“Honestly, things are completely out of hand,” she laughs. “I am in a blur, a daze. It’s been really crazy for me, because all of this has happened in the course of a year. I’m so fortunate and also very confused. That combination of confusion and excitement is basically my everyday, especially with the record coming out.
“Record companies have a certain way of doing things, and they’ve been doing it for years. Like, ‘Artists have to go to a country, people need time to get to know them, and only then we’ll put out your music.’ For me, it was like, ‘Well fuck you, that’s not how it goes, welcome to 2015 and the Internet.’ You can kick off in London, in Australia, places where I’ve yet to tour even once, and it’s because people are ready.”
For an artist who’s only just released her debut album, Halsey’s career has seen an incredible trajectory. Her online presence is huge, with fans so committed to sharing the New Jersey songwriter’s journey they even share tattoos with her. Having launched her career in 2014 uploading covers to YouTube, last October her Room 93 EP appeared, ushering in a talent now renowned for straight-talking and intelligent lyrics. But while her directness is refreshing, it developed as something of a shield.
“I think I’ve always been someone who gave away too much information, who tells people too much,” she says. “I’ve always been very open, but I think a lot of that also stems from insecurity, to be honest. There’s this sense of wanting to give people so much, hoping that they’ll like some part of it, rather than be afraid of not giving them enough and have them dislike me. It’s definitely how I functioned as an adolescent.
“I pride myself on being honest, and your fans aren’t stupid. You can’t feed them bullshit – they need to know who they’re listening to, they want to know who they’re spending all this time and money and energy supporting. So I’d really like for them to get to know me as much as possible. Being an artist like me, you don’t get to pick and choose what people know about you, and you have to accept that.”
Getting to the heart of Halsey in one short interview is impossible. Listening to Badlands provides insight into her sensibilities and tone, but to gain a truer perspective, it is necessary to look larger – to assemble her online features and engagements, to connect the spheres of her influences with the protean artist she is still aspiring to be. She claims to “write songs about sex and being sad,” but that sells her content short, perhaps deliberately so. Across each song, she is attempting to elicit almost physical connections, and so it is no surprise that her literary heroes are renowned for doing just that.
“Camus, Burroughs, Kerouac. Hunter S. Thompson, Palahniuk. I like stream-of-consciousness perspectives. All the writers I love are the ones who took me out of my body and put me in another world – those who almost make you feel uncomfortable, whose writing seems so real and bizarre. It’s like, you can’t believe it and can’t help but believe it. That’s how I want people to feel when they hear my lyrics. I want them to feel there’s something kind of unsettling about them.”
BY ADAM NORRIS
