Inside Chad Gilbert’s Latest Cancer Battle: ‘I Feel Very, Very Lucky’

On the day New Found Glory released their 12th album Listen Up!, Chad Gilbert’s hand stopped working. The lead guitarist was onstage for the band’s album release party at Nashville’s The End, playing the same chords he had memorized for the past 30 years, but his fingers just wouldn’t work how he wanted them to. It wasn’t just his hands, either. Gilbert was finding it difficult to control the whole left side of his body.

Earlier that night in February, he had thrown up in the green room trash can just before taking the stage and his bandmates had to carry him to the chair he performed from. After battling a rare adrenal gland cancer for the past five years, Gilbert had experienced all sorts of side effects that can spring up from treatments and medications. But he had never been unable to move his body or play his guitar.

“The show was amazing, but something wasn’t right,” Gilbert, 45, tells Rolling Stone over Zoom. He sits in bed in his house just outside of Nashville and sports a navy green Buffy the Vampire Slayer graphic t-shirt and black baseball cap. Gilbert’s voice is hoarse, and sometimes shaky, but aside from the winter glove on his left hand, you wouldn’t be able to tell that it’s only been a week since he returned home after a month-long hospitalization.

“That night I came home and I was walking up the steps, I fell forward onto the ground,” Gilbert recalls from the album release show performance. He spent that weekend in bed, continuously losing control of the left side of his body.

“Our doctor contacted the brain and spine radiologist and he was like, ‘Get him to the emergency room right now,’” Lisa Cimorelli, Gilbert’s wife says. She sits beside him on the bed during our call, ready to help the punk rocker fill in the memory gaps from the past month. “The next morning they had found three new tumors,” she says. “One of them was the size of a walnut and was pressing on the back right side of the brain, which was causing the loss of movement on the left side.” 

Gilbert told the world about the three new tumors on his brain, and subsequent surgery to remove one of them, when he detailed his latest cancer scare in a lengthy Instagram post on March 23. It had been just a few days before he was discharged from the hospital. Since his initial metastatic pheochromocytoma of the liver diagnosis in 2021, which has changed to adrenocortical carcinoma and moved to different parts of Gilbert’s body, the musician has shared every step of his arduous journey. But even his words and the pictures from the ICU don’t explain the rollercoaster from the past month dealing with the brain tumors — or the incredible resilient spirit Gilbert continues to conjure in the face of it all. “I feel very, very lucky that I could sit here and do this interview,” he says.

The day after the surgery to remove the tumor from his brain, Gilbert’s condition had improved. Nurses who had befriended the musician and his wife were sending videos to Cimorelli where Gilbert was waving with his left hand. “It was incredible,” Cimorelli says. Gilbert was set to be moved out of the ICU to the rehabilitation floor when things took a turn for the worse.

“Around that time, they were like, ‘His sodium is crashing,” Cimorelli recalls. It’s here where she has to fill in most of the blanks since Gilbert was hardly conscious to remember most of what was happening. 

“He started to fall back asleep. All the progress we had just made felt like it was going away,” she says. After both an MRI and CT scan, doctors discovered that fluid around the tumor was causing pressure on Gilbert’s brain, plummeting his sodium levels and making cognitive function difficult. “It was so hard for him to stay awake or put his thoughts together,” Cimorelli says.

While Gilbert doesn’t remember much, he does recall the hallucinations he experienced. “At the hospital, they’d ask me what kind of food I’d want to order. I thought I was in Japan so I’d be like, ‘Can I have Okinawaki?’” To combat this scary new reality, Gilbert underwent 10 rounds of radiation to shrink the two leftover tumors in his brain. Throughout the call, he takes off his cap to scratch his forehead and scalp. “Sorry I keep scratching,” Gilbert says at one point, “I think I got a little radiation burn.”

For now, his treatment plan is all about making sure the immunotherapies he is on can pierce the blood-brain barrier and keep the cancer out of there, too. He’ll continue with those and a diabetes-specific drug of which he is the first patient to use for ACC treatment. (The findings on Gilbert will eventually be published in a medical journal.)

Even after the hellish month he just experienced, Gilbert is still unwaveringly positive. “It felt good to know that there’s still a battle to be going on and that I can recover from this and grow stronger from this,” he says. “My hope is to really get my energy and strength back. I don’t want to lay in bed all day. I want to be able to get up and do my thing,” he adds.

New Found Glory will kick off their tour with Yellowcard in May, and is set to play in Nashville on June 8. “I won’t be able to tour normally ever again,” Gilbert admits. “But I will be able to play shows that are closeby.” As Cimorelli confirms. one of his goals is to be strong enough to play at that show, even if he has to sit for it. 

But Gilbert’s main driving force goes beyond the personal. “Those tough experiences, as hard as they are, have always been a place for me to inspire our fans,” he says. Across Listen Up!, the main writer for NFG songs has been candid about his experiences, and how he musters strength at low moments. Tracks like “100%” and “You Got This” pack these heavy sentiments with heavier riffs. Even while in the hospital, Gilbert continued to write songs, asking Cimorelli, nurses, and friends beside him to write down ideas for him. “I’m always writing… there’s always melodies in my head,” he says.

Beyond New Found Glory’s music, Gilbert’s resilient attitude is inspiring fans. “I have my crying moments where like everyone, I have to let it out,” he says. “But I like that we can turn it around into something positive… It’s always been just to inspire and grow a community of people that want to go to our shows and smile and have a good time.”