Billboard reports that Lyme disease turned Avril Lavigne into a Christian rocker, or something

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      Hey! (Hey!) You! (You!) Remember Avril Lavigne? Sure you do. She was once a very popular singer and is also Chad Kroeger's ex-wife. We haven't heard from her in a few years, and it's not because she was intentionally avoiding the spotlight.

      Actually, it would be nice to think that she decided to lay low for a few years because she was so mortified by this:

      (You might think that's the most cringey song in Kroeger's catalogue, but "She Keeps Me Up" begs to differ.)

      As it turns out, no! It seems she had Lyme disease, which is actually a very serious illness that I'm not going to make jokes about. (For a look at how Lyme disease can wreak havoc on one's life in general and a musical artist's creativity in particular, I point you in the direction of the Kathleen Hanna documentary, The Punk Singer.) 

      Fortunately, Lavigne recovered from the disease and is making a musical comeback, which brings us to the current Billboard cover feature on her, which reveals that not only is she back, she's back as a Christian singer.

      Um, what?

      Yup, turns out that her stuggle with Lyme inspired this shift:

      One night, in bed with her mother and barely able to breathe, Lavigne started to pray. “I had accepted that I was dying,” she says. “And I felt in that moment like I was underwater and drowning, and I was trying to come up to gasp for air. And literally under my breath, I was like, ‘God, help me keep my head above the water.’ ”

      Lavigne grabbed her phone and opened Notes. She had the beginning of a song, and, if not a way out of the water, at least some light visible above the surface.

      Okay, so that doesn't really mean she's become a CCM artist. It does, however, explain her comeback single, "Head Above Water", a cowrite with (who else?) Kroeger that sounds big and inspirational and is almost enough to convince us that "Hello Kitty" was a forgivable sin after all.

      In the rest of the article, Lavigne reveals that she has no regrets about her marriages to Kroeger and her first husband, Deryck Whibley. And also that she skateboards indoors and likes to get matching tattoos with romantic partners and apparently also Billboard reporters. 

      Through her eponymous charitable foundation, Lavigne is raising funds for Lyme disease research through sales of a "Head Above Water" T-shirt. You can find more details right here.

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