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Alexandra Slate, 22, has a different frustration with the Avril comparisons.
"My whole point of doing this album was to make every song very different and very diverse and to incorporate every kind of music into one album," she said of Edge of the Girl. "And it's weird when I get comparisons to one person. I would rather have, 'You're a little bit of this, a little of that.' "
In that case, Slate is a little bit Sheryl Crow, a little bit Joni Mitchell. Her press photo, though, in which the blonde wears a long-sleeve baseball tee with the words "Bad Girl" ironed on, is a little bit Avril.
Like Sweetnam and the others, Slate has been writing songs for years. "My mom has a little cassette tape of me singing and making up my own songs when I was about 4," she said. "I started playing guitar when I was 13 and couldn't put it down."
In her teens, Slate began playing coffee shops, which triggered thoughts of singing professionally. "I thought, 'Cool, I could live off making 50 bucks a night. I could do this forever.' "
After signing with Hollywood Records, Slate hooked up with producer by Rob Cavallo, the man behind her "bible," Green Day's Dookie. Three members of Canadian stars the Tragically Hip played on her album, which features the single "Bad Girl."
" 'Bad Girl' is sort of about that spot in your mind where you hold all those personalities you know you have but you never let out," Slate explained. "People view me as this person I may or may not think I am, but I also have all these personalities I don't let people see."
Katy Rose, whose father, Kim Bullard, was a keyboardist for Crosby, Stills and Nash and Art Garfunkel, believes her experience growing up on tour buses and in Los Angeles makes her a lot different than Avril.
"I don't know if we write about the same things," said Rose, a tiny girl with a towering presence. "She grew up in a really small town in Canada, very different. I had a very unconventional childhood, I went through stuff most people don't even go through in college, and I'm already past that."
Those experiences are told through song on Because I Can, due October 7.
"[The songs are] dealing with self-loathing, self-hatred and learning to love yourself and this disease called depression that's looming over me," Rose said. "I've been on meds since I was 14 for all kinds of stuff."
One track, "Lemon," is featured in the movie "Thirteen," written by and starring her friend Nikki Reed. Rose's first single, "Overdrive," is about the fakeness of Los Angeles.
"Automatically if you've moved to Hollywood from, say, Idaho, you've made it," Rose explained. "But the truth of the matter is that 1 percent, maybe, of millions of people who move here to be a rock star or movie star makes it. And that's so sad, to see these people's dream obliterate."
Rose calls her album as real as her journal and does not shy away from criticizing Avril's music for being the opposite.
"I don't want to say anything bad about her because I'm sure she's a nice girl, but she's extremely manufactured, and her record is extremely overproduced," Rose said. "That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just my opinion. I don't feel like she put a lot of heart and soul into it. And it seems like she's trying to be something that is not real."
Wannabe she is not.
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Photo: V2
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