62 | ROLLING STONE | J U LY 2 0 1 9
everything for them, ’cause I’ll fucking kill myself. I
will literally go crazy.”
Right now she seems anything but, as she stands
in sneakers over the stove asking just how spicy her
spicy riga toni should be. “Do you like it spicy?” she
asks, giving the pot a little stir. Her face is bare, and
her short hair is obscured by a scarf — not one of
her 60 wigs in sight. In her paint-splattered jeans,
she looks like the upper- middle-class art-school kid
she might have been had her parents actually been
upper- middle-class and able to afford the tuition at
the Rhode Island School of Design, the dream school
she got in to but couldn’t afford to attend. Instead,
Halsey grew up in rough-and-tumble Garden State
towns, spending the first bit of her life in her parents’
dorm room, she says, before they dropped out of col-
lege, got jobs as a security guard and a car salesman,
and eventually had two more kids.
Because of their youth and temperaments, Halsey
sort of parented herself. “My parents didn’t do shit,”
she says, good-naturedly, tossing things into the pot
without measuring them. “I had to learn to cook for
myself.” The only thing at all amiss in her kitchen is
the bandage wrapped around the middle finger of her
left hand, the result of a cooking mishap a few days
back. “Are you squeamish?” she asks before whip-
ping out an iPhone photo of the bloody damage. She
brandishes the middle finger of her right hand. “Good
thing I’ve got another one.”
So it is. As an artist and even as a person, Halsey
has always been polarizing for reasons that she’s
still not quite sure she understands. Almost from
the moment her debut single, “Ghost,” was released
in 2014 — a song she wrote and recorded in a
friend of a friend’s basement and uploaded to
SoundCloud — she’s been cast as a bit of a punk:
over-the-top and in-your-face, just a little too spicy.
For one, she was hard to place — messier than Ariana
or Beyoncé, rougher than Lana or Lorde — a pop
star with a rock sensibility. For another, she was a
maximalist. No chorus was too big, no album concept
was too heady. She seemed to operate, permanently,
at 11.
And despite the haters, it worked. Both of
her albums — 2015’s Badlands and 2017’s
Hopeless Fountain Kingdom — went platinum,
and teens the world over started dying their hair
her trademark blue. “Closer,” her collaboration
with the Chainsmokers, topped the charts for 12
consecutive weeks, and “Without Me,” a song about
her breakup with rapper G-Eazy after “getting
cheated on in front of the entire world, like, a billion
times,” became her first solo single to hit Number
One.
Meanwhile, Halsey poked and prodded the beast of
public opinion: When she tweeted about her bipolar
disorder, was she destigmatizing mental illness or
romanticizing it? Was it right that she called herself
a black woman (her father is black) but passed as a
white one? And a sexy dance with another woman on
The Voice notwithstanding (“It was supposed to rep-his may come as a surprise to no one, but Halsey
is pretty good with a knife. Today she is wielding it
against a cucumber, which would seem like a joke
or a meme — given her man-eater rep in the pop-
star pantheon — were it not for the bowls of lettuce
idling nearby. “I’m kind of on autopilot,” she says
over her shoulder, blade flashing. A few days back,
she’d thrown friends an Easter feast of “baked ziti,
rosemary rack of lamb, garlic Parmesan chicken,
angel-hair pasta, meatballs, a fillet, mashed potatoes,
bacon-wrapped asparagus, green beans and roast-
ed potatoes,” she says. And this being L.A., “It kind
of stressed me the fuck out because I was like, ‘Of
the four trays of ziti I’m cooking, which one’s vegan?
Which one’s gluten-free?’ ”
Today, she’s making a spicy rigatoni, a dish in
which she takes much pride. “Have you ever been
to Carbone?” she asks, referencing a New York
establishment famed for its version, with which
everyone is obsessed because they haven’t yet
tasted Halsey’s. “With all due respect to the chef —
because they’re so nice to me there — every time I
eat their spicy rigatoni, I’m like, ‘I can make this way
better.’ ” She decisively plops some cucumber into
the bowls.
Her house is lovely: an unpretentious and airy
midcentury gem perched on the sloping side of one
of L.A.’s affluent hills and designed by the same
architecture firm that built the tower of Capitol
Records, her current label. She has another house,
one that’s more “like a bachelorette pad with a crazy
bar that’s themed like the Playboy mansion,” but she
moved here about a month ago to work on her third
album — a studio is currently being constructed out
back — and the house has grown on her in a way she
hadn’t expected.
In fact, she says that the only time she’s left her
home in the past three days was for a grocery run
this morning, which she insisted on making herself
despite the obvious peril of being a famous person
out in the wild. “I’m 24 fucking years old,” she says.
“I’m a grown-ass woman. I can’t be this fucking co-
dependent, helpless thing who has someone who does