The alt R&B singer was born Abel Tesfaye in Scarborough, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where he would be raised mostly by his grandmother as his single mother worked often to support them. From his Ethiopian grandmother, he learned his first language: Amharic.

Where did that missing 'e' go at the end of his stage name? He told MTV he had to drop it to avoid copyright issues with a Canadian band called The Weekend.

Michael Jackson's "Dirty Diana" made The Weeknd want to be a songwriter. "I got emotional," he told Billboard magazine looking back at the first time he read its lyrics. "It's when I first knew I wanted to write songs." The Weeknd covered the song as "D.D." on his 2011 mixtape Echoes of Silence.