From homeless to Forbes list 

By Christina Flores-Chan

Abel Tesfaye, commonly known and loved as The Weeknd, presents himself as the shy and mysterious (but also kind of cool) guy we all secretly wanted to be friends with in high school, and we’re here for it. But before he was charting the billboards with Grammys to his name, he was just Abel, a high school dropout in Toronto.

Tesfaye was born to Ethiopian immigrant parents and was raised by his mother in Scarborough, on the east side of the city. He grew up listening to Michael Jackson, who — he told the Rolling Stone — was something of a godly figure in Ethiopia.

Smoking weed for the first time at 11-years-old, his lifestyle eventually led to a heavily reliant relationship with harder drugs. According to his interview with The Guardian, at 17, Tesfaye loaded a mattress into a van and left home for Parkdale, another suburb in Toronto. At 18, the singer had spent time in jail and decided it was time to turn his life around. He landed a job at American Apparel and began writing his own music.

Three years later, he released his first three songs on YouTube, “The Morning,’’ ‘‘What You Need’’ and ‘‘Loft Music.” Oliver El-Khatib, Drake’s manager, discovered them and promptly posted Tesfaye’s tunes onto the OVO Blog. Needless to say, he became a local hit in less than two months.

The Weeknd’s fan base only continued to grow when his name was featured on Drake’s album Take Care, followed by the 2012 release of Trilogy, a set of three independently released mixtapes. By 2014, his voice on the radio in Ariana Grande’s hit song “Love Me Harder” had become mainstream. But, it wasn’t until 2015, when Tesfaye’s Beauty Behind the Madness came out that his popularity skyrocketed. The album, an eargasm of lush R&B beats underneath layers of silky vocals packed in 14 songs including the Fifty Shades of Grey track, “Earned It,” built his audience even further.

The fascination around the singer went international and quickly spread, though Tesfaye often shied away from too much publicity, declining interviews and paparazzi pictures. He told Complex Magazine his elusive behaviour was originally unintentional, and that he was simply insecure in the beginning. Eventually though, the air of mystery became a part of his brand. “The whole “enigmatic artist” thing, I just ran with it. No one could find pictures of me. It reminded me of some villain shit,” the singer told Complex. 

And it worked. People were dying to know who was behind the sultry, sexy voice of The Weeknd. Why did he wear his hair like that? How could he be singing about such intimate experiences, and yet share so little about himself with his audience?

By the release of his next two albums, 2016’s Starboy, and 2018’s My Dear Melancholy, The Weeknd had finally embraced his fame and now stands as one of the household names of this generation’s hip hop and R&B scene. Currently the winner of three Grammys (for Beauty Behind the Madness, Starboy, and My Dear Melancholy), the music industry can rest easy knowing they took a chance befriending the quiet kid in the corner of the school hallways.