one thing and live another, who can’t just be straight with you. That is the whole charge of it. The narrator’s contempt is for the pose, the act, the polished surface that hides what someone actually is.
She almost didn’t want it. Too pop, she thought; she wanted to be the girl with the skate shoes and the loose tie, the rock kid, not a radio confection. The writers themselves expected a different track to go out first. Then L.A. Reid heard this one and picked it as the single.
Be real, or be gone. She meant it.
What happened next was enormous. It went multi-platinum across the world, the best-selling debut single by a Canadian woman, the sound of a particular summer leaking out of every car window and mall speaker. For a stretch it was simply everywhere, the song you could not get away from if you tried.
So here is a song built entirely on a demand for the real thing. Be who you are. Drop the act. Stop performing. A teenager’s flat refusal to put up with anyone two-faced. And it became one of the biggest pop singles of its decade by saying exactly that, plainly, to millions of people who felt it about somebody in their own life.
Which leaves the obvious question hanging, the one the song never answers for you. A track this certain about authenticity, this sure of what is fake and what is real: where did it actually come from, and what is real about how it got made?
The cards have the rest. Three of them. Don’t take the surface at face value, that would be missing the joke.
Surface any pearl, in any order, to hear what's really going on.
“The whole song is a takedown of people who are fake.”
"Complicated" is an anthem against pretending to be something you're not. After the album, the three writers who built it with Avril went on record claiming they had been the principal authors and she'd added ideas on top. She pushed back publicly, hard, and split from them for album two. The song about not faking it became the song whose own authorship two sides told different stories about.
“"Complicated" is a song about a boyfriend.”
It mostly isn't. Avril has said it's about people being two-faced, and she meant her female friends as much as any boyfriend, the ones who act one way to your face and another behind your back. The breakup anthem a generation sang at boys was really about the friend who changes the second the room changes. It's not heartbreak. It's betrayal.
“A song this dominant obviously hit number one.”
It never did. "Complicated" stalled at No. 2 on the Hot 100, blocked from the top, yet it stayed on that chart 31 weeks, longer than any single Avril ever released. The song everyone remembers as the sound of 2002 is, on the record, the biggest hit she had that never reached number one. Number two, and impossible to forget.
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