FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
Part Thirty-Six: Halsey
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I like to keep quite…
a broad spread when it comes to Modern Heroines. In terms of genres, there are so many great female artists that are shaping up to be iconic. Either that, or they are hugely influential and important. I am including Halsey as I have been revisiting her 2020 album, Manic. I will get to a review of that album soon. I also want to bring in a few interviews so that we can learn more about a great artist. Before that, here is some background information about Halsey:
“Ashley Nicolette Frangipane born September 29, 1994), known professionally as Halsey (/ˈhɔːlzi/ HAWL-zee), is an American singer and songwriter. Gaining attention from self-released music on social media platforms, she was signed by Astralwerks in 2014 and released her debut EP, Room 93, later that year.
Halsey's debut studio album Badlands (2015) reached no. 2 on the US Billboard 200. Her second album Hopeless Fountain Kingdom (2017) topped the chart, and her third album Manic (2020) peaked at number two. She has had two no. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100, "Closer", a collaboration with The Chainsmokers, and "Without Me". The single "Bad at Love" reached the top-five.
Halsey has sold over one million albums. She is noted for her distinctive singing voice. Her awards and nominations include four Billboard Music Awards, one American Music Award, one GLAAD Media Award, an MTV Video Music Award, and two Grammy Award nominations. She was included on Time magazine's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2020. Aside from music, she has been involved in suicide prevention awareness, sexual assault victim advocacy, and racial justice protests”.
I loved last year’s Manic, and songs such as clementine, You should be sad, and Without Me are still in my mind. It is a fantastic third album from Halsey; showing that she gets stronger and more explorative with each release. I love how stirring and impactful the album is, even after the first listen. This is what The Line of Best Fit observed in their review:
“Powerhouse singles; the ghostly and empowering heartbreak ode "Without Me", and the tribal lament of "Graveyard", all pitch into the romantic side of Halsey's life, but it's the moments that edge away from heartbreak and instead focus upon just who she is and where she's been that offer the most.
More specifically, the diamond in the beautiful rough closer, "9:29". The most brazen in its admission of the world through Halsey's eyes, it's a listing of her life to date, apt given the title, as per the intro studio talk of her joking, her birthday. The perfect bookend to a story that's refused to sugar-coat any truth, it cleverly twists vitriolic statements that refuse to let the world take any more of her.
Perfectly attuning the musical accompaniment to the sentiment, "3am" is the kind of alt-rock number that sinks into your head with the ease of idea of that last pint, lamenting the lonely point of a difficult night. At the same time, "You Should Be Sad" trots in a country number, sticking close to the frameworks of what the hollering voice of a broken heart the genre has always been.
Strategically placed throughout are interlude appearances from a spectrum of artists; up-and-coming Floridian rapper Dominic Fike, '90s icon Alanis Morrisette and one-fifth of K-Pop behemoths BTS, Suga, singing in his native tongue. Unspeakably few artists could string together all the above facets together. There's deep honesty, generation-spanning genre-hoping, guest appearances, and an unlikely sense of cohesion: that's all just part of who Halsey is.
Even the use of pop culture references (quotes from films Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and Jennifer's Body create the cinematic drama, befitting a story rife with truth) and samples, adds to the flowing spine that underpins the album with a wild charm. Manic revels in the explorative genre-pop bombast, letting the delicates twinkle, and the snarls bare their teeth; yet it's the soul that shines dominantly. It's her most complete work to date”.
Not to ignore Halsey’s work pre-Manic – I will put out a playlist at the end which is career-spanning -, but it is her most-recent album and I think that it signals a very big future. It is such a rich and interesting album that does have some tough moments and songs that take you aback. There is also a lot of light and variation.
As a songwriter, I think that Halsey is one of the most accomplished and underrated in modern music. In an interview with The Times, we learn more about a curious and fascinating artist:
““I think of myself as obnoxious and reckless and spontaneous and loud,” she says. “But I’ve made some different friends in the past year, and they’re, like, ‘Actually, you’re pretty quiet and thoughtful.’ And I’m, like, ‘I am?’ I think that’s why I became a musician, in an attempt to become the person I was convinced I was.”
A seriously big deal in America, Halsey has made slower progress here, though she is upgrading to arenas for the British leg of her world tour next February. Back home, she has topped both the singles and album charts, and emerged as a force to be reckoned with. The daughter of an African-American father and a mother of Italian, Irish and Hungarian descent, she is bisexual, has openly discussed mental health issues and is a passionate advocate of women’s and LBGT rights. This has, predictably, got her in trouble. But trouble tends to seek her out, she says, and always has.
“In third grade, I did my summer reading project on The Green Mile by Stephen King, and wrote a book report about rape and convicts, racism and the criminal justice system. And other kids were doing Narnia! I got in so much trouble. The teacher was, like, ‘I can’t let you present this to the class.’”
A self-confessed “empathy bomber” who in her songs addresses her sexuality, drug use, relationships and depression with no filter, Halsey now has hundreds of thousands of young fans indirectly calling on her services. Unsurprisingly, there are drawbacks, as she discovered when she read her poem about her own and others’ experience of violence and sexual assault at the 2018 Women’s March in New York. “When I did it, there were 2,000 people in front of me, and no one was listening or paying attention — if you watch it, there was barely even a cheer at the end. I felt defeated. I had written this poem, I thought it was going to matter.
