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Post by Heather on Apr 28, 2009 18:20:39 GMT -5
Sum: Kind of wonderful: Evolving styles add up to success for Canadian pop-punks
Love ’em or hate ’em, Sum 41 has had one hell of a career.
Following the 2000 release of “Half Hour of Power,” the Canadian foursome - known for their brash pop-punk and potty-mouth humor - managed to attain perhaps more than their fair share of international fame. The group nearly got caught in the crossfire of a civil war during a visit to the Congo and did a stint as Iggy Pop’s backup band.
Thursday, the band plays a sold-out show at Harpers Ferry in Allston. Frontman Deryck Whibley, Avril Lavigne’s better half, took a break recently from working on new material at his Los Angeles home to chat with the Herald.
HERALD: Do a lot of people still associate Sum 41 with its early-2000s incarnation?
WHIBLEY: Maybe, but everyone kind of has a different perception of us because we’ve done so many different things over the past nine years.
HERALD: You just released a greatest hits album. Why?
WHIBLEY: We did this big show in Japan that was planned about eight months ago. The label in Japan said, ‘Hey, you’re coming to do this huge show, but you haven’t had anything new out for a year. Can we release a greatest hits record?’ We said, ‘OK, fine.’ So they did and it was way bigger than they thought it was going to be. It ended up going gold. So the American label thought, ‘Well, let’s put it out everywhere.’
HERALD: What’s your audience like, age-wise?
WHIBLEY: There are young kids who didn’t know us back in the early 2000s, and there are people who were around in those days and followed us the whole way. But every record we’ve released has been so different from the previous one. We have a lot of fans that like particular periods of us and don’t like others. They’ll like the heavy stuff, but not the pop-punk stuff. Or they like the pop-punk, but not the heavier stuff. We’ve gained and lost fans, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to do what you want to do, how you want to do it, regardless of what other people are going to consider successful.
HERALD: When the pop-punk trend gave way to the emo trend, did you guys ever consider pretending to be depressed to sell more records?
WHIBLEY: No, never. I would never fake anything I’m doing.
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