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It’s complicated: Avril Lavigne’s 20 best songs – ranked!

More than two decades since her debut, the Canadian rabble-rouser has never been more influential. As she gears up to appear at Glastonbury, we rate her bangers, ballads and brattiest moments

Neatly done Alanis-esque bitterness and fury hooked to a lyric that preaches sexual abstinence – or at least the benefits of not being pressured into sex – to Lavigne’s female teenage cohort, Don’t Tell Me occasioned a degree of mockery on release, but she was writing about something directly relevant to her fans’ lives. Written for the forgotten fantasy movie Eragon – which co-starred, if you can believe this, Joss Stone as a witch with a pet werecat called Solembum – Keep Holding On has a suitably epic end-credits feel that works as well as the final track on The Best Damn Thing as it would in a cinema. Her ability to transcend novelty appeal had less to do with Sk8er Boi’s clever contrivance than it did songs like Complicated: training-wheels Alanis that repurposed grunge angst for a tween audience, but was far more melodically and emotionally powerful than its mall-rat video suggested.

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