How David Comes to Life Came to Rule My Life

If you know me at all, you know my year has been all about Fucked Up's David Comes to Life. Today, I decided that it's my favorite album of all time, a suspicion I'd been harboring for a few months. Since I've only been listening to the damn thing for about seven months, I feel it's necessary to put lots of words next to other words and try to coherently explain why I love it so much. Also, I didn't watch any movies or listen to any new albums yesterday.

I remember the first time I heard David Comes to Life. I suppose I should, since it was just earlier this year, but I've listened to it so many times since – easily hundreds – that picking out a single listen has become more difficult.

The first time I ever heard this record, I only heard the first four songs or so. I was at my desk at the Quietus in London, where I was an editorial intern from May to July. My esteemed editor, Luke Turner, played the album through his computer speakers and asked me if I wanted to interview Fucked Up and go to their show at the Village Underground that week. I said I did, even though my familiarity with the band was limited to the vague awareness that Decibel really liked Hidden World. After the album played for about 15 minutes, Luke turned it off and gave me the promo CD, saying he couldn't take any more of that "fat bloke yelling at me." I love you, Luke, really I do.

I took the album back to my flat and played it straight through. I could tell I liked it, but not how much. It's a lot to take in – 18 songs, densely packed with riffs being played by three guitarists and the grating bark of frontman Damian Abraham, adding up to a rock opera. I listened to the record maybe two more times before my interview with bassist Sandy Miranda, which went about as well as you'd expect an interview with someone with as cursory a knowledge of Fucked Up's discography as mine was at that point to go.

But then there was the show.

Fucked Up are unparalleled as a live act. This was made evident by the two hours they bashed my skull in at London's Village Underground after my interview with Sandy. I had a can of Red Stripe, took my position on the rail, and was crushed by audience members and Damian alike. I'll talk more about another gig later, but for now, know that seeing Fucked Up live was my impetus to buy a copy of David Comes to Life for £9.99 at one of the big chain record stores within the week.

Once I had the CD, I started to really dive into the album. I was reading the booklet and playing it almost every day on my tube commute for the remainder of the summer. It climbed my year-end list from #10 to #1 in a matter of weeks, and by the time I was back in Bloomington for the fall semester, it dominated my thoughts. I wanted to attack it with a million thinkpieces from a million angles but fell short in writing any of them because of how impossibly close to the record I felt.

It also did something that can't be underrated in terms of why it's so important to me: It made me feel like I was 12 again. When you listen to and write about music for a living (or aspire to) you hear an awful lot of new albums. Even the good ones get shortchanged as you're constantly seeking out new stuff. It's not a curse; I think it's important to hear as much music as possible if you want to purport to be an authority on it. But it's a marked departure from the person I was when I discovered Iron Maiden's The Number of the Beast the summer before 7th grade and wore my CD within an inch of its life. I used to do that with every album I heard, but by 2004, I was trying to hear enough albums to make well-reasoned year-end lists, and I had already started to move toward a quantity-over-quality model.

That's not how I approached David Comes to Life. I inhabited – and still do – everything about it, down to the last cymbal clash and strangled syllable. I read everything I could about it (I had done this with Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway in junior high school, and this felt similar), I listened to it ad infinitum (between spins of other new stuff that I was, gulp, responsible for), and I began scrawling the cover art and lyrical passages all over my notebooks. Yeah, David Comes to Life definitely turned me into an adolescent again, and I totally embrace that. Tireless enthusiasm for music can't be seen as a bad thing for a music writer, after all.

I wouldn't say I seriously considered the album as a potential Best Album Ever Made candidate until November. After Fucked Up announced a Manhattan performance of David Comes to Life in its entirety, I jokingly texted my girlfriend to tell her that I knew what I wanted for my birthday. Clearly I didn't use enough winking emoticons, because on November 11th, I was on a LaGuardia-bound plane to see Fucked Up at Le Poisson Rouge.

As great as the band was in London, the full album set they played in New York is the best show I've ever been to, and I was able to decide that immediately after the concert. I put all that lyric learning to use by screaming into the mic throughout the night, I somehow cut my forehead open, and in the midst of one of the most stressful stretches of time of my entire life, I felt at peace with the world.

Unfortunately, I also owed the Quietus an article about the performance. I struggled through a few drafts that I knew were terrible but submitted anyway, drafts that were far too personal to be useful as accounts of what happened at the show. As I slowly edited them to a publishable form, I was forced to grapple with the fact that I would never be able to write remotely objectively about David Comes to Life or perhaps even Fucked Up ever again. I had become too close to the material. It wasn't a surprise, but it got me to thinking about how I'd never really thought that about anything else before. Could this be my favorite album ever? Am I okay with this?

I didn't declare it immediately, but David only grew on me more after the NYC concert. I was listening to it more than ever, easily crossing the 200-play threshold and leaving it God knows how far behind. The holiday season rolled around, and I received the gatefold double vinyl of the album in a gift exchange. Fast forward to yesterday.

Pitchfork.tv posted pro-shot video of the entire set from Le Poisson Rouge. I borrowed a record player from my friend to play the vinyl. I decided to dedicate my day to David Comes to Life. I watched the videos, played the record, and got the chills no less than 10 times. I was ready. This is my favorite album of all time, fuck it all.

I suppose that details my journey to accepting David into my personal canon, but it doesn't do a great job of telling exactly why I love it. Granted, there's plenty of x-factors in play, but it comes down more or less to these bullet-pointed ideas:

• It reminds me of when I was first getting into music. It stripped me of my cynicism.
• Its concept hooked me, but it doesn't detract from the songs themselves, which totally work without the extra context.
  
• Speaking of hooks...holy shit. I dare you not to get every song stuck in your head simultaneously after a few listens.
• All the intangibles – the poem included in the booklet, the cover art, the videos, the mythology of the characters that stretches into singles and comps and older releases – add to something that's so much more than the sum of its parts.
• The giant middle finger it represents toward the entire world. Oh, hey, punk rock world. You want us to write "Police" and "I Hate Summer" again? Fuck you, we're doing a 78-minute rock opera. Oh, hey, indie world. You want us to dial back the screaming? Fuck you, we're a goddamn hardcore band. This is the album Fucked Up wanted to make, and its passion oozes from every note.

So there you have it. Far too many words about my personal attachment to my Favorite Album Ever Made, Fucked Up's David Comes to Life. God let her rest, excelsior.