Sum 41’s Deryck Whibley Talks Near-Death Experience, Learning to Walk and Live Again
Deryck Whibley from Sum 41 onstage in 2016. (Photo by David Wolff – Patrick/Redferns)
(additional reporting by Monica Molinaro)
Sum 41 frontman Deryck Whibley is sitting on the back of the bus at the Warped Tour in Pomona, Calif., when we walk back to meet him. The tour is a warm-up run for the band, who will be releasing their highly anticipated 13 Voices album this Oct. 7. It’s often cliché to say just releasing an album is the definition of success for an artist. But nothing could be truer for Whibley.
In 2014, roughly five years after his split from first wife Avril Lavigne, Whibley nearly died from years of excessive partying and alcoholism, winding up in an induced coma suffering from liver and kidney failure. He details all of that in this candid interview, opening up about the aftereffects of organ failure, how Iggy Pop and other artists helped him in his recovery, the moments he wanted to give up when he didn’t know if he would ever walk again, and his fears about writing music while sober.
YAHOO MUSIC: I once spoke to Alice Cooper about sobriety, and he told the story that one day he woke up throwing up blood and the doctor said, “If you don’t change your lifestyle, you will die.” Did you have the same sort of epiphany moment?
DERYCK WHIBLEY: Yeah, I had liver and kidney failure and ended up in the hospital. So that was my moment where it was like, “OK, maybe I am drinking too much.” I was dying and they were able to bring me back. When I came to, I didn’t really know where I was; they had to induce coma first for like three days. So when I came out of it, I had no idea. I don’t even remember how I had gotten into that condition of needing to be in the hospital. It was pretty rough, and then I was kind of like, “I think I’m done with this kind of s—.”
Was there one moment then where you realized you had gotten lucky and were given a second chance?
I didn’t really know how lucky I was, because it was such a long recovery and it was uncertain if I was going to have serious damage. As I got better we would do more tests on my liver and all these things, was I gonna have cirrhosis? We didn’t know for a long time. The only thing I got that was permanent was really bad nerve damage on my feet. That was the hardest to deal with, ‘cause I couldn’t walk for the longest time. So for about a year and a half I couldn’t really walk, and I didn’t know if it was ever gonna come back, and they didn’t know if that was ever gonna come back. So that got better and I realized I was OK was this February — and that was two years out of the hospital. We started touring, and I think the touring helped because it built some muscles. When I first went onstage, I was wobbling; it feels like vertigo. Every step was really weird. But I feel lucky now that the record’s coming out and we’ve got a song out.
The incredible thing about music is it’s such a healing process and you can unite with other people who have been going through those same things.
I don’t know how much I help people, I have no idea, but I know they helped me, and I’m forever thankful for that. I’m so thankful just to be back doing it. The new record seemed like the most daunting thing, ‘cause I had to recover and write, which was very difficult and it seemed like the music was suffering for a long time at the beginning of it. Then it finally kind of came together, and here we are.
Are there sober artists you really look up to for the way they changed their lives?
I would say Duff [McKagan], from Guns N’ Roses, has always been an inspiration. He had a very similar story to mine, except his was his pancreas and mine was my liver. He was an inspiration for me before I got sober because I always knew, “One day I’m gonna have to deal with this.” You always know you can’t keep living like this. I just thought I’m still young enough I don’t have to worry yet, but one day I’m gonna want to have kids and I’m gonna have to figure this out. And I was thinking, “Duff’s cool and he still does music and still badass. One day I’ll get there.” Then all of a sudden, the things happened to me and I had to get there earlier than I thought. But it was a great thing. The way we were all living, there was no way you could survive that. It was every single day as much as humans can take, so it was bound to burn you out at some point.
You wrote “Little Know It All” with Iggy Pop on his album Skull Ring. He is certainly one of those people who’s seen and done it all.
