42 | Rolling Stone | July 2019
“I’m a grown-ass woman. I can’t be this fucking co-
dependent, helpless thing who has someone who
does 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
whipping 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 sensi-
bility. 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 al-
bums — 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 (“ItHIS 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 roasted
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 estab-
lishment 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 riga-
toni, I’m like, ‘I can make this way better.’ ” She deci-
sively 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.
THE
HOTLISTT
Senior writer ALEX MORRIS profiled Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez in March.