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Most of the Mall of America appears empty and eerily desolate for a weekday afternoon. Camp Snoopy, America's largest indoor theme park, is about a hundred yards away from the atrium where Avril will perform. A roller-coaster zips around the marble-floored park, twisting and turning just a handful of riders over closed funnel-cake shops and chained-up kiddie rides. The strange, "Dawn of the Dead"-like feel, however, doesn't carry over to where hundreds of kids are waiting for Avril to take the stage.
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A fan at Avril's show in Minneapolis
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That area is intense. Each female fan more closely resembles Avril than the last. Some hold up signs reading, "Avril, We Love You," others have homemade photo collages. One pimply faced boy's placard asks, "Will you marry me?" while an overweight girl with an equally bad complexion carries one that reads plainly, "F--- Me, Evan!"
Mall police line the path from the parking garage to the atrium. Backstage are the local radio jock emceeing the event, crew members, a high-ranking officer of the mall PD and his family, the shopping center's owners and their kids, and some press.
"I'm very anxious to get out there, see my fans again and play new music," Avril says. "We played Let Go for two years, every day. I'm ready for a change."
With Taubenfeld at her side, Avril started working on new material before her debut album was even released. From the onset, Avril always prided herself on having an actual band, and not a bunch of faceless touring musicians backing her up.
"That's one of the reasons why I took this gig in the beginning," her guitarist explains. "She was like, 'I want a real band, and I want to play our music. I don't want to lip-synch, I want to do it live and I want you to be my band.'
"She's great to work with because she's honest," Taubenfeld continues. "I'll start playing something and she'll go, 'Nope, something else.' And you're on the spot. It's not like we had weeks booked out. When she worked with other writers, it was like that. But we did it in a hotel room, so it was like [snaps fingers], 'No, that's not good,' or, 'You need to come up with a new bridge, let's see what you got.' "
Like its title's double meaning suggests, Under My Skin is an album filled with both introspection and a catalog of things that annoy Avril. While she explains her personal songs alternately as dark, deep and weird, she rolls her eyes when asked what bothers her most.
"Guys," she mutters.
 "They just don't get things you're trying to hint at them," she grudgingly elaborates. "I don't know ... Girls know what I'm talking about when I say guys don't get things. They need to grow up. When you're my age and you go through dating and stuff, sometimes you're like, 'Ahhh!' "
Her new song lyrics better illustrate her laments. On "He Wasn't," Avril dumps an inconsiderate dude because he wouldn't so much as open the door for her. On "My Happy Ending," a relationship doesn't exactly turn out as planned because her guy isn't who she thought he was. "Forgotten" tells the tale of a broken heart slowly on the mend. And the album's first single, "Don't Tell Me," is an empowering anthem for girls dealing with guys only after one thing.
"Some guys kind of pretend they're nice and sweet, just to get a piece, or whatever," Avril says. "I think it's a good song because it tells girls not to throw themselves at guys. It has a good message."
Along with its moral, Avril is proud of how the song came to be. Before Let Go's release in June 2002, she and Taubenfeld penned the tune one night in a hotel room, without any prodding from her label or management. Unlike the Let Go sessions, which were basically scheduled studio appointments with a team of pro songwriters that included the Matrix, "Don't Tell Me" happened organically, and set the precedent for the other 11 songs on Under My Skin.
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