“I wanted us to have space for a proper conversation,” he says.
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. 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. Conversation in riddles, or in monosyllables. Tesfaye sat behind a screen, perhaps, or in a turned-away chair. 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.
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. 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”).
#The weeknd die for you cover art album full
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. In the stories the Weeknd tells, falling in love is “shit” or “pointless”: women are seduced “ often/Often/Girl I do this often”. 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. 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. 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”.Īs a lyricist, Tesfaye makes arguably the best use of that m-word since Snoop Dogg. His interview shyness created a sense of Prince-like obscurity.
For a time, at the start of his career, nobody knew what he looked like. 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. With Prince at the American Music awards 2015. There’s a plate of done-with chicken on the floor outside Tesfaye’s room. This man emerges to take two brisk strides across the hallway and knock on another door. 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. From the lobby, Tesfaye’s bodyguard, “Big Rob” Feggans, whose nickname holds up, escorts me into a lift. 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. Later, if Tesfaye went out partying after the gig. I was told, flying in, to expect some sort of audience around midnight. 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. A 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.
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