'Badlands' is a very tangible record; a lot of the sounds were actual things: they were pots and pans, and they were rocks, and they were voices,and instruments used in a way to create a landscape of sound.
— Halsey
That's one thing the musicians don't remember: you don't choose your demographic - they choose you.
I love pop music, but at the same time, I'm seeking to write whatever I'm organically inclined to.
I want any kid who listens to my music to see that I am confident with all elements of my personality that I can't change.
I learned how quickly I could go from having never met someone to having the world think I'm dating them.
You numb yourself so you're not terrified when you're on TV at 7 o'clock in the morning with Justin Bieber, who you just met a couple of days before, having to perform in front of millions of people.
The environment around you shapes who you are. How you handle an emergency or how you react when someone is rude to you, that's you.
The idea of 'Badlands' was creating a space with sound, which is a really difficult thing to do.
I was a weirdo. I think I wanted to be liked, but I didn't have the attention or bother to actually make an effort to be. I also think I had a different perception of what I needed to do to be liked.
I didn't even realize I was writing songs - I thought I was just being witty and sarcastic.
All the musicians I loved growing up were men. I loved Leonard Cohen, Mick Jagger. I loved Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys. Even today, I love Van McCann from Catfish and the Bottlemen and Matt Healy from The 1975.
You can tell if there's magic in something. When you start it, you want to finish it and you want it to be perfect. If you're not inspired, and you're working hard to pull inspiration from somewhere and make a song something it's not, then it's very contrived, and I don't like to write music that's contrived.
I end up pleading my case to alternative programmers - you're telling me that my music is too dark for pop, too pop for alternative, and urban radio won't touch it - so we have a record that doesn't fit in. And what is more alternative than that?
I'm open about having bipolar disorder. I'm open about being of mixed race. I'm open about being bisexual, and I have this wantingness to talk about it, and for me, it's about more than being a role model for any specific community.
Every 16-year-old person has a love for pop in them because pop is popular.
I'm learning slowly to not be as much of a control freak. I can't afford to be all the time, but I'm getting better at communicating. Delegating parts of my vision for other people to execute has made it an easier process for knowing what I want, and what people can handle, and what I should probably save for myself.
I don't want to be 'Halsey: America's Sweetheart,' or 'Halsey: Bad Girl.' If you can sum up my career in a clickbait headline, I've done something wrong.
You can expect nothing in being a musician, and you have to be just very thankful every time it goes positively for you.
At the end of the day, every decision I make about my music is about creating a collective.
I'm used to packing up and leaving, to condensing myself into a digestible version because people don't have much time to get to know me.
My EP, 'Room 93,' was all about isolation - it was based on the idea of being in a hotel room and being totally alone with yourself or that other person.
Every song I write is autobiographical and is about people, and that's one of the things that gets complicated. You have to decide where's your place as a songwriter.
I hate feeling like a prisoner. I show up somewhere, and I can't explore the city because there's, like, 6,000 to 10,000 people on the lookout for me.
I'm 21 years old, and it's kind of uncomfortable for me to talk about, but I'm in the 1 percent as far as my income and tax bracket. But now that I'm here, there's no amount of money you can wave in front of my face that will make me understand depriving people of human rights.
It's hard because I think I fall into this in-between space where there's something that's innately feminine about me, and there's also something that's kind of androgynous. I carry myself somewhere in between, and I think my music lends itself to that as well.
It usually takes me 20 to 90 minutes to write a song because once I start, I don't stop. If I start writing a song, and you try to have a conversation with me, you're a bad person.
A guitar can be so human, so sorrowful, so angry, and I wanted to figure out how to achieve that vibe without having to actually use guitars, because 'Badlands' is a very futuristic record - and making it that in an era of futuristic music is a really hard thing to do!
My mom is awesome. She's really young. My mom is 40, and she raised me listening to Nirvana and Courtney Love and Coldplay, Gin Blossoms, The Cranberries, and stuff. Like, my early, early memories are of being a little kid running around in floral skirts and Doc Martens when I was, like, three.
I feel like, if I'm going to have young, impressionable people listening to my music, then I'm going to respect that.
For me, writing about hotels is like writing about being in a parallel universe. The sense of voyeurism, and the sense of removedness, and there are all these people silently above you and next to you.
The 'Room 93' EP was just kind of picking apart the sense of voyeurism and the sense of isolation and turning it into, essentially, a little black book and reflecting on - at that time - 19 years of me forming relationships with people.
Every time I got to play a show, even if it's already sold out, I'm so scared no one's going to come.
When you're an artist, you're expected to describe yourself in interviews every day in five words.
So many people are concerned with being the perfect 'something.' Whether it's the perfect singer, the perfect sexy girl, or the perfect feminist. I don't want to be the perfect anything.
People are so afraid to talk about real things, but they're experiences that everyone goes through.
I think, growing up in a small town - I grew up in a lot of different places. I grew up in a city environment, a more suburban environment, a more rural environment. That's the beauty of New Jersey is you get a lot of different types of living.
Most artists, their 60th show was in front of no one. My first show was in front of 1,200 people.
I'm not actually even a very good singer. I'm not.
As a songwriter, pop music really is a love and a joy and a science, and I feel like a lot of people look at pop music with a very formulaic perspective in numbers and patterns, but an outsider would think that the process is very natural.
I write songs very quickly, so the 20 minutes of joy I get out of writing a song doesn't compare to the two months of joy I get engaging with the people who like my music.
I have to remember for every kid saying something awful, there's a kid saying something great.
