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.
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.
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.
I used to work at a punk venue in Pennsylvania because I wanted to be near music.
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.
At the end of the day, every decision I make about my music is about creating a collective.
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.
That's one thing the musicians don't remember: you don't choose your demographic - they choose you.
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.'
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.
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 put so much of myself out there and make myself so accessible that sometimes I fear I make myself too accessible.
People are so afraid to talk about real things, but they're experiences that everyone goes through.
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 learned how quickly I could go from having never met someone to having the world think I'm dating them.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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'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.
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.
I want to be treated like a musician.
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.
Being bisexual, being bipolar, being biracial - it's been used to define me, but I am desperate to be indefinable.
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'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.
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.
I love pop music, but at the same time, I'm seeking to write whatever I'm organically inclined to.
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.
In 2016, makeup has become an incredible passion and hobby for men and women, but it hasn't become mainstream.
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.
I didn't even realize I was writing songs - I thought I was just being witty and sarcastic.
You can be accessible without catering to an audience.
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.
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!
My first album was called 'Badlands,' and it's something that I think I'm most proud of having done in my life.
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.
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 was a fan of One Direction when I was 16, but I was also a fan of Bring Me The Horizon and hardcore bands.
Every 16-year-old person has a love for pop in them because pop is popular.
The hardest thing about writing my second album is that I had 20 years to write my first album.
I was always running off to the city, whether it was Philly or New York, going somewhere where there was something more 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.
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!
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.
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 have to remember for every kid saying something awful, there's a kid saying something great.
