The Weeknd: Photos of Abel Tesfaye through the years, from tours to 'The Idol'
The Weeknd: Photos of Abel Tesfaye through the years, from tours to 'The Idol'
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USA Today
a day ago
- USA Today
The Weeknd: Photos of Abel Tesfaye through the years, from tours to 'The Idol'
The Weeknd: Photos of Abel Tesfaye through the years, from tours to 'The Idol' 40 PHOTOS
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Shakira, Blackpink and more: 10 must-see Southern California concerts this summer
Craving a break from the desert heat? Or just missing the desert music festival season? This summer, let the music guide you to cooler temperatures with concerts that are well worth the drive to Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties. From The Weeknd's soulful anthems to Linkin Park's dynamic energy, Southern California has something for fans of all music genres this season. Here are 10 concerts that The Desert Sun recommends checking out. After gaining popularity by posting covers of songs on Instagram and TikTok, Riverside resident and Mexican music singer-songwriter Ivan Cornejo performed at the Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits festivals in 2023, and at the 2025 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. For those who can't get enough of his songs "RELOG" and "Baby Please," he'll perform on June 14 at Pechanga Arena. If you go: 8 p.m. Saturday, June 14, Pechanga Arena, 3500 Sports Arena Blvd., San Diego. Tickets are available at Remember that time when Shakira was going to perform two shows last November at Acrisure Arena but pulled a "Whenever, Wherever" and canceled over an "unprecedented demand," shifting the tour to stadiums? Well, it makes sense considering she's a superstar and it's been seven years since her last U.S. tour. If you're still up for seeing the Colombian singer-songwriter, she'll perform at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood on June 20. If you go: 7:30 p.m. Friday, June 20, SoFi Stadium, 1001 Stadium Drive, Inglewood. Tickets are available at The Weeknd has been busy over the past five years. He's evolved his sound since the 2020 synth-pop driven album "After Hours," the experimental "Dawn FM" in 2022, and "Hurry Up Tomorrow" released in January, which might be the singer's final album under The Weekend persona. The Weeknd will perform four concerts June 25-29 at SoFi Stadium. If you go: 7 p.m. Wednesday, June 25 through Sunday, June 29, SoFi Stadium, 1001 Stadium Drive, Inglewood. Tickets are available at Blackpink in our area! The renowned female K-pop band featuring Jisoo, Jennie, Rosé and Lisa is on tour this summer and performing two dates at SoFi Stadium July 12-13. Lisa and Jennie both performed solo sets at Coachella 2025 following Blackpink's headlining performance in 2023. For those who have never seen the band, expect an energetic performance full of pyrotechnics and surreal moments. If you go: 8 p.m. Saturday, July 12 and Sunday, July 13, SoFi Stadium, 1001 Stadium Drive, Inglewood. Tickets are available at Pop star Katy Perry didn't get the public response she expected in April after joining TV personality Gayle King and journalist Lauren Sanchez to visit outer space on a Blue Origin space mission. But as she sings in "Firework," you gotta ignite the light and let it shine. She'll perform on July 13 at the Honda Center in Anaheim as part of "The Lifetimes Tour." Expect a spectacle featuring dazzling costumes, choreography and colorful production that Perry is renowned for. If you go: 7 p.m. Sunday, July 13, Honda Center, 2695 E. Katella Ave, Anaheim. Tickets are available at If you're a fan of electronic and hip-hop music, you'll love the HARD Summer music festival being held Aug. 2-3 at Hollywood Park. The 2025 lineup features headliners Dom Dolla, Gesaffelstein and Kaytranada. Sean Paul, Juvenile, Four Tet, Floating Points and more are also on the lineup. HARD Summer has become a renowned Southern California festival for its eclectic lineups, and the immersive visuals and themed areas at the festivals. If you go: Saturday Aug. 2 to Sunday, Aug. 3, Hollywood Park, 1011 Stadium Drive, Inglewood. Festival passes are available for purchase at with GA passes starting at $199 and VIP at $395, single-day GA passes at $139 and VIP at $239. Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel is wrapping up his tenure with the Los Angeles Philharmonic before he departs to become the music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic in 2026. After Dudamel and the orchestra performed at Coachella in April, the season at the Hollywood Bowl began. On Aug. 5, Dudamel will conduct a performance of music at the Hollywood Bowl by French composer and pianist Maurice Ravel and jazz great Duke Ellington based on Ravel's 1928 visit to Harlem and jazz clubs in upper Manhattan and Ellington's jazz symphony "Black, Brown and Beige." If you go: 8 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 5, Hollywood Bowl, 2301 Highland Ave., Los Angeles. Tickets are available at and cost between $13 and $151. Australian psychedelic-rock band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard has a reputation for performing highly energetic sets that electrify late-night crowds at music festivals, but on Aug. 10, the band will perform a unique set with the Hollywood Bowl orchestra and conductor Sarah Hicks at the Hollywood Bowl. Expect to hear cuts from the new album "Phantom Island" and other songs from the extensive discography of progressive rock, folk, thrash metal and more. If you go: 7 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 10, Hollywood Bowl, 2301 Highland Ave., Los Angeles. Tickets are available at and cost between $24 and $184. After the death of Linkin Park's frontman, Chester Bennington, in 2017, the band returned last year with a new female vocalist, Emily Armstrong — much to the delight of many fans. Linkin Park will perform on Sept. 13 at the Intuit Dome as part of the From Zero World Tour. The show was originally going to be at Dodger Stadium but was switched to the Intuit Dome due to low ticket sales. But the tour features stunning visuals and Armstrong's debut during the band's 2024 performance at the KIA Forum in Los Angeles was well-received. If you go: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 13, Intuit Dome, 3930 W. Century Blvd., are available at A music festival founded by Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder set against the serene backdrop of Doheny State Beach in Dana Point? Yes, please! Ohana Festival returns Sept. 26-28 featuring headliners Vedder, Kings of Leon, Hozier, Leon Bridges, Green Day and Cage the Elephant. Other notable performers include The Chats, Margo Price, Garbage and more. If you go: Friday, Sept. 26 through Sunday, Sept. 27, Doheny State Beach, 25-300 Dana Point Harbor Drive, Dana Point. Tickets are available at and GA festival passes are $530, VIP $1,589 to $10,255. Single day GA is $198 and VIP is $624. Brian Blueskye covers arts and entertainment for the Desert Sun. He can be reached at This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Hollywood Bowl concerts and more: 10 SoCal concerts to see this summer
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
The Weeknd on the ‘Deeply Psychological, Emotional Ride' Behind the Music in His ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow' Film
The following story contains spoilers from Hurry Up Tomorrow. Four months after The Weeknd released his Billboard 200-topping album Hurry Up Tomorrow, XO fans are finally able to watch the film that inspired its inception in theaters, starting Friday (May 16). More from Billboard The Weeknd Reveals 'Hurry Up Tomorrow' Album 'Didn't Exist' Before the Film 'American Idol': How to Watch Season 23 Finale Online REI Anniversary Sale: Shop the 20 Best Tech, Clothing & Outdoor Deals for Up to 30% Off Directed by Trey Edward Shults, Hurry Up Tomorrow follows a fictional version of the superstar (also named Abel) who's 'plagued by insomnia' and 'is pulled into an odyssey with a stranger who begins to unravel the very core of his existence,' according to the official synopsis. But what's soundtracking his nightmarish journey digs even deeper into The Weeknd's lore. 'Wake Me Up,' the Justice-featuring synth-pop album opener, also serves as the film's opening 'concert song.' The show The Weeknd performs at a that looks identical to the ones he held in Brazil and Australia last fall, where he wore a black and gold kaba — a hand-embroidered Ethiopian robe historically worn by royals and traditionally worn at weddings — and sang atop a rock-hewn church, resembling Lalibela, in the northern region of his motherland. He debuted 'Wake Me Up' at his São Paulo show in September. 'We always wanted a performance song that we can open the film with, and in the vein of a pop record, and 'Wake Me Up' was the inspiration,' The Weeknd tells Billboard. He performs the song again at a different concert later in the film, where he ends up losing his voice – mimicking The Weeknd's real-life experience at Inglewood's SoFi Stadium in September 2022, when he had to cut his concert short for the same reason. That incident, as well as The Weeknd's sleep paralysis diagnosis, are key influences in Hurry Up Tomorrow. The film's Oscar-winning sound designer Johnnie Burn says they remixed the first 'Wake Me Up' performance in the film '35 times, trying to get the balance of how much crowd sound you would hear, how the music would come across. Are you hearing it from Abel's perspective? We tried that. Are you hearing it from the audience's perspective? No. Are you hearing it from a deeply psychological, emotional ride? Yeah, you are.' Burn, who says he went from 'dancing around my kitchen to Abel's music' as a fan to 'dancing around the mixing room' with the man himself, says the process involved everything from asking Mike Dean for 'a new synth line that sounds a bit more live' to miking The Weeknd while he recorded new lyrics that better suited the storyline. When The Weeknd was changing up a few lyrics during the cutaways, 'I said, 'Well, you're probably in quite an adrenaline state when you go out in front of 80,000 people.' So I made him do push-ups to get kind of worked up,' Burn recalls with a chuckle. 