A couple weeks ago, four members of Simple Plan (all except for David) attended the Canadian Music Industry & Broadcasting Awards in Toronto, Canada, where the band became the previously-announced recipient of the Allan Slaight Humanitarian Spirit Award for their on-going charitable efforts with the Simple Plan Foundation.
SamaritanMag.com recently published an article about Simple Plan receiving this award which also included bits from their acceptance speech.
You can now check out some of it in the quotes from the article below:
“Thank you to the Slaight family, to Canadian Music Week, for recognizing the work that we’ve done with the Simple Plan Foundation. It’s an incredible honour and we couldn’t be more proud to be here, tonight with all of you to receive this award. Now, how about a little bit of honesty here? When we were kids, we didn’t dream of one day winning the Allan Slaight Humanitarian Spirit Award or any humanitarian award for that matter — sorry Mr. Slaight — we didn’t have pictures of famous philanthropists on our bedroom walls. Our bedrooms were plastered with Guns N’ Roses, Bad Religion and blink-182 posters. We had a dream of one day being rock stars, up on stage at Rock In Rio in front of 150,000 people, touring the world, winning Junos and Grammys, and then that dream started to come true for us. Our first record came out in 2002 and sold 3 million copies around the world, and then by 2005 our second record was certified four times platinum in Canada. We were selling out our hometown arena for the first time. We were just about to go on tour with Metallica in South Africa, so things were pretty awesome.” – Pierre Bouvier
“And then one my dad picks me up for lunch. So I’m thinking he’s going to be all stoked and tell me how proud he is. I was feeling pretty good about myself, but actually he goes, ‘I think you guys are not doing enough. I think you’re missing out on a big chance to do something here. I think you need to start thinking about your legacy and start to think about how you want to be remembered as a band, and that it’s the perfect time to start your own foundation.’ — not exactly what I was expecting to hear after all the stuff that is happening, all the great success. Basically, it stuck in our heads and we starting thinking about the idea. And we started thinking about all the letters and stories that we heard from our fans — that without music, they wouldn’t be here today, that it helped them to deal with their parents’ divorce, their depression, getting bullied at school, having cancer at 15 years old, that music was all that they had, that music really saved their lives. That’s when it kind of hit us and we realized how lucky and privileged we were. While so many people were struggling, we were living out our dreams. Even more importantly we realized that we had the power to help these people to go through these tough times. My dad was right; we could actually do a lot more…” – Chuck Comeau