In a recent New York Times Magazine profile, longtime the Weeknd engineer DaHeala describes a moment when Tesfaye decided: ‘‘Fine, I will apply myself, play ball." Did you experience that turning point? When?

After Kissland. He was doing arenas because of Kissland, like 20,000 people screaming every word of every song. It was like he had these hits that weren't on the other radio, just in another universe. At that point, we were trying to figure out how do we blow this up. As was he and his team—as a group, we were all like, how do we break this.

How did you "break it"?

There was an Ariana Grande song. Wendy Goldstein was overseeing Ariana's project as well. She hit me about it and was like, “Do you think Abel would do this?” At first I was like, "Yikes." But then I listened to the track and I was like, this song is amazing if you take out the context of how people perceived Ariana at that point. I sent it to Abel, and there was certainly hesitance in the beginning—he was like, “I'm not really backing where the lyrics are, can I bring myself to it more?” So he rewrote his lyrics.

And that spirit carried over to the album?

I almost think like, honestly he had this amazing thing going, he turned to the side, did this "Love Me Harder" song and then went back to what he was doing, but this thing just started. It was the Ariana thing and "Earned It”—having the massive success of those two songs as he's starting to make the record put this you-already-won-the-race-vibe over the record.

Was there any attempt to tone his sound or content down to make him more radio-friendly with this album?

I do think from Abel, there has been a strategy of wanting to express himself, and he's experienced a lot more things than he had when he was 20, 21 years old.

On first listen, this album feels a bit more upbeat—

Sometimes humans feel good and want to dance, and so does Abel. I was like, whatever is going on up there is incredible, this uptempo thing. Everyone has a spectrum of emotions. This is like a baroque painting—there are real bright and real dark paintings, the spectrum of the emotional experience, I think.

How was the process on this album different from his past projects?

Abel co-produced everything on this. His guys were involved in all of it. Abel was meticulous in mixing, and all of the construction of the record. We presented names to him, but the real effort is: if he wants to do something how do you give him the colors to paint it? He's definitely painting it. The "I want to work with Max Martin” or "I want to work with Stephan Moccio" come from Abel.

How and when did Kanye become involved?

Kanye and Abel have been friends for a while and he was going to Paris to do some stuff maybe for Kanye, and they had worked on some stuff together. I'm not sure how this track end up for Abel, but I know they're very close and a lot of it is timing—like, how do we get this done in time to deliver the record so the whole record will come out? Kanye has backing vocals on it, but hopefully in the future there will be one. [Laughs]

The biggest surprise on the tracklist was Ed Sheeran—

It was all purely from Abel. The Ed thing was somewhat recently, when he came to do the Much Music Awards in Canada. Abel had a party right after, and that rolled into them writing that song. He was playing the album back for me and was like, “This is the missing piece!” He loves movies so a lot of this is like, how does this have the arc of a film, and for him it kind of completed that.