Halsey Quotes
Singer
I'm open about having bipolar disorder. I'm open about being of mixed race. I'm open about being bisexual, and I have this wantingness to talk about it, and for me, it's about more than being a role model for any specific community.
I consider myself someone who takes a lot of beauty risks, and I've realized what I liar I am. I change my hair a lot, from blue to blonde to bald, but I'm trying to branch out a little more with makeup.
I end up pleading my case to alternative programmers - you're telling me that my music is too dark for pop, too pop for alternative, and urban radio won't touch it - so we have a record that doesn't fit in. And what is more alternative than that?
I'm a human, and I'm multidimensional. If I was the perfect form of anything, I'd be boring. If I was a free spirit all the time, I would be boring; I would lack depth. If I was dark and enigmatic all the time, then I would lack relatability.
Growing up in the suburbs, I used to listen to punk rock, Brand New, Taking Back Sunday. And no one from my high school listened to it.
At the end of the day, every decision I make about my music is about creating a collective.
Being bisexual, being bipolar, being biracial - it's been used to define me, but I am desperate to be indefinable.
I wear my personality on my sleeve, for sure, and my look is constantly changing because so am I.
The environment around you shapes who you are. How you handle an emergency or how you react when someone is rude to you, that's you.
My mom is awesome. She's really young. My mom is 40, and she raised me listening to Nirvana and Courtney Love and Coldplay, Gin Blossoms, The Cranberries, and stuff. Like, my early, early memories are of being a little kid running around in floral skirts and Doc Martens when I was, like, three.
I love Kanye West. I think he's a visionary. He's one of those people for whom I separate his personality from his artistry.
I'm used to packing up and leaving, to condensing myself into a digestible version because people don't have much time to get to know me.
I have to remember for every kid saying something awful, there's a kid saying something great.
I write songs very quickly, so the 20 minutes of joy I get out of writing a song doesn't compare to the two months of joy I get engaging with the people who like my music.
There are conspiracy theorists who think I was crafted in a boardroom. Because I'm so very relatable and so very topical and so very Tumblr.
I want any kid who listens to my music to see that I am confident with all elements of my personality that I can't change.
It's hard because I think I fall into this in-between space where there's something that's innately feminine about me, and there's also something that's kind of androgynous. I carry myself somewhere in between, and I think my music lends itself to that as well.
I don't want to be 'Halsey: America's Sweetheart,' or 'Halsey: Bad Girl.' If you can sum up my career in a clickbait headline, I've done something wrong.
People are so afraid to talk about real things, but they're experiences that everyone goes through.
It usually takes me 20 to 90 minutes to write a song because once I start, I don't stop. If I start writing a song, and you try to have a conversation with me, you're a bad person.
I'm 21 years old, and it's kind of uncomfortable for me to talk about, but I'm in the 1 percent as far as my income and tax bracket. But now that I'm here, there's no amount of money you can wave in front of my face that will make me understand depriving people of human rights.
I think, growing up in a small town - I grew up in a lot of different places. I grew up in a city environment, a more suburban environment, a more rural environment. That's the beauty of New Jersey is you get a lot of different types of living.
I'm learning slowly to not be as much of a control freak. I can't afford to be all the time, but I'm getting better at communicating. Delegating parts of my vision for other people to execute has made it an easier process for knowing what I want, and what people can handle, and what I should probably save for myself.
I used to work at a punk venue in Pennsylvania because I wanted to be near music.
You don't know fear until it's 7 A.M. and freezing cold on live television, and you're not sure if Justin Bieber is going to kiss you or not.
When I was in high school, I was a bad kid and a good student.
You can tell if there's magic in something. When you start it, you want to finish it and you want it to be perfect. If you're not inspired, and you're working hard to pull inspiration from somewhere and make a song something it's not, then it's very contrived, and I don't like to write music that's contrived.
People around me like me the best when I'm depressed because I'm a bit more passive.
Being a musician, people ask you a lot about what musicians inspire you, and there's plenty of musicians that I love and respect, but I think that I'm the most inspired by cinema.
All the musicians I loved growing up were men. I loved Leonard Cohen, Mick Jagger. I loved Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys. Even today, I love Van McCann from Catfish and the Bottlemen and Matt Healy from The 1975.
A guitar can be so human, so sorrowful, so angry, and I wanted to figure out how to achieve that vibe without having to actually use guitars, because 'Badlands' is a very futuristic record - and making it that in an era of futuristic music is a really hard thing to do!
So many people are concerned with being the perfect 'something.' Whether it's the perfect singer, the perfect sexy girl, or the perfect feminist. I don't want to be the perfect anything.
I made up 'Badlands'; anything I say, goes. I came to realize I was materializing a metaphor for my mental state.
I was doing some YouTube covers, and I had a decently popular blog on Tumblr.
I feel like, if I'm going to have young, impressionable people listening to my music, then I'm going to respect that.
I was a weirdo. I think I wanted to be liked, but I didn't have the attention or bother to actually make an effort to be. I also think I had a different perception of what I needed to do to be liked.
In one week, I went from being a girl who owed a guy thousands of dollars - my manager Anthony was paying for my outfits, paying for my food; I was sleeping in his parents' basement - to taking meetings with every major label in America. The next morning, I had a record deal and wrote him a cheque to pay back all that money.
For me, writing about hotels is like writing about being in a parallel universe. The sense of voyeurism, and the sense of removedness, and there are all these people silently above you and next to you.
I have this first album that sells more than 100,000 copies in its first week, debuts at number two, goes gold, the single goes platinum, we're doing Madison Square Garden.
You can expect nothing in being a musician, and you have to be just very thankful every time it goes positively for you.