“I definitely flip-flop between disassociatedness and being hyper-present. There’s really no in-between. But if I’m guarded and give you nothing, and you need something, you’re going to go and find it somewhere else — and I have no control over it. It becomes about digging up old clickbait, and I’ve then created that problem for myself”.
I do not think one has to be a fan of Pop music to appreciate Halsey. There are artists who get labelled as ‘Pop’ acts, but they are much broader and harder to define. Whether you have had the same experiences as Halsey or are new to the music, it does not take long for the songs to resonate – and they will linger in the mind.
I want to grab from another couple of interviews or so before wrapping up. When Halsey spoke with The Guardian last year, we learn more about Manic in addition to Halsey’s (Ashley Nicolette Frangipane) upbringing:
“Manic is more than a breakup record, then – it is the aftermath of years of feeling beholden to lovers, collaborators and the public. It was made while Halsey, who has bipolar disorder, was in a manic state. (“That’s not a punchline,” she quips.) On Clementine, she sings: “I’m constantly having a breakthrough, or a breakdown.” The song is named after Kate Winslet’s character in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a key example of the manic pixie dream girl movie trope in which a free-spirited woman loosens up an emotionally stunted man. It samples the line: “I’m just a fucked-up girl looking for my own peace of mind. Don’t assign me yours.”
Halsey’s story often exists adjacent to the men in her orbit. Her first album, Badlands, was made with her producer boyfriend, Lido; her second, Hopeless Fountain Kingdom was about their breakup. She started dating G-Eazy in 2017. They made their love official in joint single Him & I, now G-Eazy’s second-most streamed song, but not even in Halsey’s Top 10. After they split the following year, Halsey released Without Me, in which she seems to take the credit for his success – the chorus goes: “You know I’m the one who put you up there.” She says: “As writers, we have this habit of waiting until something doesn’t hurt any more. On Without Me, I ran into a burning building to find whatever I could before I felt too afraid to speak. I’d gone from being a 19-year-old activist, a sexual badass, to this girl who’s someone’s partner.”
She worries that being a firebrand pushes people away. “It’s hard to figure out when being an activist deflects attention from my art,” she frets. “Sometimes when you’re the centre of ‘having something to say’ you start losing your agency. People don’t wanna hear it.”
She reckons her lack of Grammy nominations this year is because she spoke out against former president Neil Portnow’s comments two years ago, when he said it was women’s responsibility to “step up” if they wanted to excel in the music industry. “I had a lot to say about that, and I am nowhere to be seen on any of those acknowledgments.” Post #MeToo, she has been disappointed by the lack of camaraderie between female pop stars. “Nobody wants to be my friend. They’re scared I’m gonna pop off about something. I’m drama by association. I put myself out there with my peers; I don’t know if people really ever wanted to do the same with me. So I stopped wasting my energy.”
She isn’t coming from the same place as many of those peers. Halsey grew up Ashley Nicolette Frangipane in New Jersey to a white Italian family on her mother’s side and an African-American family on her father’s. Her parents were teenagers when she was conceived. She addresses her dad on Manic’s final song 929 – “the most uncensored song I’ve ever written” – about a lonely night on tour when her dad promised to call and didn’t. After she wrote it, she called him. “We need to make more of an effort to connect,” she says. “It’s hard to have a traditional relationship with your parents when you’re …” The parent? She nods reluctantly. “Kinda. I don’t mean to discredit my parents. I was five when they were my age”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Masha Mel for CLASH
I want to grab from a great interview in CLASH . Halsey spoke about Manic’s upcoming release (the interview was from January 2020):
“It’s been two years since your last album, how are you feeling about the upcoming release?
In terms of the album coming out, it’s been a long lead, which is rare for me; I usually like to announce things and put them out right away - I’m not the type to keep a secret for six months, but here we are! It’s definitely very cathartic.
I’m comforted by the fact that I’ve been sitting with this body of work for so long and I still feel so strong about it and connected to it. You always love the work you did most recently the best, but just because it’s the thing will care about the most doesn’t mean it’s what everybody else will. That can be kind of hard - seeing through that illusion. With this album, though, I do feel really good. It had a very clear identity once it revealed itself.
At first I was intending to write something that was really angry and volatile and angsty and self-deprecating and unreliable. I wanted to write an album about mania, and that’s what my understanding of it was at the time. And I kept sitting down to write like that, but it felt kind of performative. I did some greater self-inventory and self-forgiveness, and then the faucet opened. The writing became easier upon my discovery that I actually get on with my manic self a lot more than I thought I did.
What came out of that process? What did you find yourself writing about?
The album isn’t a commentary on mental health - the reason I called it ‘Manic’ is because I wrote it manic. Which I’ve never really done before - usually I’m too distracted or too impulsive to wrangle myself into a room and do something productive. It was my first time ‘off’ in a while, and usually I vent a lot of that [energy] into the chaos of my lifestyle and the chaos of my schedule; it brings me comfort because it gives me a way to exhaust that energy.