Exactly. When I went into the hospital, he’s the first person I called, ‘cause he’s been through it all. “Iggy, what do I do? Am I gonna be OK?” He was just really cool about it. He’s also a humble guy, so he doesn’t think he’s got advice. We just talked.
Are there moments you look back on where that almost doesn’t seem real? Like, “I really wrote a song with Iggy?”
Even though I was young and I didn’t really take much in back then, that one I did, probably ‘cause it turned into so much more than a one-time thing. It became a single for his record that year and we ended up playing on Dave Letterman together, we played MTV awards together , and then another awards show, so we ended up being his band a few times, playing that and “Lust for Life,” which was really cool. We shot a video for it, so we spent a lot of time together and we’ve been friends now for 13 years.
Did you have a pretty solid support group while getting sober?
Yeah, I really didn’t feel like I was on my own at all. Something I didn’t really expect at all was how much the fans were there for me. They were constantly writing in, and I wasn’t expecting that. I wasn’t expecting it to affect me as much as it did. Every day reading new things from fans actually did give me a lot of inspiration and hope and will to get better, along with the group of people that were around me. It almost felt like cheesy to say it: The fans did help, but they really did. That’s the other thing about being sober now, is you say something and you really do mean it. There’s no bulls— anymore. I said the other night, “I’m so happy to be on this stage right now, so glad to be here with you.” And I meant it.
Records usually end up being a snapshot of where you are in life, so is it difficult to go back and listen to all the pain you were going through at that time on 13 Voices? Or are there places you listen and it’s more optimistic than you remember?
The record is definitely all about my whole journey of falling and rising. There’s a song called “War” that was a turning point in my recovery. I couldn’t walk, it had been almost a year into it and there was no progress. And everything just felt really s—ty and I thought, “It’s so easy to go the other way. If I can’t do this and write songs and I can’t walk, what am I even trying to get better for? So why don’t I drink the last bit of my life away and enjoy it? Or you can keep fighting.” And in that moment, I started writing these lyrics and it became the song “War,” about fighting harder than you’ve ever fought before. So once I had those lyrics, I thought, “I’ve got this song now; I better live up to it.”
Ozzy Osbourne said when he did Black Rain that was the first album he ever wrote sober and it was intimidating for him. Did writing this album in recovery feel like starting over to you?
Oh yeah, I hated the whole experience. It was awful, ‘cause the worst part about it for me was that: I’m the sole writer in the band, so when I write I’ll write all day, work on music, and then when I’m done at like 10 o’clock at night I used to just go out to the bar or go out and do something — go for drinks, go to parties. Then you wake up the next day and laugh at the crazy night before, get to work that day, and then do it all over again. And you have an escape. When I’m done working at, say, at 10 at night, I’m just me thinking about the music still. And when I go to bed, I’m just lying there thinking about the songs.
Does it also make it so much more vulnerable when you’re putting it out there sober?
Definitely. The whole process was fear, self-doubt, second-guessing, over-analyzing — everything bad about what you should never do as a writer.
I read [Blink-182 drummer] Travis Barker’s book, and the one thing that stuck out was he said he had to learn how to live again, everything,
Totally, every little thing felt new. It really felt weird to do anything. My motor skills were all f—ed up; even just speaking in a full sentence was difficult for a while. Everything was really weird. I couldn’t play guitar at all, hadn’t played in so long. It felt like everything got reset to zero, it was weird. Things came back, like I could eventually start to play guitar. When I first picked it up, it was like, “This is how it was the very first year I was learning to play guitar.” And I thought, “Is this gonna take me four years to get better?” But it came back within like six months. Those days everything felt weird, like learning everything again.
Do you look back now on your pre-recovery days and wonder, “What was I doing?”
I do think about it all the time, and I think, “I wouldn’t change a thing.” I’m so glad I did it all. The only way I could be sober and enjoy it, I think, right now, is the fact that being sober and healthy is so new and exciting and it’s fun. I like waking up early in the morning. That’s new.