The Weeknd

📍Scarborough, Toronto, ON, Canada

“Abel Makkonen Tesfaye was born in Toronto in February 1990, the only child of Ethiopian immigrants who had come to Canada in the 1980s. His parents separated soon after he was born, and he was raised in Scarborough, a sprawling, multicultural suburb in the east of the city, by his mother, Samra, and his grandmother. His mother worked long hours in several jobs, including nursing and catering, while studying at night, and his grandmother looked after him. He grew up speaking Amharic with her and went with her to the Ethiopian Orthodox church. Home was full of Ethiopian music, singers like Aster Aweke and Mahmoud Ahmed, whose soaring, ornamented vocal style he later absorbed into his own voice. He also loved Michael Jackson, Prince and R&B, and the hip-hop of the Scarborough streets around him. He went to several local schools and was a restless teenager, and he has spoken openly about the drugs and trouble of those years. At seventeen he dropped out of high school and left home, moving with a friend into a small apartment in downtown Toronto. There, in 2010, he began uploading songs anonymously to YouTube under the name The Weeknd, chosen because he had left home one weekend and never come back. In 2011 his mixtape House of Balloons, named after a house in Parkdale, made him a star. He has often talked about the sacrifices his mother and grandmother made, and Toronto and its streets run through his music.”

Sources: ebsco.com Wikipedia: The Weeknd