Deryck Whibley nearly drank himself to death.

In 2014, the frontman of legendary pop punk band Sum 41 found himself in the hospital after excessive alcohol consumption caused his liver and kidneys to stop working. Fortunately, Whibley survived, and after following the long road of recovery, he’s now able to do all the things he loves again. That includes playing guitar, something the “Fat Lip” singer had to re-learn following his close brush with death.

These days, the 46-year-old is playing all the wellness hits. He’s a cold plunge devotee, tailoring his diet to fight acid reflux, and learning that even rockstars need their sleep. No longer the tabloid darling who dated Paris Hilton and checked into hotels under the name Jack Daniels, Whibley is extremely candid about his fast living, reckless days of yore. In 2024, he put out his memoir, Walking Disaster, chronicling everything from being raised by a single mother in Canada to his balls-to-the-wall Warped Tour debauchery.

With that all in the rearview—and Sum 41’s breakout album All Killer No Filler now 25 years old—Whibley is able to offer clear-minded reflection on getting famous at a very young age, the power of stoicism, and what it’s like to hear a doctor say you may not make it

GQ: With all your health issues, is there one moment over the last—I guess, 12 years—that really stands out as the watershed, holy shit moment for you?

Deryck Whibley: I mean, there’s really only really been one health issue for me, which was liver failure due to excessive drinking.

So when your body shut down, that was the moment that you remember the most?

Oh, absolutely, but it was the greatest day of my life. There’s so much emotion wrapped around it that I can remember it so clearly. It does feel like yesterday, even though it was about 12 years ago, April 2014. Obviously, that was the catalyst of everything changing in my life, but for the better. At the time, it felt like the most difficult thing. It was the most difficult thing I’d ever been through. It was painful, it was awful. It was draining in every possible way. I mean, for one, I almost died. My organs shut down. So there was that whole thing. Physically, I was dying. They managed to keep me alive, and coming out of that was a long journey.

Just the physical side of it, like I couldn’t walk for a long time because of the severe drinking and neuropathy. It caused nerve damage in my feet. I couldn’t walk for a year, at least without a lot of pain, and for the first few months, I couldn’t walk at all. There was a lot of muscle atrophy on top of the neuropathy. I overcome that, but my motor skills were completely fucked. I couldn’t form real sentences. I could only say one syllable at a time for a long time. Not only that, the one solace I thought that I would have was that I could pick up a guitar. That’s my one thing that I could always go to. I picked up a guitar and I couldn’t play it. I was looking at my fingers like, my brain knew what it wanted them to do, but I couldn’t tell them what to do.

Everything was very difficult in that way. But then on the mental side of it, I mean, there was so much shame, and guilt, and blame, and embarrassment, and confusion, and fear. I don’t think there was one good thing going on in my life at the time. There was nothing really positive other than I survived. That was enough, to be like, “Okay, I’ve survived.” At least I’ve got one thing to hold onto. I didn’t die. So now it’s about getting better. When I was in the hospital, the doctors were telling me, “Look, it’s going to be 50-50, we may not be able to save you here.” They were just straight up with me like, “We’re going to do our best.” There were a few times that things were going south and I would end up back in the ICU because my organs started failing. After I’d been there for a couple weeks thinking I’m on the mend, all of a sudden I would start vomiting blood because my organs were shutting down. It happened a couple times. So they were like, “You may not make it out of here.” But I made that vow that if I ever got out of there, that I was going to completely turn my life around, and I’ve never looked back.