“No matter what, just don’t try to make yourself sound cool,” Deryck Whibley recently told us for a forthcoming feature. “Just tell the story.”
The difference is, though, that Deryck Whibley is inherently cool, and the way he navigates this life of his is a story in-and-of itself.
From years of covering Sum 41, we have quite a few notable, introspective, and buzz-worthy quotes from the punk rock frontman and new author. With his book out tomorrow and a handful of exciting events coinciding with such, we thought now would be the perfect time to round-up these quotes from our friend, the rockstar himself… especially being that we have interviewed him some five or six times – in 2002, 2004, 2007, 2016, and 2019, respectively.
2002:
On what he hopes people take away from Sum 41’s Does This Look Infected? – their sophomore album that dropped one week before: “I think we write really positive songs and we have a positive outlook on life. [I hope people take away] things like that.”
2004:
“Nothing beats starting over,” he told us two decades ago. In this instance, he was referring to the switching of record labels: Island to Warner. “At first I was really nervous to give a new record to a bunch of people that didn’t know our band. They knew who we were but they didn’t start with us and grow with us and rally with us. But after a while, we went in and we met with everybody and that made us feel a lot better. Especially meeting with L.A. Reid. That’s when we realized that we were in good hands. I really felt like he understood our band and that it was almost that same feeling that we when we first signed to Island all over again.”
2007:
On writing the personal, meaningful, and the then-new songs for Underclass Hero, as well as the liberation that came from writing/recording that record the way that he did: “It was a hard record to make because every song was really scary. It was scary to the point where I didn’t even want to show the rest of the band. Anytime I was playing a song for someone I was always nervous. Anytime you write in a very literal way about yourself, and you know everyone’s going to know what you’re talking about you have a lot of subconscious brick walls that try to stop you. My rule on this record was to break down all the brick walls and go through them. A lot of these songs I had tried to write before and just didn’t want to let myself think about.”
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2016:
After intensive rehabilitation, Whibley buckled down to write 13 Voices, one of the deepest, and most inward looks at him via the band and the music. As he shared with us at that devastating-turned-revitalizing time: “I had spent a few months in and out of the hospital. From just liver and kidney failure from alcohol abuse – from years and years of alcohol abuse. And once I got out of the hospital and had come so close to death, I was trying to recover, which was really difficult because in the hospital, I had all these problems with my feet – I’d had nerve damage from the swelling from all the medication I was on and atrophy from being inactive and in bed for so long. I couldn’t walk, I had to do huge rehabilitation just on my body to be able to walk again. And then there was my mental state at the time, which was definitely affected as well, and my motor skilled were really fucked up at the time and I couldn’t form sentences very well and I couldn’t play guitar. I had to relearn everything and at the same time, I was desperately trying to write new songs for a record because I knew that if I had music to work on, it would give me something to fight for and it would help me recover.”
2019:
On being such an open book, in-and-out of music, and how/why he is able to do so: “Sometimes I feel like, ‘Why do I let it all out?’ And sometimes they just feel like it’s something that I have to do. The way I operate is somewhat easy, but also hard to explain, because I don’t really think about the way I go about things. Then, when I get asked something, I’m kind of like, ‘Well, I don’t really have an answer, because the only way I go through life is how I speak,’ so if I’ve said something that day about my personal life, that is just because that’s how I felt that day, what I felt I should talk about, and what I wanted to do. I didn’t really put much thought into it and never really do. I don’t exactly know why I did that or why I didn’t do other things. I have no idea. I just sort of feel my way through life and hope for the best.”
FOR MORE ON WHAT DERYCK WHIBLEY IS UP TO, & SUM 41 (BREAK-UP ASIDE), CLICK HERE!
