I remember first listening to punk-pop Avril Lavigne with her heavily mascaraed eyes singing about her skater boy and giving the finger to anyone who got in her way. There was a true passion in her, despite how quickly it got packaged and marketed to teen audiences longing for something authentic.
But it’s been years since I’ve been a teenager and I wasn’t interested in teen anthems. So, I quickly moved on to music and musicians who were more suited to my stage in life and interests — Radiohead, Sufjan Stevens, Death Cab For Cutie, and so on.
But Avril Lavigne has popped back into the popular consciousness recently for her first song release in half a decade. Not having followed her career, little did I know that she had contracted Lyme disease and almost died of it. In fact, the new song arises from her near-death experience.
“One night I thought I was dying, and I had accepted that I was going to die,” she stated. “My mom laid with me in bed and held me. I felt like I was drowning. Under my breath, I prayed, ‘God, please help to keep my head above the water.'”
Her words became the central line of the song: God, keep my head above water. Don’t let me drown.
What becomes immediately obvious from the song is Avril’s history with the Psalms. And the most minimal poking around online reveals that she was raised in a devout Christian home where prayer and the Psalms almost certainly played a role in her personal formation.
Her condition and the location of her turning-point prayer echoes Psalm 6 —
Have mercy on me, LORD, for I am faint;
heal me, LORD, for my bones are in agony.
My soul is in deep anguish.
How long, LORD, how long?
Turn, LORD, and deliver me;
save me because of your unfailing love.
Among the dead no one proclaims your name.
Who praises you from the grave?
I am worn out from my groaning.
All night long I flood my bed with weeping
and drench my couch with tears (Ps. 6:2-6).
The music video linked to above picks up on her use of water and drowning as the primary images in her song, images that run throughout the Psalms. Here’s just one of many examples:
Save me, O God,
for the waters have come up to my neck.
I sink in the miry depths,
where there is no foothold.
I have come into the deep waters;
the floods engulf me (Ps. 69:1-2).
We could take time to parse Lavigne’s lyrics here, like her reference to the parting of the sea in the Exodus, but I’m less interested in the particular details than I am in her use of the Psalms.
The Psalms are unique within the Scriptures in their invitation for us to pull from them and improvise on them. The rest of the Scriptures are vastly quotable and have been inspirational for many generations. And though many have echoed the rest of the Scriptures, the Psalms almost beg us to modify them, add to them, and adapt them to our situations as Lavigne did in her song.
As such, the song is an almost perfect example of what an immersion in the Psalms offers us. Their words seep into Lavigne’s words without there being any direct quoting. The Psalms have given her a vocabulary and a powerful image to draw from and she does so almost unconsciously.
That whispered prayer in bed from which the song rose is the kind of prayer prayed when someone is at the end of her rope and doesn’t know what to pray.
When our words fail us, the Psalms provide words for us to pray. They are filled with brief, ready-made prayers we can use when none of our own words adequately express our heart reality.
So, keep reading the Psalms. Keep praying them. Keep soaking in them, knowing that some day you’ll come to the end of your own words and they’ll provide the words your praying heart needs, just as they did for Avril Lavigne.