About 10 years before Brie Larson took the stage at the Academy Awards to accept an Oscar for her exceptional performance as an abducted prisoner in Room, she was a 16-year-old with a dream of making aggressively radio friendly pop music for young women in the suburbs.

Thanks to Jezebel’s Bobby Finger, the internet is currently remembering a string of four singles that the Best Actress winner was responsible for in the early aughts, all songs that took cues from Hilary Duff, Ashlee Simpson, Avril Lavigne and other young women whose names were synonymous with OG millennial angst, Hot Topic, and live lip syncing debacles.

Take a listen to one of those tracks, “She Said,” above and embrace your inner 2005-alienated-teen. Larson is clearly talented but the songwriting here is ROUGH. Perhaps I’m being too judgemental, but actually I am definitely not because one of the lines in this song is “You can say what you want, you can tell me I’m wrong / La-dee-dah la-dee-dee.” Like, that is stinkier than a big whiff of nail polish remover.

Quick digression: In my head, the below GIF is an alternate reality where Larson is retroactively winning a Grammy for “She Said” and high-fiving Jacob Tremblay, who was just a twinkle in his handsome father’s eye when this track was originally released. I would tune into a Grammys ceremony that had a segment about Oscar winners’ previous, embarrassing careers in the music industry.

Anyway, the takeaway here is this: Sometimes you have to sling songs about slingin’ burgers before you become a critically acclaimed actor with a cool child costar that loves Star Wars. If you need me, I will be hoedown dancing from my desk all the way to the Nerdist office parking lot.

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HT: Jezebel

IMAGE: Casablanca Music