With the final 16 days before Halsey releases her new album, we bring you 16 facts about the singer who is bound to make a splash in the music industry! Everything, from her roots to her new album.
So, let’s get to know the raging feminist behind the new album titled BADLANDS!
1- Her full name is Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, but her stage name Halsey comes from a NYC street name on Brooklyn where she spent her teenage years at. Also, when asked about her stage name, she once said “I love Halsey. Halsey is the manifestation of all the best and worst exaggerated parts of me”
2- Although you can mostly find her jammin’ out on an acoustic guitar, she actually got her first steps in music with classical instruments such as the violin, viola and rocking out on the cello. She discovered her love for the acoustics when she was fourteen years old.
3- Even though this is her first album, the blue haired beauty already has a few songs on iTunes, such as her ep Room 93
4- She started out and had an amazing blog by the username se7enteenblack on the one and only social media site Tumblr but later deleted her blog (she’s still totally a Tumblr girl though) dedicated to,you guessed it, British boybander Harry Styles! She used her blog to share the music, quotes, covers and poems that she wrote
5- You read that right, she wrote all of that on her blog! And we have examples directly from her it! You may have heard of her most popular Tumblr quote and later lyric for her song “Colors” , “You were red. You liked me because I was blue. You touched me and suddenly I was a lilac sky and you decided purple just wasn’t for you”
6- She is a massive promoter of body love AKA the fact that we should all except our bodies for what they are. That we should embrace our stretch marks, scars, freckles, etc and that we should all take care of our bodies because, in her own words, “those are a part of your code. You are unique. You have your own code.”
7- And when she’s writing her music, it’s all from personal experience.
“Everything I write is autobiographical. Even if it’s not directly about me it’s a combination of things about me, things my friends have gone through, things that I’ve witnessed. I thought I was invincible when I was a teenager”
8- High school is over! What next? When the time came, Halsey couldn’t afford to go to college, so she went to community college and took creative writing classes. Later on she discovered that not being able to go to an actual college was a blessing in disguise, because look at where she ended up! Not a lot of usual college students can say that they’ve been supporting Imagine Dragons on tour now, can they?
9- First kiss, you ask? With a character like herself, you’d expect a romantic kiss under the rain while they were both running from her parents who didn’t approve of their love. But nope, her first kiss was actually in seventh grade with Brian Murphy while playing truth or dare at 11 PM.
10- Listening to the few available songs, it’s not hard to determine the difference between them and modern day music, and we’d have to say that the best description for her music comes from herself, when she said “I wanna make pop music that’s just a little bit, y’know, left of center… and has dignity, and crosses gender barriers. And talks about things that otherwise would be considered unladylike.”
11- Now finally we’re discussing the new album! Where she got her inspiration from? Well turns out it was in the air. Literally. She was over Las Vegas, and here’s what she had to say: “I got inspired to write BADLANDS flying over Las Vegas. I looked out at the desert with this booming city in the middle of it and thought, “What the fuck?!” There are all these things you’re not supposed to do: excessive sex, be sexually deviant, do drugs… But if you do it in Las Vegas, it’s totally cool. That’s fucked up! Badlands, for me, is a booming metropolis filled with toxic behaviours, gluttony, commercialism, sex, neon lights, and super heavy police authority. I started getting obsessed with this concept and halfway through writing it I realised that it’s a metaphor for mental state, you know? I’m regressing to a childlike state. I’m going home and thinking about the album, thinking about the Badlands and what the people are doing there, escaping to this imaginary world I invented so I don’t have to deal with my actual life. After I’d acknowledged that, I wrote “Drive”, which is the first happy song I’ve ever written in my entire life. It’s called “Drive” because it represents my departure from the Badlands, and from sadness.”
12- Talking about her EP, an album inspired by hotel rooms and conveniently called Room 93 she claim’s it’s all about smashing those gender barriers to the ground and acting unladylike but not caring if she does so. It’s about how in a hotel room, you can either be yourself for a bit or you can really be someone you’re not.
13- Okay, so we’ve pretty much established that Halsey is awesome, but would she be more or less awesome if she joined a band or a group? Whatever the answer may be, we will never know since she wouldn’t like to join a band any time soon. She claims she would have less energy for her fans if she had to put up with bandmates.
14- She prefers Taco Bell over McDonald’s. Sorry, Donny.
15- Her biggest fear, career wise, would be getting interpreted in the wrong way and not having enough time to explain herself, since most of her interview questions are about describing her songs, projects, etc
16- So the massive storm that is her new album will be released on August 28th, and what can we expect? Well apparently, judging from a tweet back in December 2014, 95% of it is about feminism, gender roles and sexuality and the other 5% is about cool hair colors.
That’s it folks! So, what new things have you learned about Halsey? And are you excited about her new album, because we are!