Deryck Whibley on Sum 41’s farewell: ‘It ended the way I hoped’​on March 28, 2025 at 2:00 pm

Deryck Whibley made it through almost the entirety of Sum 41’s final tour without being wracked by nerves. But as the Ajax, Ont., band prepared to hit the stage at Scotiabank Arena for its last-ever show, the band’s leader couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all coming to an end.

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“I woke up that day feeling pretty nervous,” Whibley, 44, said in an interview last month. “I’m always nervous on show day because you want to have a good show. But the difference is, if you have a bad show there’s still tomorrow. This one hit me. There was no option other than to be great. So that kind of hit me for the first time.”

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After nearly three decades of making music with bassist Jason McCaslin and lead guitarist Dave Baksh, Whibley pulled the plug on the pop-punk outfit that became chart-toppers in the late ’90s and early aughts.

But in the leadup to the release of its now-final album, Heaven :X: Hell, Whibley decided it was time for something new.

“I didn’t know it was going to be the last album,” Whibley admits. “I didn’t even know it was going to be a Sum 41 album. The only reason it ended up as a double-record — one pop-punk and the other heavier — was I thought I was writing songs for other people.”

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Deciding that he liked his musical ideas too much to have someone else sing them, Whibley worked on demos at his Las Vegas home and sent them to his bandmates, which also included drummer Frank Zummo and guitarist Tom Thacke.

“One by one, everyone wrote back and said, ‘What do you think about doing a double album?’ So the music told us what to do,” Whibley explains.

It was after he started putting on the finishing touches on the LP that Whibley was hit with a nagging thought: what next?

“I was thinking, ‘What else would I do after this?’ This was Sum 41 from the beginning of our career up to now, and everything in between. It’s all in one record. We were going to go out on tour and then what? Write another record? Was it going to be the same thing? I thought if there’s any time to call it, this album was it.”

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Following a farewell tour that wrapped with a two-night stand in Toronto in January, the band will take to the stage one final time at this Sunday’s Juno Awards when they are inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.

“We got told about that five minutes before we were going onstage in Los Angeles back in October,” Whibley recalled. “We were completely caught off guard in a good way … They told us about the induction and we were speechless.”

After achieving fame barely out of their teens with hits that like Fat Lip, Still Waiting and In Too Deep, and making headlines thanks to their hard-partying antics, Whibley concedes he never considered Sum 41 as the kind of band that would be honoured alongside other notable Canadian musicians.

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“We still thought of ourselves as a high school band in our garage trying to make it. So much of our career has been about proving ourselves,” he said. “We never felt like we made it. In that moment, we looked at each other and said, ‘Have we made it now?’”

“Looking back on the things we’ve been able to do, being put into the Hall of Fame with some of the greatest musicians Canada has ever produced is a beautiful thing,” Baksh says in an email. “It’s the perfect way to cap this surreal career that music has given us.”

“It feels really good and a perfect cap on our career,” McCaslin adds in a separate message.

At points during their heyday, Whibley lived a stereotypical rock star life. There were moments where his picture was a staple in celebrity tabloids after his relationship with Paris Hilton and a four-year marriage to pop princess Avril Lavigne.

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He nearly lost everything more than a decade ago when his addiction to drugs and alcohol landed him in the hospital in 2014.

But his now-wife Ariana Cooper and two children gave him a new perspective on life.

Last fall, Whibley revisited the band’s history in his memoir, Walking Disaster, in which he also accused Greig Nori, Whibley’s mentor and Sum 41’s onetime manager, of sexual abuse.

Nori has denied Whibley’s claims, saying their relationship was consensual. The two are now locked in a legal battle that will head to court later this year.

“It was hard to leave out,” Whibley says of the allegations. “If I left those things about Greig Nori out of the book, then I’d be lying. … I wouldn’t even know how to explain that period, those first four albums, with it all being intertwined. Was I surprised with where it’s at? Not really … I knew full well, anything can happen.”

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Following Sunday night’s performance in Vancouver, Whibley will close the book on Sum 41, but he’s eager to see what else life has in store.

“Everything that I dreamed of came true. Whether it’s professional or personal. It all ended up the way I hoped,” he said. “That gave me the courage to think there’s probably something else out there. I’ll just go figure that out.”

One of your bandmates described the end as being a mixture of the complete best and complete worst feelings. What was it like for you experiencing the end of Sum 41?

The biggest thing to me was making it a great show for everyone that night. I wasn’t thinking about the past too much or the future. My energy was focused on: This has to be awesome because it’s the last one.

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Sum 41 has been around for a long time. There have been ups and downs, but the last decade has been a high point. So why did you decide to end it?

