2019-10-01 Cosmopolitan

men: “Mary Karr! June Carter Cash!

Zelda Fitzgerald! Jackson Pollock’s

wife, Lee Krasner—brilliant fucking

painter!” Too bad she was overshad-

owed by a husband who plagued her

with all “his cheating and bullshit.”

And, *ahem*, as for all that: In the

midst of last year’s messy split from

G-Eazy, Halsey remembers feeling

not at all herself until the moment

that zapped her back to life. “I was

doing Good Morning America and I’m

in a blonde wig and white patent-

leather outfit, twirling around while

I’m going through a heinous

breakup,” she recalls. “I look down

and there are these two girls, one with

pink hair, one with blue hair, septum

piercings, cool as fuck, still loving me,

probably knowing what a weird time

I’m going through. I looked at them,

lo oke d a t my s e l f i n my s p a rk ly B r it ne y

Spears outfit, and went, Ohhh no, they

deserve way better than this. If those

girls can be that brave in who they are,

then I owe them better than this

homogenized bullshit.” (Look up the

clip on YouTube. There’s something

almost indescribably sad about the

performance—until the very end.)

“But hey,” she continues, casually

peeling off the last of her photo-shoot

fake eyelashes, “if the worst thing

that’s happened to me so far is I wore

dumb clothes and dated a shitty dude,

I think I’m doing all right.”

trying to be some sort of picture-

perfect pop star. This rabbit hole

she’s gone down, it just kind of hap-

pened. “But I love that, because I wake

up every day wild-eyed and spongy,”

she says, “trying to do things better

than the last time.”

There’s a great old photo Halsey

posted on Instagram earlier this year,

in which a middle school–age Ashley

plays a secondhand violin, decked out

in Costco glasses, an Evanescence

T-shirt, and Hot Topic pants. She still

s e e s t h a t g i rl i n t he mi r r or “ l i ke , fou r

times a day,” she laughs. Generally,

H a l s e y ’s t hou g ht s a r r ive i n w i ld ,

breakneck bursts, but here she speaks

softly: “I have bipolar disorder, and I

get bored of shit really quickly. Music

is this thing that I get to focus all my

chaotic energy into, and it’s not a void

that doesn’t love me back. It’s been the

only place I can direct all that and

have something to show for it that

tells me, ‘Hey, you’re not that bad.’ If

my brain is a bunch of broken glass, I

get to make it into a mosaic.”

Lately, she has started to put

together a book of poems. (“It’s ironic

having to explain to people that I’m a

poet,” she says wryly. “It’d be like talk-

ing to Michael Jordan about baseball

and saying, ‘Oh, you’re gonna try bas-

ketball?’”) She’s always been a big

reader, but these days, she’s particu-

larly obsessed with books about female

artists who’ve been undermined

because of their proximity to famous

reproductive rights. People are always
asking her things like, “Are you a
crazy, rambunctious bad girl, or are
you an activist, political, fund-raising
philanthropist?” “Like, how fucking
immune are you to the human experi-
e nc e? ” s he l au g h s i n d i s b e l ie f. “ S ome -
times I want to have really good sex
and sometimes I want to save the
world, and sometimes I might try to
do both in the same day!”
Still, she says, she’s a Libra—mean-
ing she just wants everyone to love
her, even at her most incorrigible.
“That’s the problem: I’ll do what I
want, knock down everyone in my
path who says I shouldn’t, and then
when people don’t like it, I’m like,
‘Why?!’” she admits with a grin.
“When I made ‘Nightmare,’ there were
people saying, ‘I
don’t think this is
the move. You just
had a number one
song and now
you’re gonna put
out this weird,
political song
that’s not safe.’
Well, yeah, that’s
why I’m gonna do it.” She’s talking
about her latest radio smash, part of
her “Marilyn Manson–inspired goth
record” phase. If “Nightmare” is any
indication, with its howled lyrics
about trampling the patriarchy, the
vibe of her forthcoming album is pri-
mal scream from the soul.
That might seem like a radical
departure if you’d listened only to
songs like “Without Me,” the chart-
topping ballad she released mid
highly public breakup with her on-
again-off-again-who-even-knows-
again ex G-Eazy. Or “Closer,” her 2016
collaboration with The Chainsmokers
that could probably be statistically
proven as the biggest song of the
2010s. But then you’d be missing the
p oi nt. B e c au s e H a l s e y h a s n’t b e e n

“I

fm

yb

rai

n is

a bu

nch of broken g

la

ss,

I get

to make

it into a mo

sa

ic

.”

(^122)
Cosmo
politan
October (^201)
9