This week on Kyle Meredith With…, Sum 41 frontman Deryck Whibley joins the podcast to discuss his latest projects, including touring in support of the almost 30-year-old band's final album which dropped earlier this year, Heaven X Hell, his upcoming memoir, Walking Disaster: My Life Through Heaven and Hell, and more.
LISTEN NOW: Kyle Meredith With... | Deryck Whibley
“I've always had a really good memory and I think it runs in my family too,” Deryck tells Kyle. “So writing the book and having all these memories of our whole career and everything wasn't such a deep dive to go back and do all this stuff -- writing the book was actually kind of easy once I'd got going.” The timing, he admits, of finally putting an exclamation point on that part of his career, came about as a bit of an accident. “When I signed on to do a book and when we started making a record, none of this -- final tour, final album -- was in our thoughts. It was just making an album and writing a book, and once it all came together,” he says, “the timing just felt right for me personally and creatively that it was the end of Sum 41 for me."
Losing their youthful “gang mentality,” as Kyle puts it, eventually gets lost over the years, as each members’ priorities in life shift and evolve. Deryck has noticed that as well, admitting "Life changes… You know, you start out, you just all want the same thing. You're your only friends and that's it. You have the same goals and then you get to a certain age where you have different goals, different priorities and different family members and then kids appear and all this kind of stuff. It can be very difficult to keep it together. I think we had some problems in the past with keeping it together. And then also you throw in a lot of partying and not sleeping and booze and all the other stuff that makes life 'fun,' to a certain degree, but difficult to another degree, and things start to implode. We went through all that. But then we came out of the other side of that really close and really great friends and the family bond and the gang of us was tighter and stronger than ever.”
“It's been like that for the past decade. And it only gets stronger and stronger as we get older because we've sort of managed to figure out how it works for all of us. The thing is, we always had the same goal,” Whibley says. However, when it came to finally calling it quits, “that was really more my thing,” he reveals. “It really was just about creativity. It wasn't about we can't get along or we have different priorities… like I said, everything is the best it's ever been. I just felt I've kind of said all I wanted to say within Sum 41 and that it's probably time for me to try to explore something different, and leave the band in a place that is at the best it's ever been.”
“I would say I was having these thoughts as far back as say 2019, pre-pandemic,” Deryck says of his decision to wind down Sum 41. “Then the lockdown started and I thought, ‘OK, maybe I just need a break,’ you know? We had like a year and a half, two years off or whatever that was just at home and I thought when we started back up, all those feelings would be gone, but they were still there.”
While writing the band’s latest record, he says, “I was writing all that music through that lockdown period and not thinking that it was gonna be the last record, knowing that I felt like, ‘Man, I've been in this band of a long time and I don't know if I have much to say anymore.’ I found ways to get inspired, and other things inspired me that I didn't know that were going to inspire me -- like having a child. My son... he would stop crying when Punk rock music was on. So, I started listening to just like old school, like my old high school Punk rock -- which is like NOFX, and Pennywise, and Lagwagon, Strung Out, like Epitaph, Fat Records bands, and I fell in love with that music that I loved in high school, which is what I was listening to when I wrote the first couple records of Sum 41.”
“All of a sudden, I noticed that the new songs sort of had that same sort of spirit, same vibe, same kind of thing, except we're just better musicians now. We were able to articulate those ideas a little bit better, I think, to a certain degree, in certain ways… And then when it was finished, I listened to it and I thought this is the record I've always wanted to make. This is the sound of Sum 41. It feels like if it was a painting, like it's complete now.”
Related
Whibley's new memoir, Walking Disaster: My Life Through Heaven And Hell, is set to arrive on October 8. Pre-orders are available now. Right now the band is giving fans around the globe one more trip around the sum, currently on their final tour to toast three decades of music and mayhem after announcing their impending breakup last year with plans for one more album and a live trek to celebrate. Check out Sum 41'sTour of the Setting Sum final world tour dates and grab your tickets HERE.
Don't miss the full episode with Deryck Whibley on Kyle Meredith With... -- now streaming on Audacy -- an interview series in which WFPK's Kyle Meredith speaks to a wide breadth of musicians, digging deep into the artist's work to find out how the music is made and where their journey is going.
Plus, listen to Punk in the Sun and more on the free Audacy app