Sometimes our walls exist just to see who has the courage to knock them down. The dare is to actually see whether the closest people around us are willing to sit and talk about the hard stuff without getting overwhelmed and distancing themselves to avoid getting in too deep. Most of the time, there tends to be a stigma especially surrounding mental health. Even though it has gotten so much better with various people coming out with their stories of experiences, there is still a long way to go.
An artist who was not afraid to share his struggles with his fans and be vulnerable with his feelings and what he had been through was none other than Sum 41’s Deryck Whibley. If you aren’t familiar with his heart-wrenching story, here’s a little background as to what the singer had been through to create the track ‘Catching Fire’ which was initially a part of their 2019 ‘Order in Decline’ album.
The tragic passing of his friends in the industry, Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington, due to suicide had already ruptured a hole in his life. Around the same time, his wife also had a suicide attempt which added to overwhelming feelings of grief and sadness, leading to him writing the song’s lyrics.
Whibley wrote the track from his perspective as the one who would have been left behind if his wife had passed away. The lyrics resembled how he would feel wrapped in grief, thinking he failed to recognize the signs to help the person and have so much regret that he can’t do anything about it after the fact.
Later on, Sum 41 also decided to release a reimagined version of ‘Catching Fire’ featuring the TikTok creator and musician Nothing, Nowhere just in time to raise awareness on suicide prevention during Mental Health Awareness month in 2021.
The depth of the song allowed the couple to have an honest conversation about how it got to that point, and it was also a healing process for Deryck. He even explained how he felt on a Facebook post in 2021, sharing, “Writing this song was cathartic for me in dealing with my emotions for the first time about almost losing my wife to suicide. When I first played it for her, it was the beginning of us having an open conversation about what she went through.”
The music video was also very sentimental, where Sum 41 fans shared their stories of loss and grief. It was curated in an emotional black-and-white video that brought so many people together that was going through or had gone through something similar in their lives. If you didn’t get to chance to listen to the track that signified so much for so many, including the Sum 41 vocalist Deryck Whibley, there could never be a better time than now!
