The Lavigne Project

[Sharifa]

Title: The Lavigne Project

Author: Norman Provencher

Publication: Ottawa Citizen

Date: 12.18.2002





It’s one of the simplest things about life in the music industry, but one of the least understood by people outside the business.

Most often, it’s the one thing that must be obeyed. They call it The Advance.

It can, and often does, dictate how and what an artist records, when she records it and with whom.

For example, when people read that someone like Avril Lavigne has signed a multi-record deal with New York-based Arista Records for $650,000 US or so, and a maximum of about $1 million per album, most people, at least those outside the music industry, assume that the then-16-year-old from Napanee has struck the jackpot. After all, a major-label deal is as rare as hitting the lottery and, even then, the dollar amounts are most often between $200,000 and $300,000 Cdn.

But the music business has many truths, some of them more true than others, and, in anything pertaining to The Advance, the simplest and most accurate truth is that, by signing the deal, Avril Lavigne (or, because she was a minor, her management and/or someone else) could end up owing the record company a lot of money, depending on how much the company actually spent putting together her first record and depending on if that record sells.

And the record company always gets repaid before the artist gets paid. Basic industry math in the United States holds that a record has to sell about 500,000 copies before it breaks even.

Which was why things were getting a bit tense for Lavigne and her first manager, Cliff Fabri, who now lives in Kingston, when they arrived in Los Angeles in May 2001.

They were about five months into a ground-breaking record deal and the meter was running, dollars clicking away relentlessly, more than $100,000 US in expenses already, without a single song to show for their efforts.

Technically, under the terms of the contract, Lavigne had to deliver the record towards the end of the year and while no one is saying the record company would hold a 16-going-on-17-year-old girl to the deal, record companies have shown that they wouldn’t not hold her to the deal just because she was a small-town teenager.

Lavigne and Fabri had spent five months meeting and working with a series of songwriters sent by the company.

Lavigne, at Fabri’s constant urging, had been writing material for almost two years, but she didn’t have anything remotely suitable for a project of this size, so like countless other artists before her, the company was hooking her up with proven writers and song doctors, similar to the role Glen Ballard had played with Alanis Morissette.

The problem was, Fabri recalls, the company was fixated on what CEO Antonio “L.A.” Reid saw at Lavigne’s three-song “audition” in October 2000, a performance that Reid had loved. But the three audition songs were not what Lavigne and Fabri were interested in pursuing, even though one of the songs was Lavigne’s very first co-write, a pretty song called Why, which she wrote with award-winning songwriter-producer Peter Zizzo, who has written songs for Celine Dion and whose studio Lavigne and Fabri had been using as a base.

The audition numbers had a definite New Country flavour and both artist and manager were determined to head out in a tougher, rock-pop direction.

“I think the record company was getting worried or pissed off,” Fabri recalled. “It seemed like we were turning down everything but, even though Avril knew and accepted that we needed the help, the material just wasn’t what we had decided she was going to put out.”

The first writer provided by the company on the West Coast turned out to be very much along the lines of the people they had worked with in NYC.

“Avril was very stressed out – I promised her she wouldn’t have to go through that again,” Fabri said.

He phoned a friend at EMI Publishing in New York, almost begging for a recommendation for a good co-writer for Lavigne. The first suggestion was Clif Magness, an Oscar-nominated writer/producer/musician who’d worked with stars ranging from Barbra Streisand to Cheap Trick.

Magness was ideal, Fabri recalls, because Magness knew nothing about Lavigne, so he was carrying no baggage.

Four hours after they met, Lavigne and Magness had written Unwanted. The song is the antithesis of New Country, featuring “alternative”-type acoustic-guitar-based verses with hard choruses and sprinklings of keyboards and electronica.

“We all flipped out,” Fabri recalls. “But I told Clif right away the label was going to hate the song.”

Sure enough, when Fabri played the song over his cellphone for John Hecker, boss of Hi-Fi Records in New York, which had been brought into the “Lavigne Project,” Hecker said the label was not going to change formats to accommodate “this rock song.”

“I don’t blame John’s attitude, they were just being protective of Avril,” Fabri says now. “The problem was, they didn’t know Avril yet.”

For unusual reasons, Fabri and Lavigne were on their own, without the usual record company representatives to ride shotgun, so they decided to fight that country-vs-rock battle another day. Shortly after, they had their first meeting with Arista-supplied songwriters/producers The Matrix, a hot collective featuring Lauren Christy, Graham Edwards and Scott Spock, who, individually or together, had done everything from solo work to songs and production for Christina Aguilera to movie songs.

The group had a country-flavoured tune already written at the request of the label, Fabri recalls, and Fabri and Lavigne once again went into their spiel that Avril would not perform anyone else’s songs on this record.

She was more than willing to co-write and take advice, but it had to be her material.

This time, things were different. For the first time, Fabri and Lavigne had “product” for The Matrix to listen to.

“We played Unwanted for them, they were excited and talked to each other for a minute and said they really preferred to write when the artist participates.”

That afternoon, the monster hit Complicated, the album’s first single and probably the record’s identifying song, was born.

“Everyone who listened to that song knew Avril had just been born, she had a hit song,” Fabri says.

“It was a very happy time.”

But the song, Complicated, was like jet fuel for the Let Go record and the album came in on time and under budget. From about May 2001 until last fall, Lavigne co-wrote every tune, working again with Magness and the Matrix and back with Peter Zizzo and Curt Frasca.

The North by Northeast (NXNE) music conference in Toronto in June 2000 was, for all intents and purposes, Avril Lavigne’s coming-out party.

