Over the past six months or so, I’ve become a little bit obsessed with The Weeknd. He’s a Canadian singer/songwriter/pop star with soul, straight out of Toronto. “Earned It” feels like it’s already a classic, and “Can’t Feel My Face” and “Wicked Games” are two of my current workout jams. Before now, it really hadn’t occurred to me to pay attention to The Weeknd’s personal life, but that was before I read this striking and interesting profile in the NY Times – you can read the full piece here. His real name is Abel Tesfaye and he’s just 25 years old. He’s kind of short (5’7”) and his dreadlocks are amazing/sexy. Oh, and he’s dating Bella Hadid, Gigi Hadid’s 18-year-old sister. Here are some highlights from the NYT piece:

Changing his career from dark & moody music to pop-soul: ‘‘I felt I had to change who I was,’’ he says. His new album, ‘‘Beauty Behind the Madness,’’ is the end result of a year’s worth of molting old habits, a creative upheaval that has begun to teleport him from the margins right to pop’s center.

He’s obsessed with early Michael Jackson: ‘‘These kids, you know, they don’t have a Michael Jackson. They don’t have a Prince. They don’t have a Whitney. Who else is there? Who else can really do it at this point?’’

Learning how to make pop music: In the early days, producers ‘‘would always try to structure it, make it more into a song, and I was always a punk: ‘I hate major chords. I hate structure. I want this song to be eight minutes long.’ It would kill them…. My head-space now is, I love choruses. A chorus is not easy.’’

Bella Hadid shows up for the interview: [There are four SUVs] waiting to drive him and his crew uptown for a performance at the Museum of Modern Art. Moments later, the 18-year-old model Bella Hadid stepped out of the building, her black jacket draped over a sheer black top. She was asked to stop for [a photo], too. She demurred, wordlessly ducking into one of the other trucks.

What he says about Bella and love: A couple of weeks later, Tesfaye refused to talk about Hadid. Asked if he was in love, he replied: ‘‘I don’t know, to be honest with you. I don’t think so. Maybe. It’s no, it’s yes, it’s maybe.’’

[From The NYT]

By most accounts, Bella and The Weeknd have only been dating a few months, maybe three at most. I don’t think that’s long enough for your guy to be making public declarations of love in the NYT, so I don’t fault him for playing coy with the love question. Then again, if he didn’t want to be asked, why in the world did Bella show up when he was with a NYT journalist? Basically, Bella and The Weeknd are happening and it’s pretty serious, but not serious enough that he’s going to declare his love publicly.

Bella’s giving me Jessica Biel vibes. Right?

Photos courtesy of WENN.