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.
0 kommentar(er)
