The Weeknd: How a Drum Loop Through a Studio Mic Became “Starboy”
Abel Tesfaye was 17 when he left his family home in Toronto, moving out with a friend in a van over a single weekend. He took the stage name The Weeknd and dropped the “e” because a Canadian band called The Weekend already existed.
He gave his first mixtape, House of Balloons, away for free on 21 March 2011. It sampled Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Happy House” and sounded like nothing else on the radio.
In 2016 he flew to Paris to record with Daft Punk. He was working on “I Feel It Coming” when, between takes, he heard a drum loop through the talkback mic. He walked into the control room and found Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo playing it from his phone. Abel set aside the song he had come to record and wrote “Starboy” in about half an hour. “Starboy” opens the album and went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100; the song he set aside, “I Feel It Coming”, closes it.
“Blinding Lights” spent 43 weeks in the Hot 100 top five, 57 in the top ten and 86 in the top 40. In November 2021 Billboard named it the number-one song of all time.
In January 2023 it passed Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” to become the most-streamed song on Spotify, and he celebrated with a tweet: “happy new years to blinding lights. the most streamed song of all time tonight.”
At the Super Bowl LV halftime show on 7 February 2021, his manager said, he put about $7 million of his own money into the production. In February 2023 he became the first artist to pass 100 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
The Weeknd has his own station in the Exclusive collection of Kalisha. Open the radio and press play.
— Kalisha 🎧
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