In a recent interview with W Magazine, the R&B Singer who has dominated the industry for almost a decade says he wants to retire the “Weeknd” persona and hinted at going back to being just plain Abel Tesfaye.
The singer discussed his music and future career plans with the publication, and described himself as being on a “cathartic path right now.”
“It’s getting to a place and a time where I’m getting ready to close the Weeknd chapter,” he told the publication. “I’ll still make music, maybe as Abel, maybe as The Weeknd. But I still want to kill The Weeknd. And I will. Eventually. I’m definitely trying to shed that skin and be reborn.”
The Weeknd has enjoyed massive success with four No. 1 albums and seven No.1 tracks on Billboard’s Charts.
As to how he got the “Weeknd” stage name, the singer related an anecdote from his teenage on a Reddit AMA in 2013.
“We grabbed our mattresses from our parents, threw it in our friend’s s—ty van and left one weekend and never came back home,” he wrote. “It was gonna be the title of HOB [the 2011 mixtape ‘House of Balloons’]. I hated my name at the time, though, so I tried it as a stage name. It sounded cool. I took out the ‘e’ because there was already a Canadian band named The Weekend.”
