Talk:Sum 41

Origin of the name according to Deryck Whibley

On his new autobiography, Walking Disaster (2024), Deryck says (on Chapter 3):

As school ended and summer rolled in, we heard that a music festival called the Warped Tour was coming to town. When we saw the lineup, we lost our shit: Pennywise, Face to Face, Unwritten Law, Rocket from the Crypt, and our favorite band of all—the band we thought we would never see in our lifetime—NOFX! There was no way we were going to miss this. July 27, 1996, was a hot and humid day, but we got to the festival early, because we didn’t want to miss a single thing. (...)

We were in awe as we watched all of our favorite bands play that day. None of us went near the mosh pit, not out of fear, but because we actually wanted to sit and listen to the music. We thought seeing these bands was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and we weren’t going to waste it moshing. As the four of us sat watching NOFX, I turned to the guys with an idea. “We need to end Kaspir,” I said. “We need to be a punk rock band. The kind of band that would play the Warped Tour. This is the only music we listen to, why are we not playing it? Kaspir sounds like the early nineties rock music we used to listen to, and don’t anymore.” Everyone agreed. We were starting a new band and Jon would be in it. All we needed was a name. The worst part of starting a new band is always the question: “What the fuck do we call ourselves?”

The four of us brainstormed for days in my basement, even cutting up words from a magazine and pulling them from a hat, but nothing stuck. We liked the idea of having a number in the name, because we thought that could be original, which sounds ridiculous now. Then we thought, What if the number rhymed with the word? We almost went with the name 7 Ply Surprise, which is slang for a skateboard to the face, but there was a local punk band named Five Knuckle Chuckle, which meant a punch to the face, and it felt too similar. One word we liked from our magazine cutout experiment was the word “Sum.” Since it was like the sum of something, we thought we should add a number to it. What number, though? We looked at the calendar and counted how many days it had been from the start of our summer break to the day the Warped Tour was on and it was forty-one days. That was it! We would be Sum 41, which meant forty-one days into the summer. We had our name and it was original! Or so we thought. We’d been a band for about a year and a half when we started to hear of a band from Southern California with numbers in their name—blink-182. Their song “Dammit” had started getting radio play and people were starting to know their name. Still, we didn’t think too much of it, because at the end of the day, who gives a shit about band names anyway?

And then adds:

I wanted him to know I was in a band, too. So I told him that we were called Sum 41 and we were playing our first show at a Battle of the Bands in Toronto in a few weeks. (...)

We had booked another one of those SuperNova Battle of the Bands, but this time we weren’t going to play their game of selling tickets or trying to win any bullshit prizes. This was just the easiest way to get a show in a real venue downtown.

Sorry for the extensive quote, but seeing as this confusion has spread online it is better to take it from the founder of the band himself.

TL;DR "Supernova" was the name of the festival where the name was used for the first time and never a name the band used. They went from Kaspir to Sum 41 directly. Deryck even complains on his book that many facts on this Wikipedia page are wrong that could be corrected in time. Valenzine (talk) 14:58, 19 October 2024 (UTC)