Abel Tesfaye’s tortured, genre-bending R&B has brought him millions of fans, a triple platinum album and collaborations with Daft Punk and Beyoncé. Will mainstream success make him happy?
degree of mystery attends the buildup to my meeting with Abel Tesfaye, the 26-year-old Ethiopian-Canadian who for some time now – ever since his stealth emergence as a recording artist in Toronto in 2010 – has been making varied, often exceptional, ever more popular music under the assumed name of the Weeknd. It is early November. He has a new album that’s nearly finished, a follow-up to last year’s 3.6m-selling Beauty Behind The Madness, and at breathtakingly short notice I have been summoned to Rotterdam, where Tesfaye is due to sing a track from the new record at the MTV European Music awards, for a rare interview.
I was told, flying in, to expect some sort of audience around midnight. Later, if Tesfaye went out partying after the gig. But orders change and I arrive at a hotel in Rotterdam in the early evening, a few hours before he’s due on the MTV stage. From the lobby, Tesfaye’s bodyguard, “Big Rob” Feggans, whose nickname holds up, escorts me into a lift. Up a few levels, Feggans leads the way along a corridor and at the end of it knocks on a door, summoning out another member of the Weeknd’s entourage. This man emerges to take two brisk strides across the hallway and knock on another door. There’s a plate of done-with chicken on the floor outside Tesfaye’s room. We wait beside it.
It’s an appropriately enigmatic way to be taken to meet a composer of genre-smushing R&B, whose output – especially in 2011, when the then 21-year-old made a trilogy of precociously brilliant mixtapes – has always assumed extra heft from his personal mystique. For a time, at the start of his career, nobody knew what he looked like. His interview shyness created a sense of Prince-like obscurity. When I first saw Tesfaye perform live, at a taping of Later… With Jools Holland in 2012, he showed up trenchcoated and dreadlocked, and mesmerised the studio with a performance of Wicked Games, a madly profane song about love, or rather, about “motherfucking love”.
As a lyricist, Tesfaye makes arguably the best use of that m-word since Snoop Dogg. He’s also been about as prolific a writer (and as expert at mining his life for material) as Taylor Swift, blessed with a Springsteen-like ability to establish concrete worlds inside songs, expressing along the way a sexual confidence (at least in his narrative persona) that might render Rihanna or R Kelly wallflowers by comparison. But unlike most artists who make it in the mainstream – all at once last summer, the Weeknd had three huge hits, Can’t Feel My Face, The Hills and Earned It, from the Fifty Shades Of Grey soundtrack – a cloying misanthropy hangs over this music.
In the stories the Weeknd tells, falling in love is “shit” or “pointless”: women are seduced “often/Often/Girl I do this often”. A troubling murmur of misogyny in the lyrics sometimes gets very audible indeed (“House full of pros that specialise in the ho-ing”), though a counterargument could be made that Tesfaye seems to think men are no great shakes, either. As a narrator, he is frequently the Other Guy (“He’s what you want/I’m what you need”), a brilliant charmer who might nonetheless try to persuade girls out of their clothes by queasier means (“Take a glass… You wanna be high for this”). He writes a lot about drug use. If love or affection is admitted to, it will generally be a love felt under the influence, as in the recent single Starboy, a collaboration with Daft Punk that broke global streaming records on its release in September.
His lyrics paint a vivid picture of a man, and not an especially easy one, and outside his hotel room in Rotterdam, I start to imagine the worst for our interview. Tesfaye sat behind a screen, perhaps, or in a turned-away chair. Conversation in riddles, or in monosyllables.
You’re not quite what I was expecting, I tell Tesfaye, who with a, “Come, come” has brought me inside his room and directed me to sit on the bed. We’ve shaken hands a few more times than custom dictates, and now he is fussing at the minibar, fetching water and apologising for changing the hour of the interview. “I wanted us to have space for a proper conversation,” he says. While he tries out perches around the room – other side of the bed, windowsill, wheely chair, armchair – I get a good look at him. He is stocky, 5ft 7in, his arms buried almost to the elbow in the pockets of a hoodie, with a youthful, big-cheeked, bearded face under a dark baseball cap. Tesfaye lifts it off to show his newly shorn hair. The dreadlocks came off a few weeks ago, he explains in a soft voice, on the set of the video for Starboy. Sleeping was getting difficult, and in a more general way he missed being able to wear anonymising hats. Able to hide under a cap for the first time in years that day, he says, “I think I felt a single tear come down my cheek.” He laughs, and again when making reference to his height (“Thinking about putting lifts in my sneakers”). In apparent reference to his on-off girlfriend, the model Bella Hadid, who is 6ft in heels, he adds, “Guess I’ve been hanging out with too many supermodels.”
I explain that, although I’ve been listening to his music on and off for years, I know very little about him, other than what seems to be confessed to in the songs. Why don’t I put forward a few things that, from the lyrics, I think I know to be true, and you tell me if I’m right?
“Sure.”
One. You’re supremely self-confident.
He thinks. “Uhhh… in the music, yes.”
And in life?
“I mean, we’re all insecure, aren’t we? I’m not walking around like I’m macho man or anything.” Writing lyrics, Tesfaye says, “is like an escape sometimes. You see what’s going on in the real world. And sometimes, you go into your own world, where you create what’s going on.”
Two. You bloody love your drugs.
Tesfaye pops his eyebrows, nods half a dozen times and says eventually that he “dibbles and dabbles and whatnot”. Everything in moderation, he insists. “When I had nothing to do but make music, it was very heavy. Drugs were a crutch for me. There were songs on my first record that were seven minutes long, rambling – whatever thoughts I was having when I was under the influence at the time. I can’t see myself doing that now.”
Three. How to put this: you have a complicated relationship with women.
“Yeah.” The nodding again. “Uh. Yeah. I mean… in life… what relationship is easy?”
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