For more than six months, ever since Fabri had seen Lavigne perform at a Kingston Chapters store, he’d been bringing her along slowly, just talking about the music business, what the young girl might expect, what to watch out for, how to prepare.

Fabri already had two acts signed or ready to sign major deals, singer-songwriter Jenifer McLaren and rockers Bomb32, and he knew most of the pitfalls and wanted to make sure Avril and her family were prepared.

“Most musicians have little sense of the business of music. Nor should they have to,” Fabri says. “There are good people and bad people everywhere, so I just wanted to get everyone familiar with what to expect.”

The other thing Fabri stressed constantly was the need for Avril to write her own material, to tell her own story. Not only would that ensure her individuality, but, frankly, music writing and publishing – basically the payments made to a writer any time a song is performed in any way, anything from radio to sheet music – is probably the most consistently profitable area of the music business.

Never mind buying the record, although Lavigne gets money for that both as a performer and a writer, every single time you hear Complicated (or Sk8ter Boi, the new single) you and everyone else are, in effect, dropping a few pennies into Lavigne’s hip-hugger pockets. Those pennies add up. Lavigne now has her own publishing deal and, because they generally correspond to the size of the record deals, it’s estimated Lavigne’s deal is worth up to $1 million for starters.

For want of a better expression, Fabri had adopted a stealth strategy in promoting Lavigne. She was a singer without any material, but there was time for that to develop. What she had was a malleable voice and, let’s face it, The Look.

“Avril has something that’s critical to superlarge success,” Fabri says now.

“Yes, she’s beautiful, but more than that, she has this charisma, she forces people to pay attention to her. That’s something you can’t teach, but you can definitely use, if you know how.”

Fabri’s risky plan was to drop hints to any music business person he could pigeonhole; always enough to pique the interest, but never revealing too much about this mystery artist.

“Any time they’d ask for something to listen to, I’d tell them, ‘Oh, she’s not ready yet. When she is, you’ll be the first to know. Really.’

“That drives them crazy.”

By the time of NXNE 2000, Fabri decided Avril was ready, and arranged meetings with about a dozen representatives from record companies or publishing houses. But there was no singing, just chatting.

“I wanted the buzz. I knew that once people met her we could go to the next step.”

The plan worked on Ken Krongard, then an artist and repertoire (A&R) man for Arista. A&R people are record industry talent scouts and work with artists throughout the recording process. A&R people receive thousands of demos and bios every year and aren’t easily impressed.

“Frankly, I was knocked out,” Krongard says from New York City.

“In terms of the look, she had it all. Cliff told me she could sing, but at that point, it didn’t matter if she could sing or not.”

Krongard’s reaction was typical of almost everyone who met Lavigne at NXNE. Mark Jowett of Nettwerk Records arranged for Lavigne to go down to New York to work with producer/writer Peter Zizzo, a Nettwerk-affiliated producer/writer who’s written for Celine Dion among others. Other people left business cards and made Fabri promise to call when Lavigne was ready to make a move.

In July, Fabri offered a management contract to the Lavigne family. By August, Avril had signed, with Fabri’s company, Romanline Ent., taking 20 per cent of Lavigne’s gross revenue, within industry norms for independent managers.

Then came the first trips to New York, the first, more of a tourist deal with parents John and Judy Lavigne. There was one solid breakthrough, though: Lavigne and producer/writer Zizzo were able to come up with Avril’s first co-write, Why, a sort of Tracy Chapman-meets-Faith Hill song. Why didn’t make it onto the album, but it gave Lavigne the confidence that she could be a writer.

In one of those weird coincidences that happen in the music business, on the day Lavigne went in to see Zizzo, he was doing some work with Vanessa Carlton who, along with Lavigne and Michelle Branch, have become known in some circles as the “new Liliths,” even though they’d prefer being known as young rockers.

Two months later, the Lavignes and Fabri returned to New York, a trip intended to move matters ahead even more. By then, Nettwerk Records has moved to formalize things with Lavigne, offering a $2,000 Cdn “demo deal,” which Fabri turned down.

It was time to call in Arista’s Krongard, and he dropped by Zizzo’s studio for a three-song audition – the song Why and two songs Zizzo had written for Faith Hill.

“I knew this was it,” Krongard says now. “I called [Arista CEO] L.A. [Reid] and told him he had to trust me on this, that we had the whole package right here.”

Reid was busy that night, but cleared a time for the next week and the Lavignes and Fabri returned to NYC for the moment of truth.

Krongard remembers two main things about that audition: Lavigne didn’t seem the least bit fazed being in front of the high-powered business types and Reid was floored.

“I remember he came in looking irritated or out of sorts, he’d definitely not had a good day,” Krongard says. “He was brusque, he wanted to get on with it. And then Avril sang and he visibly relaxed, and when she finished that first song he just looked at her and said: ‘You changed my day.’ ”

That, essentially was that. Reid had spoken. On that late October night in 2000, four months after the NXNE conference, the record boss sent the Lavignes, Fabri and Krongard off to the Windows on the World restaurant atop the World Trade Center.

The next month, lawyers for both sides got into the fray to hammer out a deal (the final, final contract didn’t get signed until June 2001) but everyone was already thinking about the record.

[sweet pea]

That was an interesting read. Thanks for posting.

[ginger]

“Yes, she’s beautiful, but more than that, she has this charisma, she forces people to pay attention to her. That’s something you can’t teach, but you can definitely use, if you know how.”

WOOOOOT!

Thanks for posting!

[bestofavril]

t4p..