ONE NOTE AT A TIME –
April 6, 2024 – Call it a premonition or pure naïveté, but Sum 41’s Deryck Whibley knew for a fact when he was 16 that he was going to be famous someday.
“I mean, I was just so obsessed with music, and this was, at that time, pre-internet, so I didn’t know a lot of information about rock stars except for the chaos and craziness.” “People ask me a lot of times over the years, ‘Do you regret things or do you wish that didn’t happen?’ Or, ‘I’m so sorry you went through that,’” he says. “I’m like, ‘I’m so thankful I went through those hard times.’ How boring would my life be if I had never struggled for anything?”
Fame came fast and furious for Whibley after Sum 41 was signed to Island Records in 1999, when he was fresh out of high school. They released their first EP, Half Hour of Power, in 2000 and their debut album All Killer No Filler — featuring hits like “Fat Lip” and “In Too Deep” — a year later,
“When things started taking off, all of a sudden we were on MTV and the radio and songs were going No. 1 and all this stuff,” he says. “It happened quickly once it started. It was just such a whirlwind. We were only 20 years old, flying in private jets all of a sudden, taking helicopters to shows and hanging out with our heroes.
