Avril Lavigne, with Simple Plan and girlfriends, at Xfinity Center

Avril Lavigne. Joe Maher/Getty Images

Music is time travel. It’s lots of things, of course, but that’s one of the big ones. Play the right song from your younger days – or the wrong song, even – and you get transported back to that time, with all of the feelings that you felt back then. And when the artist herself is standing in front of you, reeling off memory after memory, it can generate an alchemy that goes beyond the performance itself.

It’s not likely that Avril Lavigne was thinking in quite such explicit terms when she conceived her Greatest Hits Tour that landed at the Xfinity Center on Saturday. But she had an inkling, for sure. “Who here is over 30?,” she asked the crowd at one point. “Well, today, you’re 17 again.” When she declared that “Complicated” took her back to 2002, she wasn’t just speaking for herself.

That’s because Lavigne is a deeply-felt (and deeply under-recognized) touchstone for a whole generation of women, a generation for whom Alanis Morissette might have been too old and/or intimidating and Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera might have been too inauthentic. So was Lavigne, of course – a great deal of ink was spilled at the time both calling her punk and explaining how she very much wasn’t – but it didn’t matter; ironically, the image was all that mattered. And so her petulant, snotty, well-crafted and often insidiously effective songs wormed their way into hearts uncountable.

Lavigne brought pretty much all of them, starting with the big, idiotic and brilliant cheerleader sneer of “Girlfriend,” which found the singer stalking half-bored across the stage in a gaudy hooded jacket of black and day-glo green and pink, exactly right for the song. The jittery keyboard twitches of “What The Hell” could have been an alternate-universe Pink, and the dismissive “He Wasn’t” flew, soaring on the sound of a capacity crowd singing along despite it not being one of her major hits. Even when they weren’t ubiquitous, Lavigne’s choruses were and remain indelible.

Historically a stiff performer, Lavigne still didn’t demonstrate much in the area of personality that wasn’t strictly scripted; this universe’s Pink needn’t worry there. But she was notably looser and more at ease both in her songs and in between them than she’s been in the past. Joined by her 2003 tourmates Simple Plan on the heavy shuffle of the latter’s “Addicted,” she blew bubbles that she’d cadged from the audience just beforehand, and it may have been the only truly spontaneous thing she did all night. Then she and Simple Plan frontman Pierre Bouvier went back to spraying nozzles of smoke at the crowd.

Brattiness might be Lavigne’s stock in trade, but she also could do pleading and frustrated. Sometimes it was all in the same song, as with “My Happy Ending,” which offered a hint of Ray Of Light-era Madonna in its intro before shifting to the chunky guitars that made up its backbone. The slower and more pillowy “Don’t Tell Me” was defiant but also sad and hurt. And with smoke and flame jets bursting in rhythm with the drums, “When You’re Gone” was a full-on lighters-in-the-air power ballad.

That was Lavigne’s secret weapon, in fact. Returning for her encore in a flowing white robe (albeit with zippers, studs and heavy lace-up boots), she stood on a platform at the back of the stage and unloaded the windswept drama of the slow and booming “Head Above Water”; shifted a degree or two, it could’ve been Céline Dion. Moving to the front, she ended in the same vein with a warm and reaching “I’m With You” that was all the more powerful with somewhere shy of 20,000 people singing along just as they had all their lives.

Opening with bratty pop-punk of the Sum 41 variety, girlfriends seemed like they were just on the verge of inventing emo, unaware that someone had already done it for them three decades ago. Whether she was real or simply a fictional creation, the explicit call-out of Travis Mills’s ex-girlfriend by name in song and the profane cheer that he led the audience in showed that they also embraced the old emo misogyny as well.

Simple Plan seemed to operate off of a similar teen-boy attitude – every lyric sounded like it should’ve been be followed by a snotty “… Mom!” – but they offered a more welcoming variety of pop-punk. With a passel of heartbursting guitar anthems, they performed with absolute joy, whether on original material like “Welcome To My Life” or rapturously received covers of “All Star” and “Mr. Brightside.” A mention that “I’m Just A Kid” was 22 years old made it seem like Bouvier was suggesting that he felt old, but it became clear that he was more thrilled at still playing to eager fans all those years later. It wasn’t a matter of recapturing or reliving their glory days, just remembering them. Just time travel.

Setlist for Avril Lavigne at Xfinity Center — Aug. 24, 2024

Girlfriend
What The Hell
Complicated
Smile
Here’s To Never Growing Up
Hot
My Happy Ending
He Wasn’t
Don’t Tell Me
Losing Grip
When You’re Gone
Addicted (Simple Plan cover) (with Simple Plan)
Bite Me
Love It When You Hate Me
Sk8er Boi