'He was like, 'What, now?' And I was like, 'Yeah, get down and give me 20.'' Burn says the song that required the most fine-tuning was the cathartic centerpiece 'Hurry Up Tomorrow,' which The Weeknd explains was inspired by the titular track from Robert Altman's 1973 satirical noir film The Long Goodbye, because of how frequently it appears. 'You hear it throughout the entire film, different iterations of it. You hear it on the radio, you hear a pop version of it, subjectively in the score, diegetically, a mariachi band will sing it every time he goes to Mexico. And I wanted to do that with 'Hurry Up Tomorrow,'' he explains. Abel first plays Anima (played by Jenna Ortega) a stripped-down draft of it off his phone in a hotel room. Moved to tears, Anima admits she relates to its autobiographical lyrics — because her father left when she was a kid, her mother struggled to raise her alone and she abandoned home to forge her own path that's fraught with inescapable loneliness. The next morning, Abel turns around while sitting on the hotel bed and faintly hears Anima singing some of the first verse in the shower behind closed doors. He later encounters his younger self, who's swaddled in a gabi, a white handwoven Ethiopian cotton blanket, and singing a few lines in Amharic, the primary language of Ethiopia. But after Anima douses him and the hotel bed he's tied to with gasoline — and right as she holds a lighter above him — Abel belts an a cappella version that feels like he is literally singing for his life: 'So burn me with your light/ I have no more fights left to win/ Tie me up to face it, I can't run away, and/ I'll accept that it's the end.' 'You're seeing the making of it, not literally me making it, but the themes and the concept and the melody and the soul of it is being made throughout the film. By the end of it, it's fully blossomed into this song, which essentially is what the film is saying,' says The Weeknd, who adds that he had 'to finish the lyrics the night before I had to perform it at the end.' But outside of the Hurry Up Tomorrow tracks, fans will be surprised to hear two earlier songs from The Weeknd's discography in the film: his 2021 blockbuster hit 'Blinding Lights' – which is the top Billboard Hot 100 song of all time – and 'Gasoline,' the first track from his 2022 album Dawn FM. Anima analyzes the emptiness and heartache in the songs as she hysterically lip-syncs and dances to them, and she later questions Abel if he's the true toxic subject behind his music. 'What I am doing by the end of the film is, I'm lighting my persona up on fire. But to tap into that, you need to go into the back catalog a little bit, and take in what I'm saying in some of these lyrics and how they're masked by pop elements,' he says. 'It's always been a joke that joke with The Weeknd music, where it makes you sing and dance and it feels jolly. And then when you actually get into the themes of it, it's something much deeper — and maybe a call for help, who knows. That's how [Anima's] reading it, and essentially forcing myself to face myself.' There are other callbacks to his catalog in the sound design. The guttural shrieks heard right after Anima swings a champagne bottle over Abel's head and knocks him out when he first tries leaving the hotel room sound reminiscent of the title track of his 2013 debut studio album Kiss Land. The 'Easter eggs,' as Burn calls them, extend beyond the film — as fans pointed out online that the ending of 'Hurry Up Tomorrow,' which serves as the final track of The Weeknd's album, seamlessly transitions into the beginning of 'High For This,' the first track off his 2011 debut mixtape House of Balloons. While Hurry Up Tomorrow bids farewell to the character Abel Tesfaye has played for over a decade, it also underscores the long-standing symbiotic relationship between music and film in The Weeknd's world. 'When you hear the screams in the record and you hear all these horror references and you feel scared, listen to the music — because I want you to feel what I'm feeling. Kiss Land is like a horror movie,' The Weeknd told Complex in his first-ever interview back in 2013. 'We wanted to do something we've never seen or heard on screen before,' he says now. 'We were able to do these big swings, and I think they landed well in the film. I'm really proud of the music, and I'm proud of the sonics of it. It's much different from the album. It's like its own experience.' Best of Billboard Kelly Clarkson, Michael Buble, Pentatonix & Train Will Bring Their Holiday Hits to iHeart Christmas Concert Fox Plans NFT Debut With $20 'Masked Singer' Collectibles 14 Things That Changed (or Didn't) at Farm Aid 2021