There’s a few points to that. One is, we have been doing it for a long time. It’s the only thing I’ve done since I was 15, 16 years old. The other thing is, we did go through a lot of ups and downs, but we’ve been on a really great high for about a decade. So, it felt like there’s no better place to go out on. The third part to that is that I have so much excitement and energy to try other things. I don’t feel like I’m getting older. I feel like I’m 22, and I just want to try stuff. I’m excited about life, and doing other things. Sum 41, as great as it is, there’s a repetition to it and there’s built-in expectations to a degree. We’re going to do another album, another tour, little break, then another album and tour. The cycle was going to continue, and there wasn’t much variation to that. I don’t know what else I can do, but I know that I can’t figure that out or experiment or try new things with Sum 41 in my life because it consumes me.

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How did you tell the guys you wanted to end the band?

I sat on this idea for a long time. Even before the pandemic started, in 2019, I started having feelings where I was asking myself, ‘How long are you going to do this for? Is it another 10 years and then you’ll try something different?’ I was wondering if I was getting bored or burning out. I would have these feelings, and I would bury them and tell myself, ‘Stop. You’re in Sum 41. This is what you do. Stop thinking about something else.’ After the pandemic, I thought that after the two years off maybe we’d be excited. But when we got back out on the road, I still had those feelings. Not that I didn’t like it, I just thought about how much I wanted to try something else. So it was a few years of me having those thoughts. Once I came to the conclusion that I wanted to try new things, I sat on that for a year before I brought that to the band. I really needed to be sure. So, it took awhile. I probably had the feeling for four or five years in my mind before I mentioned it. Then I wondered how I would tell them … So I wrote an email that explained how I felt and at the end of it I told them to think about it for a few days and then let’s talk, individually.

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What was the secret to the Sum 41’s enduring success?

We went up and down … but for me, I never paid attention to any of that stuff. When we were in the down periods, I was still focused on doing the best work we could. We weren’t trying to fit into what’s going on (musically). I could hear it and I knew it was happening, but I didn’t try to chase those things. We weren’t going to break up the band just because things weren’t working — and it was years of things not working; making records and songs that were not played on radio … Kind of overnight, the door was closed all of a sudden. Then tickets weren’t selling and everything just kind of crashed. It was really quick. But I remember thinking if we were going to have any type of longevity, we couldn’t live and die by radio or MuchMusic or MTV. So I just said to the guys, ‘Let’s go out and tour and build up a fanbase like a lot of bands that we loved.’ Iron Maiden continue to tour and grow, all because they’re a great live band. So, we just started going down that path. We set out to become the best live band we could be. We went from arenas to playing to just hundreds between 2007 and 2013, and we had to slowly build back up. It took a really long time of just slowly getting bigger and bigger.

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What do you think Sum 41’s legacy will be?

I don’t know. It’s not up to me. It’s stuff that just happens. And what is legacy? Legacy is for a certain amount of time. How long does legacy last? A generation or two and then you’re forgotten about. You get replaced by new stuff and new people.

What was the wildest thing that happened to Sum 41? I remember reading about how you guys got sued for a hot dog prank at a Blue Jays game.

We got sued for that. That was a wild story. But especially in those days, everyday we were trying to top the day before. We just kept pushing the envelope of what we were able to do and then you end up in the hospital like I did after 15 years of that.

You mention the hospitalization that happened. You nearly died. What did that experience teach you about  life?

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When I got out of the hospital, I wanted to focus on being the best version of myself in every possible way. It didn’t happen overnight, but I slowly built myself back up. It’s still a constant feeling of working on myself and getting better. It’s part of why I want to try something different and see what else is out there. I think there are certain cliches. It makes you appreciate life more. You realize how quickly and easily you can just disappear. It puts your own mortality into perspective and it just makes you aware of a lot of things in your life and things you took for granted before. When you’re young, you do take things for granted. Things just slip by. I take in everything now. I don’t want to miss opportunities or moments. I don’t think I would have gotten there — especially at that age — without having gone through something like that.

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What would you say to young Deryck?

Just keep doing what you’re doing. Everything you want to come true is going to come true.

What would that youngster from Ajax have thought about where he ended up?

Young me thought I was going to take over the world. I believed it was all going to happen. Sixteen-year-old me thought, ‘Of course I’m going to be famous.’

Would you change anything?

No … the only thing I would have changed is, when I think of everything in my life coming true, I wonder: ‘Why didn’t I dream to be as big as Metallica?’

Is this really the end of Sum 41?

This is definitely the end of Sum 41, as far as I’m concerned. My plan is to go do something else.

The Juno Awards air live from Vancouver on Sunday, March 30, on CBC

mdaniell@postmedia.com

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