When You're Gone

I think I will write 1 piece about songwriting, especially since Avril Lavigne is coming has been to Singapore.

What a song like “When you’re Gone” tells me is that Avril Lavigne is one of the most inconsistent songwriters out there today. Let’s start on the plus side. This song has a killer chorus. It is a CHORUS. It’s one of those soaring sing-along choruses that will easily stand alongside others like “My Finest Hour” (Sundays), “Voices Carry” (Til Tuesday), “I’ll Stand By You” (Pretenders).

This is one of those songs where the rest of the song somewhat pales beside the chorus. I can picture what happened: a great chorus pops into you head 1 day, and you got to write it down. But a great chorus doesn’t stand on it’s own, a great chorus is a magnificent roof, but you still need the walls to hold the thing up. So you write verses, verses which in this case are not really bad but are fairly undistinguished when put aside that CHORUS. It’s a fairly common problem that when you get a great chorus, the build up to it is not so great. There’s a bit of imbalance, and it’s like seeing a woman with fantastic butt and legs, but flat chest and mediocre face. It happens all the time. (I mean this for both songs and women.)

And she seems almost determined to follow up a great line like “when you walk away I count the steps that you take” with a clichéd clunker like “do you see how much I need you right now?”. I mean, common sense would have you follow that up with another line that begins with “when you…”, right? Unless she thought about it for 1 hour and couldn’t come up with something.

Similarly the main hook, “when you’re gone the pieces of my heart are missing you” is a good line, but the chorus ends with a limp “I miss you” (as if we didn’t know that already.)

But then I’m reluctant to criticize teenagers. There was this review which put it nicely (“everything is either a blowjob or a castration”). Every thing about her is black and white. Even her face looks like a panda. I remember what it was like to be a teenager, and I know that I will never look at life with such certainty again as I did when I was younger. Well let’s hope she stays in the business long enough for us to know what a middle-aged Lavigne sounds like.

I rate her as a songwriter. A good songwriter is somebody who has a knack for that catchy chorus. She reminds me a bit of Debbie Gibson (although their images are quite different.) The teenage precocious songwriters with high voices and the knack for hooky choruses.