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1. Born Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, he initially wanted to use The Weekend as a stage name. But an already existent Ontario rock band forced him to make a slight edit.

2. Emigrating from Ethiopia in the late 1980s, his parents Makkonen Tesfaye and Samra Tesfaye landed in Toronto. Never married, they split up and he and his mom shared a tiny apartment with his grandmother in the city suburb of Scarborough.

3. As a kid, he learned Amharic before English, still speaking it to this day.