Standing at the Edge of Something Cold

The thing about Avril Lavigne’s I’m With You is that it came from the same album as Complicated—her snappy, eye-rolling debut single—and nobody seemed to find it strange that the same teenager who complained about her boyfriend acting fake also wrote something this bare and exposed. Standing on a bridge in the rain. Asking a stranger not to leave. The production is thin, almost uncomfortable. She was seventeen and she sounds like she meant every word completely.

I remember hearing it and doing a double-take at the restraint in it. None of the pop-punk posturing that defines the rest of Let Go—just a voice and a chord progression that lands somewhere you don’t expect. That kind of loneliness doesn’t need to earn its credibility. You either recognize the specific feeling of standing somewhere in the dark and needing someone, anyone, to stay—or you don’t. She caught it exactly.