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A month after his punk hard-core band Fucked Up won the Polaris Music Prize, lead singer Damian Abraham is still coming to grips with being accused of helping to create the best album of the year in any genre (The Chemistry of Common Life). The Globe and Mail caught up with the 30-year-old performer in a Queen Street café, on his way to meet his wife and infant son at a Movies for Mommies screening.

How'd you get started in music?

I had a couple of fanzines in my teens. I loved music and I wanted to be involved, and having no musical ability whatsoever, I decided the next best thing was to write about it.

No ability whatever?

Yeah, I'm living proof that you do not need any musical ability to get a career in music. But I like plenty of bands where the people in the band have no ability to play their instruments. I prefer a band to not have ability but to have passion, rather than the other way around. I think virtuosity is the most overrated element in music. You can have no technique and still have the drive to create the music, and the feeling, but if you strip those things away, there's nothing left.

Did you perform with other bands before Fucked Up?

I've been in 15 or 16 bands altogether, and very few of them made it past their first show. I can remember the first show my first band in high school ever played, at the Opera House, at one of those battles of the bands. It was one of the worst concerts ever performed by anyone. But the next band was even worse, and the bassist in that band was Sandy [Miranda], who plays bass in Fucked Up. If anyone had told me then that 15 years later we would be touring the world together, I would have killed myself right there.

Fucked Up has done things that aren't typical of hard-core

music, such as writing lengthy songs that may include dozens of overdubbed guitar lines. Was that a conscious development?

The aesthetic of the band is very self-conscious. We decided very early on how we wanted to be presented. But the musical shifts the band has gone through have been completely natural and organic. We never woke up one day and said, “Hey let's write an 18-minute song, that'll be really popular.” We just went to the studio and wrote a song, and it turned out to be 18 minutes.

Is anyone more militantly

hard-core than anyone else?

Jonah [Falco] and I are the guys who are still most into punk and hard core, and

every once in a while I think, “Oh man, I wish we could write a short punk song again.” But that would be

really self-conscious and dishonest, to try and reject what we've become. The changes

in our music have not been deliberate. We're not that smart.

Is everyone involved in the songwriting?

It's a collaborative process, but we do it in shifts, and in isolation. Mike [Haliechuk], Josh [Zucker] and Jonah will come in with a basic shell of a song, Sandy will write a bass line, I'll add some lyrics, Mike will come back and add another line, I'll come back and change the vocals. That really worked for this album, and it was a lot better than the way we worked before, which was like cats and dogs. And it really changes the kind of music you make. You don't know what someone else necessarily intended.

What has winning the Polaris Prize done for you?

The biggest effect is the recognition it has given us. It has meant that we've gone from being on the outside of the Canadian music scene to being on the inside. I get stopped almost daily by someone on the street, not necessarily someone I would recognize from our shows. It has also exposed us to a whole part of the world that hates us, and I'm very happy about that too.

What did you do with the money?

We're using some of it to pay down debt, but we're also using it to produce a benefit record for organizations that work on raising awareness of the 500 aboriginal women who have gone missing in Canada.

You're a big man who mostly performs with his shirt off. How did you get into that?

We've got a fairly large gay-bear fan base, and I have a bunch of friends who identify as bears. One of them was at one of our shows, and he said, “You should take your shirt off more.” I was like, “What?” I'm a very large man with very low self-esteem. I would wear my shirt into the shower if it were allowed. But I took my shirt off for that show, and it was a weird, empowering thing. I kind of felt, for the first time, in charge of myself.

Has your relationship to your audience changed in other ways?

We used to be quite confrontational with our audience. But then I started to realize that I'm only able to do what I do because of the generosity of others, of the people who come to our shows and pay to see us. So now I want there to be a kind of love community. I still want there to be excitement, but I want there to be a more communal feeling at the end. Whether they like us or not, I want people to walk out of the show and say, “That distracted me from my life, that was entertaining, that was something I'll never forget.”

Fucked Up closes the Fucked Up Fest tonight at Sneaky Dee's, 431 College St., Toronto.