Every 16-year-old person has a love for pop in them because pop is popular.
I'm a fixer, unfortunately. I'm like, 'Oh, I can fix you.' But it's not just guys I'm dating anymore. It's this entire legion of young girls who tell me they need me to maintain any sort of sanity or peace.
I had a crazy life for a teenager. I lived in New Jersey, but I'd go to Vermont for three weeks, join a commune, take pictures with the guy I was dating, come back home, and post photos.
I didn't even realize I was writing songs - I thought I was just being witty and sarcastic.
I think escapism is something artists write about pretty frequently - it's something everyone can relate to, the concept of wanting something more, wanting to find solace, wanting to have something better.
'Badlands' is a very tangible record; a lot of the sounds were actual things: they were pots and pans, and they were rocks, and they were voices,and instruments used in a way to create a landscape of sound.
I love pop music, but at the same time, I'm seeking to write whatever I'm organically inclined to.
When you're a teenage girl, a lot of being pretty has to do with your hair.
I cultivated this fan base that I really didn't really understand or appreciate until I put my first headlining tour up for sale. 500- to 1,000-capacity rooms weren't an underplay for me at the time. I'd never done a tour before!
Being a pop-leaning, female artist, you'd think that I'd have my record company breathing down my neck and trying to control everything I'm doing. Actually, they've just kind of let me take the wheel.
My EP, 'Room 93,' was all about isolation - it was based on the idea of being in a hotel room and being totally alone with yourself or that other person.
Even if you can't relate to what I'm singing, I hope you can believe in it and see it as something that it is real.
Every time I got to play a show, even if it's already sold out, I'm so scared no one's going to come.
My mom has every issue of 'Billboard' I've ever been in.
I was always running off to the city, whether it was Philly or New York, going somewhere where there was something more for me.
In a city, there's more room to be, where in a small town, you have to squish yourself down a little bit. And it's exciting for me to be pursuing a career where I don't have to be small.
Please don't erase my race because I'm white-passing. There is literally nothing I can do about my complexion.
It's really exciting to see all those people that exist in numbers online translate into tickets and then into faces, handshakes, pictures, stories.
I want to be treated like a musician.
I hate feeling like a prisoner. I show up somewhere, and I can't explore the city because there's, like, 6,000 to 10,000 people on the lookout for me.
If I go out there and am myself, and I do what makes me comfortable and what I think is true to my artistry, and they don't like it, then that's fine. I walk off stage, and I know there's nothing there's nothing I could have done differently.
I wouldn't trivialize my existence into a hashtag.
I put 'Ghost' online hoping to make a couple hundred bucks, but then the next day, I took meetings with five different record companies.
That's one thing the musicians don't remember: you don't choose your demographic - they choose you.
The hardest thing about writing my second album is that I had 20 years to write my first album.
My first album was called 'Badlands,' and it's something that I think I'm most proud of having done in my life.
Whether it's writing songs, being on stage, being interviewed, meeting fans - I just try to be myself, which is kind of exhausting because it almost feels like it never shuts off.
The cool thing about my show and me is that I'm a writer, and I'm a writer first if I don't have music.
I'm a musician with a very unique mental state, I suppose. I'm agoraphobic. I'm scared to leave my house. I haven't been alone in, like, two years. I'm either with my boyfriend or my assistant, my manager or my tour manager. I won't go anywhere by myself; I'm too terrified.
Everything that I hate about myself goes away when I was onstage.
To be fair, I did come out of nowhere. 'Ghost' was the first song I ever did in a studio, my first time ever cutting a professional vocal.
Every song I write is autobiographical and is about people, and that's one of the things that gets complicated. You have to decide where's your place as a songwriter.
You can be accessible without catering to an audience.
If I am who I am, I'm provocative, candid, and androgynous; there's nothing I can do that will make any fan think, 'I didn't expect that from her.'
As a songwriter, pop music really is a love and a joy and a science, and I feel like a lot of people look at pop music with a very formulaic perspective in numbers and patterns, but an outsider would think that the process is very natural.
The 'Room 93' EP was just kind of picking apart the sense of voyeurism and the sense of isolation and turning it into, essentially, a little black book and reflecting on - at that time - 19 years of me forming relationships with people.
I love films that show people in a way that's so real it's almost unsettling, and that's what really inspires me because I write about people. I write about people that I know, so I want to portray them and portray myself in a way that is unapologetic.
I learned how quickly I could go from having never met someone to having the world think I'm dating them.
I'm not actually even a very good singer. I'm not.
I put so much of myself out there and make myself so accessible that sometimes I fear I make myself too accessible.
I was a fan of One Direction when I was 16, but I was also a fan of Bring Me The Horizon and hardcore bands.
When you're an artist, you're expected to describe yourself in interviews every day in five words.
Most artists, their 60th show was in front of no one. My first show was in front of 1,200 people.
The idea of 'Badlands' was creating a space with sound, which is a really difficult thing to do.
I'm not going to present myself one way all the time just because it will make me sell best.
In 2016, makeup has become an incredible passion and hobby for men and women, but it hasn't become mainstream.
You numb yourself so you're not terrified when you're on TV at 7 o'clock in the morning with Justin Bieber, who you just met a couple of days before, having to perform in front of millions of people.
I love Quentin Tarantino; I love Harmony Korine, Larry Clarke.
I like writing about places, about people and environments. When I create a world, it lets me go in and define the details of that world.
I would love to write a screenplay for 'Badlands' one day. I don't think I could ever have the patience to do it; I don't even have the patience to write songs. I write some of the shortest songs ever because I don't have the patience.
I was obsessed with learning about social behaviors. I remember explaining to my mom that kids on my soccer team were fighting because of dyads and triads.