My sister is a huge fan of the Ethiopian kid from Toronto Abel Tesfaye but some may only know him as the Weeknd. He recently sat with +Rolling Stone in the midst is at a rehearsal for Later...With Jools Holland, the BBC music show. Here's a few excerpts from the interview:
The Weeknd on having a long career -
"We live in an era when everything is so excessive, I think it's refreshing for everybody to be like, 'Who the fuck is this guy?'" Tesfaye says. "I think that's why my career is going to be so long: Because I haven't given people everything."
The Weeknd on not being what people expect -
"When people meet me, they say that I'm really kind — contrary to a lot of my music."
The Weeknd on changing the culture-
"People tell me I'm changing the culture," he says. "I already can't turn on the radio. I think I'm gonna drop one more album, one more powerful body of work, then take a little break — go to Tokyo or Ethiopia or some shit."
The Weeknd on being fancy-
"I just started being fancy, to be honest," he says. "Like, I just started learning how to pronounce what I'm wearing." He imitates a snooty shopgirl: "'It's not Bal-mane, it's Bal-mahn.' 'Oh, sorry!'"
The Weeknd on when he first started recording -
"I was everything an R&B singer wasn't," he says. "I wasn't in shape. I wasn't a pretty boy. I was awkward as fuck. I didn't like the way I looked in pictures — when I saw myself on a digital camera, I was like, 'Eesh.'"
The Weeknd on his earlier music and Drake not feeling him -
He and his crew posted three songs on YouTube and started spamming their friends on Facebook, then watched the play counts slowly climb. "I don't know how many it actually was, but it felt like a million," Tesfaye says. "Five hundred plays? Holy shit!" Toronto being a small town in some ways, the songs were heard by Drake's manager, Oliver El-Khatib, who posted them to the OVO blog, where they promptly blew up. "Apparently, Drake wasn't even fucking with it at first," Tesfaye says today. "Oliver was the one vouching for me."
The Weeknd on why he declined interviews -
"Me not finishing school — in my head, I still have this insecurity when I'm talking to someone educated," he says. "I don't want them looking at me like this fucking retard — no disrespect." For months, no one even knew if the Weeknd was a person or a group. That's when Tesfaye realized he "could run with the whole enigmatic thing," he says now. "If it backfired, I probably would have been doing interviews. But people were kind of liking me being a fucking weirdo."
You can read the entire +TheWeekndVEVO interview here
ForeverMeah says... this guy is growing on me.
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