All About HALSEY

Pop justice interview

WARNING: it's a long interview

Right. How are you finding London so far?

I love it here. The air's different.

How is the air different?

I don't know. It feels different. I was in a really high altitude part of the US for a while, so it's really hard to breath out there. It's nice here, I like it here. No one really knew I was coming, but there were like 40 kids at the airport last night which was really cool, it was like eleven o'clock at night. It was fun to stop and get to meet them all. That's fun for me.

What are your UK fans like?

It's so funny because it's a little different to the US. It's a bit more diverse here. There were a lot of girls, but also a lot of guys. Now I'm focus grouping, trying to get to know my UK fans as best I can.

What did you want to do with 'Badlands'?

I kind of got stuck on this idea last winter: Badlands. I didn't know what it meant but I said to my managers, 'I'm naming the record BADLANDS'. They're like, 'we're not even thinking about the album right now'. Then a month later I'm like, 'okay, so for Badlands...', and they're like, 'oh, you do want to name it that'. I'm like, 'Yes!'.

'Badlands' is a concept record, about a dystopian society. I became kind of obsessive about this idea of a dystopian society in the future. I moved into an apartment in LA after my headline tour — no furniture, just paper on the wall. It looked like a serial killer's house. It was me just writing notes about the album, tearing pages out of things, so

How far in the future is the album set?

I would say 50 to 100 years.

So it's soon enough for some of your fans to live to see it come true?

Hopefully. But hopefully it doesn't, because that wouldn't be a good place. The Badlands are this part of the world that are kind of removed.

I flew over Las Vegas once and I looked down at this desert with this city in the middle of it that seemingly pops up out of nowhere. Las Vegas is such a bizarre thing because it's all these things that are bad; sex, gambling, drugs whatever, but if you do them there, it's okay — which I think is the most bizarre concept ever. All of these things are awful, but if you do them in Las Vegas it's okay because that is what Las Vegas is for. It's a city that exists for vice.

So I thought that was such an interesting concept and I kind of got obsessive and started thinking about what these people might be like. What are the buildings like? What is this world like? What are things made of? What is the structure of society, and what are the rules? I got obsessive about the society. I wrote 'Castle', the first song on the record, then I wrote 'Hold Me Down', and 'New Americana'. The tracklist appears almost true to the order in which I wrote the songs. So it follows an actual story because the songs are reflective of what part of my life I was in at the time, what kind of mental state I was in. The record is autobiographical, but in a surrealistic fashion because I obviously don't live in a dystopian society. I wish I did!

Can you describe your state of mind when you were making the album?

Neurotic. The interesting thing about 'Badlands' is that here I am in this imaginary world and my life is changing in the US and I'm 3000 miles away from my house, I'm flying somewhere new every day and I'm busy and all of a sudden people fucking care about me.

Six months ago no one gave a shit about me and all of sudden a company turns around and says, 'look at you, look what you did when none of us fucking cared about you at all. Let's talk about this now!' I'm in this whirlwind with everything happening really quickly and I think I was regressing almost to like a childlike defence mechanism where I was hiding in this world because it was easier for me to think about the record and give all my time to the Badlands, rather than deal with what was actually happening to me in my real life.