With nowhere to go tonight, he’s hanging out on Zoom with me. He’s in his own world, just in an inherently disappointing expectations-versus-reality version of it. “I’d be in my own world.”Īt least some part of Tesfaye’s plan came to fruition. “The audience wouldn’t really exist to me,” he says. Not intimacy with the crowd or letting the fans get close to him but letting them witness an experience he’s created. If the concept for Starboy, his last major tour, was all about interaction with the audience-as he puts it, “getting them to play along and sing along and jumping with them, you know, mosh pitting”-then this tour would be about distanced storytelling. It would be a new iteration of the Weeknd, one that would take him into the second decade of his career. He and his team had imagined a theatrical experience, like a three-act play or a rock opera telling the story of the character from the “Blinding Lights” video, a bloodied, beat-up man in a sharp red jacket, desperately trying to fuck, drink, drug (maybe murder?) his way out of heartbreak and into emotional maturity. The show-the whole tour-was going to be bigger, grander, more ambitious than what he’s done before. “I feel like my body was programmed and clocked to be onstage,” he says with the wistfulness of someone describing mislaid plans with an ex.
![i feel it coming the weeknd live i feel it coming the weeknd live](https://djmag.com/sites/default/files/article/image/screen-shot-2016-08-22-at-10-01-02-pm_0_0.png)
He can’t really describe it, but he’s feeling it right now, like the tingle of a phantom limb. He’d have warmed up the band, and maybe now he’d be taking a preshow shot, or just swapping jokes with his crew right up until the moment the lights dimmed and he could hear the crowd, feel that little surge of energy he always gets right before he launches into the first song.
![i feel it coming the weeknd live i feel it coming the weeknd live](https://www.lifeandstylemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/the-weeknd-feel-it-coming-bella-hadid.jpg)
If that hadn’t happened, he’d be backstage, getting ready to perform before a twenty-thousand-person crowd at Boston’s TD Garden. on the East Coast, where, if it were normal times, he’d be making a stop on the tour for After Hours, his new album-which happened to drop on March 20, the same week the gates of hell fully swung open here on earth.