  Sum 41's Deryck Whibley (PHOTO: Michael Peake, Sun Media)
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Underclass Hero is the most personal, political and musically ambitious album yet from Canadian pop-punk band Sum 41.
It's also the group's first CD without guitarist Dave "Brownsound" Baksh, who quit Sum 41 last year for "artistic reasons."
While frontman Deryck Whibley spent a year writing the songs for the new disc -- which hits stores Tuesday -- and wound up producing for the first time too, he says it is no accident that Underclass Hero turned out the way it did.
"This record for us is so different than anything (we've done) before," the chatty singer/guitarist/keyboardist told Sun Media in June, the morning after his band and his wife, singer Avril Lavigne, attended the MuchMusic Video Awards in Toronto.
Sum 41 hail from the bedroom community of Ajax just east of Toronto, and includes Steve Jocz (drummer) and Cone McCaslin (bassist).
"We approached recording and writing and rehearsing in a different way, and we had planned on doing that while Dave was still in the band," Whibley said. "We started talking about all of these things. We had such high expectations for what we wanted to do on this record, that we knew it was going to be like nothing we'd ever done before. And this is while he was still in the band."
When discussions turned to working differently in the studio -- namely, harder, longer and more closely -- Baksh backed out.
"That kind of freaked him out, I think," Whibley, 27, said. "That's when he quit. So regardless if he was still in the band, it would have been a different dynamic in the studio anyway if it was the four of us. So (we just) created something new with the three of us."
Whibley had just awoken for the day before his late-afternoon interview with Sun Media, and he was resting a bit bleary-eyed on a couch in a Toronto hotel lounge. His cellphone was ringing constantly, and you can only wonder if it was Lavigne on the other end. Whibley would only say that Lavigne was elsewhere at the time doing interviews for her latest record, The Best Damn Thing, on which he produced two songs.
(This interview was done three weeks before the latest round of allegations of song-stealing resurfaced against Lavigne, which she has vigorously denied.)
Whibley said Sum 41's new disc Underclass Hero is a riff on John Lennon's Working Class Hero.
"Title-wise, yes. Topic, no," said Whibley, who added that Lennon is his favourite songwriter.
"Everything on this record is so personal, and it's all about me, I mean almost to an egotistical point, where it's only about me and everything in my life. So to me, that song is basically a definition of who I am, I guess. It's that very us-against-them attitude, that spit-in-your-face attitude ... sort of coming from the bottom and working your way up. And that's who I am, and that's what that song is."
Whibley was raised mainly by a "cool" single mother who was only 17 when he was born. He documents his feelings about his absentee biological father on the new songs Dear Father and Complete Unknown.
"It's not that tough for me 'cause you just learn how to deal with things, you just kind of adapt, I guess," Whibley said of growing up fatherless and moving around a lot.
"And I think I'm a tough person. And I can deal with (it). Especially being in this f---ing business, you have to be tough. You have to deal with the bull----. I think if I didn't do what I was doing now, if I was not artistic and I wasn't creative and I wasn't making music, I might have a harder time dealing with it. Because if you live this kind of life, it's a painful life. Even though you get everything that you want, and you live your life, there's so much negativity thrown at you, and you have to really be tough because you have to deal with so many things that are just painful. There's a lot of negativity. The second you do something that you believe in, maybe there might be a million people who love it, but there's probably a few thousand people who want you to know how much you suck and they hate you and you're the worst and those are the people that resonate the loudest."
The you-know-what hit the fan in some quarters earlier this year when Sum 41 released their new Bush-bashing single, March Of the Dogs, to iTunes. Among the song's lyrics:
"Ladies and Gentlemen of the underclass, the president of the United States of America is dead ... And now the president's dead, because they blew off his head, no more neck to be red, I guess to heaven he fled."
Whibley says he has been attacked mainly by one person, a writer-intern for Rolling Stone, "who went to the House minority leader in the States (a Republican), who tried to have me deported, trying to say I'm threatening the president.
"I don't want him dead," Whibley added emphatically, in explaining what he meant by the lyrics. "He's so bad at his job that somebody on life support could be better than him. He's so terrible. He's dead at his job. He has killed his legacy ... He will forever be known as one of the worst presidents of all time. He's historically not as low as a few, but I still think he's worse. So that's what I meant by the lyric."
Sum 41 plan to tour Canada in October.
