David Desrosiers

David Desrosiers: The Second Voice in Simple Plan

He lasted roughly six months in Reset, the Montreal punk band whose singer had just walked out to start something new. That was long enough. Pierre Bouvier and Chuck Comeau — the two who had left — watched the teenager filling the gap they had made and invited him into their own group instead. The arrangement freed Bouvier to front the band and Jeff Stinco to concentrate on guitar. It also gave Simple Plan a bassist who could sing, which turned out to matter more than the bass.

Sept-Îles to Montreal

David Phillipe Desrosiers was born on 29 August 1980 in Sept-Îles, a port town on the north shore of the St Lawrence in Quebec, several hundred kilometres from the Montreal scene he would join. He arrived in Reset in 1999, stepping into the place Bouvier had vacated, and left again within months. By late 1999 or early 2000 he was a member of Simple Plan.

The Job

Desrosiers played bass and supplied backing and occasional lead vocals plus additional percussion. In pop-punk that description undersells the role. The genre's signature texture is the shouted-gang harmony, and Simple Plan's records are built on two voices rather than one: Bouvier's lead and Desrosiers' higher, thinner counterpart riding above it in choruses. Live, he was the band's second focal point, the one working the opposite side of the stage.

The commercial results were substantial. *No Pads, No Helmets... Just Balls*, released in 2002, sold more than four million copies worldwide and remains the band's best-selling record. *Still Not Getting Any...* followed in 2004, the self-titled *Simple Plan* in 2008, *Get Your Heart On!* in 2011 and *Taking One for the Team* in 2016. The band became a fixture of the Warped Tour and played the closing ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. In 2005 the members established the Simple Plan Foundation, which raised substantial sums for youth causes.

Absences

Desrosiers stepped away more than once. In December 2008 he missed two weeks of European dates. The longer break began in May 2017, when he left touring to recover from depression; the touring bassist Chady Awad covered for him. He returned to the stage on 8 June 2019 in Cleveland, Ohio, after more than two years away — a public, unembarrassed acknowledgment of mental illness from a musician in a genre that had spent two decades singing about adolescent unhappiness without often naming the clinical version.

2020

On 10 July 2020 an Instagram account called victims_voices_montreal published anonymous allegations that Desrosiers, then 39, had targeted fans, made inappropriate advances and used threats to control them. One accuser said he had started making inappropriate jokes when she was a minor and pursued her for sex once she reached legal age. Further accounts appeared on Reddit.

Desrosiers responded the same day. "Recent public statements have led me to acknowledge that some of the interactions I have had with women have caused them harm," he wrote, adding: "I am truly sorry for the harm I have caused to these women." He said he was leaving the band to seek professional help. Simple Plan's statement read: "Following recent public statements, David Desrosiers is withdrawing from the band in order to work on his personal issues. We offer our deepest apologies to the women who were hurt by his actions." It ended a twenty-year tenure. The band carried on without a permanent bassist and self-released its sixth album in 2022.

Outside the Band

Desrosiers is vegan and has campaigned for animal rights, working with the Montreal SPCA. His instrument of choice throughout his career was the Fender Precision bass, with Squier models alongside it — an unfashionable, unfussy choice consistent with the music, which needed volume and attack rather than tonal subtlety.

Why David Is Called a Genius

This is the section where honesty costs something, because the case is weak and inflating it would be a lie. Nobody serious has called David Desrosiers a genius, and the available record contains no critic, bandmate or scholar using the word about him.

What can be said precisely is this. His value to Simple Plan was not instrumental virtuosity — pop-punk bass is largely root notes locked to the kick drum, and there is no evidence he played anything more demanding. It was vocal and physical. He was hired because Bouvier and Comeau watched him front a band and concluded he could carry a stage; his arrival is what allowed Bouvier to stop playing bass and become a singer, and Stinco to become a full-time guitarist. That is a structural contribution: one recruitment decision reorganised the entire group into the configuration that sold four million albums. The skill on display is the specific, trainable craft of the harmony singer — holding a pitch a third or fifth above a lead vocal, night after night, while moving, which is much harder than it sounds and is the reason the choruses on those records land.

The counter-case is not merely that his talent was ordinary. It is that the word does not belong here at all. The songwriting credit sat with Bouvier and Comeau. The band survived his departure. And his career ended with admissions of harm to women, several of whom encountered him as young fans — a fact no account of him can be organised around anything else.

Legacy

Desrosiers was, for twenty years, half the sound of one of Canada's most commercially successful rock exports — a band whose debut album outsold most of its American contemporaries and whose reach ran from the Warped Tour to an Olympic closing ceremony. His willingness to name depression publicly in 2017 and to return from it in 2019 was, briefly, a genuinely useful thing for a genre built on unspoken adolescent misery. The 2020 allegations and his own statement acknowledging harm foreclosed the rest. What remains is a body of recorded work he shares with four other people, and a cautionary ending that belongs to him alone.

Achievements

• Instruments: bass guitar
• Genres: punk rock