Having time off - even though I was out promoting ‘Without Me’, which is pretty demanding, but not on tour - I bought a house in LA and built a studio, and surrounded myself with a grand piano, guitars, mandolins, violins, all this accessibility, so that when that behaviour and state of mind came I had something to do with it. Sometimes I’m unable to harness it, but this time I was in the perfect position to do that.
It had been two years since I put out an album and I felt like the public narrative about me was built around me and other people - people I’d dated or people I’d collaborated with. I had very little narrative, zeitgeist presence on my own, because it’d been so long since I’d spoken singularly. I thought it was time to do this sort of re-introduction to me.
How do you handle having so many sides to yourself as an artist?
I don’t do anything but this. I have very few personal relationships, I don’t have many hobbies, I don’t really take vacations; I don’t really do anything but this, all the time. So I’ve committed myself to being two people. I do all the work of the pop star and I do all the work of the alternative homegrown ‘fan relationship’ artist. I do two people’s amount of work.
Most people choose to do the pop star thing or they chose to be the homegrown, touring, fan-connection, base level artist. They pick one and then save the rest of their energy for like having a boyfriend and playing fucking soccer. I don’t really do that, so that’s been quite a task; balancing all of that, and reminding myself and evaluating myself every day, asking: ‘Are you still doing all this because you want to?”.
With news that Halsey is to become a mother soon, I am sure that will shift focus - not just in terms of her work commitment and schedule but her music and lyrical concentration. Not to say that she will completely change approach, though I feel maternity will have an impact for sure. I want to end with a fairly recent interview from late last year. Vogue spoke with Halsey about a new collection of poetry, I Would Leave Me If I Could:
“In January, after the release of Halsey’s third album, Manic, she was slated to hit the road for one of her biggest tours yet. But instead, the pop singer, born Ashley Frangipane, found her plans on pause. Like much of the world, she has spent most of this year at home—and she’s embraced the coziness. In fact, when we speak in the days leading up to the presidential election, Halsey is peak hygge, flaunting her newly shaved head, wearing a Barbie-esque Biden-Harris sweatshirt, and bundled in a giant plush blanket. “I look like, I don't know, a gym teacher or something,” Halsey quips on Zoom from an office in Los Angeles, where she lives.
Yet the multi-hyphenate never gets too comfortable. Halsey has remained quite busy: She has been on the front lines of the Black Lives Matter protests, landed her first acting gig in the forthcoming Sydney Sweeney–produced series The Players Table, performed alongside Bruce Springsteen for a remote COVID-19 benefit for her home state of New Jersey, and filmed a conversation series with Senator Bernie Sanders. Tomorrow, she releases her debut collection of poems, I Would Leave Me If I Could.
Earlier this year you announced that you were going to do a press blackout. Has it ended?
Oh, I’m barely doing interviews again. You’re just special. I’m only doing interviews when I have something very specific to talk about. I’m not doing interviews just purely for the intention of having a larger profile: I don’t want a larger profile. I’m not saying that I don’t want one at all. I love what I do. I can’t control [my profile] sometimes—it grows out of proportion and makes me feel really, really helpless. I gave a lot away in the beginning, and it didn’t help me. So I’ve got to take care of me now. Also, I sound like an asshole in print, and I don’t mean to. All the YouTube comments on my video interviews are like, “Oh my gosh, she’s so nice. I thought she was such an asshole.” I’m like, “It’s because you read something!” That’s probably just the Jersey in me.
You’re about to release your debut poetry collection, I Would Leave Me If I Could. How did you come up with its title?
It’s from a really old poem that I wrote when I was 18. The title comes from the idea of feeling trapped with yourself, the idea that most people who are in your life are there because of obligation or convenience, and that everyone will leave eventually. And that reflective moment of, “Yeah, I get it. I’d probably leave me, too, if I could.”
In the book, there are a lot of allusions to sexual misconduct and assault. How difficult was it for you to be able to revisit those experiences? Why did you think it was important to write about them?
Well, I definitely cut a lot of shit out, that’s for sure, because I do have to create boundaries for myself. A lot of this book is about relationships, betrayal, abandonment, and interpersonal communication. When you read a poem about something that happened to me when I was eight, maybe it’ll help you better understand the poem about something that happened to me when I was 24. Also, ever since I did the Women’s March speech, I’m not afraid of talking about sexual assault or misconduct. It’s far more common than any of us realize. So I do think it’s important to include it.
Have you started working on a follow-up to Manic, or do you plan to release a new body of work next year?
I’m kind of just taking some time. This is the longest I’ve ever spent at home, so I’m always making stuff. With albums, it’s like I wake up one day and all of a sudden, I know 16 songs I want to write. Then I start them, and it’s done. I’m doing what I do before I make an album—I call it “collecting.” I’m watching movies, reading books, and collecting inspiration”.
I shall leave it here, but I wanted to highlight an incredible artist who is going to be making amazing music for years to come! From 2015’s impressive debut album, Badlands, to now, it has been one hell of a career so far! Although the incredible Halsey has already accomplished so much, I feel that…
THE very best is yet to come.