Cosmo’s October Cover Star Halsey Talks Breakups, Breakthroughs, and Why She’ll Never Be the Pop Star She’s Supposed to Be
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Editor’s note: This cover story was originally published in October 2019. In March 2021, Halsey clarified that their pronouns are she/they, and this story has been retroactively updated to reflect this.
I am not sure who to expect. During my cab ride through Los Angeles’s winding side streets, two songs come on the radio that sound like they have nothing in common: “Eastside,” an electro-pop smash about puppy love, and “Nightmare,” an alt-rock thrasher about punching mirrors and tasting blood. They both belong to one of the biggest pop stars on the planet. And I’m on my way to her house.
Well, one of her houses. (They have two places in L.A. because, what the hell, they’re one of the biggest pop stars on the planet.) The driveway gate skates open and here’s Halsey—Oasis tee, baggy sweats, bare feet—curled over an ashtray in the backyard. Where the Halsey of Google Images is an endless mood board of raver wigs and shaved heads, the Halsey of right now has their dark-brown bob pulled back casually à la Rosie the Riveter, traces of glitter from her Cosmo cover shoot smudged around their eyes.
Halsey swears her fans think of her as a friend from camp, which is kind of absurd coming from someone with more than 15 million Instagram followers, two Grammy noms, and a handful of hits that have nabbed top spots on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. But after 10 minutes of chain-smoking together (yes, they tweeted last year that they’d quit their decade-old habit; also yes, they’re a human being and quitting things is hard) and comparing our questionable tattoos, I nearly forget I’m not here to just shoot the shit in a cool mid-century bachelorette pad with, um, someone I know from camp.
“I’m pretty regular,” she shrugs, as we huddle around a picnic table next to a swanky ’60s-style pool. A huge deer monitors us silently from the forest. Jersey native that they are, Halsey’s unfazed. “I’ll sometimes look at other artists who seem so larger-than-life and wonder, Am I not supposed to be here?” This, again, from a 24-year-old who could retire right now with 10 multiplatinum singles to her name, who was honored by the Songwriters Hall of Fame at the same age as when most people are still working their first-ever office job. Imposter syndrome is real, people!
We’re reminded by Payton—Halsey’s supremely chill BFF from their dollar-slice NYC days, who they brought to L.A. in 2016—that there are piles of takeout containers in the kitchen. Halsey chalks up a great deal of her groundedness to Payton keeping her in check. Their banter is sprinkled gratuitously with “dude” and “sick.” (Okay, the takeout is French, a serious upgrade from cheap pizza—and one of the many contradictions of this abnormally gifted person’s vaguely normal life.)Inside, the house feels more cozy-artist nook than fuck-you-I’m-rich mansion. See: the 1934 Steinway piano and purple-and-blue overhead lights that make everything feel like an episode of Euphoria. (“I’m not sure how I feel about the ‘Party Uber’ lights,” she laughs. “You know when you get in an Uber and the driver’s, like, ready to party?”) As we stand around a dozen containers of ratatouille, flaky Napoleons, and Cornish hens, Halsey self-consciously assures me that we can order something else too: “Is this too bougie? Ignore the trout.”
In the eventual Halsey biopic, you’ll get the record-scratch, freeze-frame, You’re probably wondering how an artsy misfit from New Jersey became one of the biggest names in pop! voice-over moment somewhere around here. Ashley Frangipane—a melodious name that sounds even better in a strong Jersey accent—was raised in various blue-collar Garden State towns by their dad, who managed car dealerships, and their mom, who worked security at a hospital, along with their two little brothers, Sevian and Dante. (Sevian has been her date on a few red carpets; Dante’s voice appears on an interlude on her 2017 album, Hopeless Fountain Kingdom.)
As a kid, Halsey was more AP student than rebel without a cause. That is, until the subsequent—and well-documented—chaos of their teenage life. There was the thwarted attempt at art school; the psych ward stint and bipolar disorder diagnosis at 17; the starving artist years in Brooklyn where she couch-surfed and made minimum wage; the heroin addict ex who lived off the Halsey Street subway stop (the street was part of the inspo behind their stage name) and is the subject of “Ghost,” the first song they ever wrote, which blew up on SoundCloud and changed their life.
If anything, maybe the general public could stand to know a bit less about Halsey’s backstory, given how constantly it’s been used against her—to question the authenticity of her bisexuality or her biracial identity (her dad is black; her mom is white) or to wonder whether her frankness about mental health is some sort of next-level marketing ploy. But having grown up venting into the black hole of Myspace, presenting herself as an open book came naturally. Around the time of their 2015 breakthrough—when they were still largely known as a Tumblr persona who’d post sad poems and satirical Taylor Swift covers—Halsey was an early ambassador for a new kind of pop star. Less manufactured, more messy; real in a way that feels familiar because they weren’t pretending. “I shared a lot about myself, assuming the world would be kind,” she says. “And that hasn’t quite been the case.”
For one thing, she’s now at the tail end of four straight years of criticism over which version of Halsey is the real one. Besides their seriously deep wig closet, they have a thing for genre-hopping (this year, they’ve collaborated with the Korean pop group BTS, the rapper Juice WRLD, and their much-buzzed-about boyfriend, Dominic Harrison, better known as the messy-haired British rocker Yungblud), posed for a sexy Playboy spread, and spoken up about their commitment to 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 experience?” she laughs in disbelief. “Sometimes 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, they say, they’re a Libra—meaning they just want everyone to love them, even at their 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 their forthcoming album is primal 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 they released mid highly public breakup with their on-again-off-again-who-even-knows-again ex G-Eazy. Or “Closer,” their 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 point. Because Halsey hasn’t been trying to be some sort of picture-perfect pop star. This rabbit hole they’ve gone down, it just kind of happened. “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. They still see that person in the mirror “like, four times a day,” they laugh. Generally, Halsey’s thoughts arrive in wild, 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’s starting to put together a book of poems. (“It’s ironic having to explain to people that I’m a poet,” they say wryly. “It’d be like talking to Michael Jordan about baseball and saying, ‘Oh, you’re gonna try basketball?’”) Halsey has always been a big reader, but these days, they’re particularly obsessed with books about female artists who’ve been undermined because of their proximity to famous men: “Mary Karr! June Carter Cash! Zelda Fitzgerald! Jackson Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner—brilliant fucking painter!” Too bad she was overshadowed 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,” they recall. “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, looked at myself in my sparkly Britney 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.” (Check out 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.”
Photographed by Peggy Sirota. Styled by Aya Kanai. Hair: Florido for Cloutier Remix. Makeup: Denika Bedrossian using Marc Jacobs Beauty. Manicure: Bel Fountain-Townsend @SoHotRightNail. Props styled by Danielle Von Braun. Production by Wonder Partners. Video by Janet Upadhye and edited by Livi Akien.
On Halsey: Sequin dress look: DSQUARED2 dress and belt, Janis Savitt earrings. Roller skate look: Gucci top and skirt, Dinosaur Designs earrings, Impala Rollerskates skates, impalarollerskates.com. Minidress look: Versace dress, Moutton Collet earrings, Marco de Vincenzo heels. Sequin suit look: Sally LaPointe top and pants, Kate Spade New York earrings.
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