After Kiss Land, The Weeknd went from being a mysterious singer people didn’t know much about to a pop star. He even cut his hair last September. How instrumental were you in those decisions?

Obviously Abel’s the captain of the ship and we go off his vibe. If he says he wants to cut off his hair today we’re just like, “Okay, this is how we are going to present it and ensure it’s the biggest and best way possible.”

It’s does become more challenging because the bigger Abel gets the more eyes he has on him. So that gives us—I don’t want to say pressure—but there are a lot of eyes and attention on the projects as well. We know people are watching his every move, so we’ve got to go real big with every project and ensure there are no fuck-ups. We were doing everything in-house back in the day but we realized that if we were going to bring it to this next level, we were going to have to work with the best. That changed everything for the better. We started working with our idols, people we admired, and I love that. I feel like relocating to L.A. was also vital to that. We wouldn’t be where we are at now if we didn’t move to L.A.

Beauty Behind the Madness was a hugely successful album. What was the decision to change the direction for his projects when Starboy was released?

We don’t like repeating anything we do. We’ll kill the Starboy aesthetic and then it’ll be onto the next on. We’re not really too concerned about other people copying our moves; we’re already four moves ahead.

It’s all just vibes, to be honest. Thankfully, I’ve known Abel my whole life, so we have that chemistry where we know each other’s taste levels and that makes it a lot easier to work together. When we’re going into a new project everything starts with the music. We listen to the lyrics, vibe out, start throwing around ideas and pull movie references. We strategize what we can do differently from the previous projects and build the excitement around that. Our whole approach to marketing is generating excitement around the project. I feel like you don’t see that in music anymore. People now just drop albums, get the first week numbers, and move onto the next. It’s not like a movie rollout. But we want to make sure it’s a moment, people are excited and inspired, and looking forward to the project.

How involved are you in creative direction for other XO artists, like Derek Wise, NAV, or Belly? How do you approach working with these individual artists?

I pretty much handle everything for Belly and work very closely with Cash, who discovered our newest artist NAV, on his creative presentation. Derek has his own internal team that I work closely with and mentor in areas I can help with. It’s just relationships. You have to really know that person, talk and go back and forth on ideas, and trust each other’s vision.

Do you have any plans to work as a creative director outside of music?

Yes, definitely. I’m in the process right now of creating my own creative facility in Toronto for the youth coming up. I remember working on the design layout for House of Balloons with my creative partner and one half of the team Drop, we’d come down from Scarborough to [Toronto arts college] OCAD and hack into their computer system so we could use all the tools on there. We didn’t have access to anything else. We had no money at the time to download Adobe or Final Cut Pro. In my head, I’m just thinking, how many more creatives in the city are in the same position? They don’t have the tools to execute their vision, so that’s what I’m trying to build for them in the next two to three years.