JULY 2019 | ROLLING STONE | 65
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with a shudder. “Uh-uh, no. Uh-uh, absolutely
not. I have worked way too fucking hard to be
quantified or categorized by something like that.”
Or even be categorized at all. Identity is a
tricky thing for anyone, but es pecially for a pop
star whose personality tends to shift, she says,
to match whatever get-up she’s wearing. “I was
talking to Dom the other day, and I was like,
‘When you’re laying in bed at night and you’re
on tour and you miss me, how do you picture
me? Do you picture me with short brown hair?
Or long blond hair?’ And he’s like, ‘I don’t really
know.’ ” And the thing is, Halsey doesn’t really
know either. She can’t really picture what she
looks like. “And I’ve thought about that for a
while, and I’ve been like, ‘Is that a good thing
or a bad thing?’ Does that mean I have no sense
of identity? Or is it a good thing I don’t limit my
perception because I haven’t permitted myself
to view myself as one thing, because I haven’t
stayed one fucking thing long enough to be that?”
She pauses, considering, waiting for an answer to
present itself. But of course no answer does.re these jay-z’s hangers?
Or Patti Smith’s?” Halsey asks,
eyeing a rack of them in the
dressing room of Webster Hall
in New York a couple of weeks
later. “Why are there so many
hangers in this room?”
“I feel like Jay-Z probably has more outfit
changes than Patti Smith,” says her assistant
Maria with a shrug. “But who knows?”
Halsey smiles, but then asks Maria for a Midol.
Last night in her hotel room before going to sleep,
she’d prayed “kind of, not to a god or anything,” that
tonight’s show, her first headlining gig since last summer,
would go well. Then she’d woken up to the immediate
realization that she’d gotten her period, which was Not
Good News. “I feel like for a normal female performer,
she’s like, ‘Fuck, I have my period. I have a show today.’
And for me, it’s like, ‘Fuck, I have my period. I hope I
don’t have to go to the hospital.’ ”
For a while, Halsey had been tormented by the idea
that she wouldn’t be able to have children, that the
endometriosis that could have caused her miscarriage
would keep her from ever carrying a child to term. But
surgery and some lifestyle changes have improved her
health to the extent that her doctor no longer thinks she
needs to freeze her eggs, which she had been planning to
do this summer. “I was like, ‘Wait, what did you just say?
Did you just say I can have kids?’ It was like the reverse
of finding out you have a terminal illness. I called my
mom, crying.” Halsey now jokes with Maria about having
a “pregnancy pact” in which they agree to get pregnant
together. “Never mind. I don’t need to put out a third
album. I’m just going to have a baby,” she announces.
And, actually, that’s not so hard to imagine. When I
met Halsey three years ago, her fame was acutely newand destabilizing, even for someone without a serious
mental illness; for someone with one, there was a
sense that the whole situation could go terribly awry,
that behind her bluster, a real fragility was hiding out.
Now that fragility seems to have morphed into a sort of
tenderness, chaotic but kind. She no longer drinks hard
alcohol, does drugs or smokes pot. “I support my whole
family,” she says. “I have multiple houses, I pay taxes, I
run a business. I just can’t be out getting fucked up all the
time.” (She’s also profoundly amused by how much she
can “freak out rich white men. Like, ‘Are you a fucking
CEO? Same.’ ”)
Her only remaining vice is cigarettes, and she asks if
she can light one now and then sits, pantsless in a ripped
Marilyn Manson T-shirt, next to me on the sofa. I ask if,
despite initial signs to the contrary, her success has been
stabilizing. “Yeah, because it makes me accountable,” she
replies carefully, taking a drag. “I’ve been committed
twice since [I became] Halsey, and no one’s known
about it. But I’m not ashamed of talking about it now.”
Being committed isn’t a problem, she reasons, it’s a way
of responsibly dealing with one. “It’s been my choice,”
she continues. “I’ve said to [my manager], ‘Hey, I’m not
going to do anything bad right now, but I’m getting to
the point where I’m scared that I might, so I need to
go figure this out.’ It’s still happening in my body. I justknow when to get in front of it.” She quickly ticks
off the people who work for her, tallies how many
kids they have. “Do I want to hurt these people?”
she asks.
Halsey says that the album she’s currently
working on is “the first I’ve ever written manic.” Her
fero cious writing process has been the same. “She’ll
be like, ‘OK, I’m gonna go smoke a cigarette,’ and
literally when she comes back the song is done,”
marvels producer Benny Blanco. But because she
“can’t sit still long enough to be productive,” she’s
ended up giving herself perspective, walking away
and then coming back to revisit songs weeks after
she initially wrote them. An eclectic product of her
state of mind, the album is a sampling of “hip-hop,
rock, country, fucking everything — because it’s
so manic. It’s soooooo manic. It’s literally just, like,
whatever the fuck I felt like making; there was no
reason I couldn’t make it.”
It’s also the first time Halsey’s work will not
hide behind a concept, though there is, she says,
a “motif.” “There’s a lot of exploration of l’appel du
vide, which is French for ‘the call of the void,’ ” she’d
told me back in L.A. “It’s that thing in the back of
our minds that drives us to outrageous thoughts.
Like when you’re driving a car and you’re like”
— she mimics cutting the wheel — “or you’re on
top of a building, and you’re like, ‘What if I just
jump?’ ” That, she says, is what her manic periods
are like. “You are controlled by those impulses
rather than logic and reason.”
It’s getting close to showtime now. Halsey’s
stylist comes in with a wig, black and blunt and
a little tussled. For a moment, Halsey considers
it. Tonight she will be performing her first album
in its entirety, a sonic time warp for her hardcore
fans. Should she have brought a blue wig, reminiscent of
the Halsey of her Badlands days? “No,” she says, finally.
“I can’t keep going back to that. Like, ‘This is the real me.’
I can’t deflect.”
Halsey used to pity “Ashley,” but she doesn’t now. “OK,
point blank, here’s what it is,” she had said back in her
living room, the late-afternoon light and the cigarette
smoke bathing her in a soft-focus glow. “I was a teenage
kid who wasn’t real well-liked in high school, and I was
sold the dream that everyone was going to like me,
because I was going to be a famous person.” But they
didn’t, not everyone, no matter what persona she tried.
“That’s all it is. And now I’m 24, and I’m like, ‘Well, I
guess it doesn’t matter.’ ”
And, really, it doesn’t. Outside the dressing room,
1,500 misfits with blue hair and tattoos and teenage
angst they can tap into no matter what their age are
filing in to watch her sing a handful of songs she wrote
back when she was still being sold the dream. They’ll
sing along. They’ll scream her name. They’ll cry, most
certainly they’ll cry, thinking about the bodies that lie
next to them and the headlights in their eyes. And in that
moment, however fleeting, the dream will be real, and
the stories she tells will be true, and no one will feel like
they have to apologize for any of it.A