Halsey Goes Back to the Badlands: ‘I Guess I Haven’t Learned My Goddamn Lesson’

When the clock struck midnight on Aug. 28, 2015, Halsey was sitting in her first Los Angeles apartment. Her one-bedroom in Studio City was hundreds of miles away from the Brooklyn neighborhoods that inspired her anagrammed stage name and countless stories to tell. Those streets, with their bizarre characters and ominous affairs, were a short distance from where she grew up in New Jersey, though that place seemed far away, too. Everything was changing for the musician, who was 20 years old at the time, but she was removed from it. There were no addresses that felt more like home to her than the one she’d created herself on her debut album, Badlands. 

“With Badlands, I think I succeeded in the way that I did because I didn’t know what it was like to fail yet,” Halsey tells Rolling Stone over Zoom on the record’s 10th anniversary. “I didn’t know what it was like to win, either, but I didn’t have the same pressures. I made most of that record in someone’s bedroom and sat on the edge of a twin bed recording vocals through pantyhose because I couldn’t afford a pop filter — they’re like $9, for the record.” 

When the album came out, she adds, that night was like many others that preceded it. “I would come off of the set of these music videos, do these interviews, but then I would go back home to my regular life where I would chain-smoke cigarettes on my balcony and my landlord would get mad at me.”

Halsey’s audience has always been drawn to the way she filtered real-life mundanity through the lens of digital aspiration. She reminded fans that castles could be built from their ruins. When they first encountered her on Tumblr, blogging under the name Se7enteenblack, the internet was still a place of relative anonymity and escapism. Ashley Frangipane was the one looking to get away. Halsey was the one who turned the key in the ignition and sped off. 

“Badlands was so pure because I only had what was available to me,” Halsey says. “All I had going for me were my ideas, so they had to be good and I had to depend on them.” They conceptualized music videos that interrogated betrayal, intimacy, and isolation in technicolor scenes. They created a fake airline and travel agency that gave fans boarding passes and passports to access exclusive events. They wrote songs about what it felt like to carry the weight of the people, feelings, and memories that settled into her bones and refused to leave, and about growing up too fast. Badlands opened up the world for Halsey. Some of what they found there changed them for the better, some gave them four more albums worth of material to excavate, some knocked them off-course.

“My second record, Hopeless Fountain Kingdom, I’m so proud of it — but it is a brief moment where I lost the plot a little bit,” Halsey says. “I thought that this high-concept, high-design, really expensive, tailored by someone else both physically and metaphorically speaking, curated person was what was expected of me. I desperately didn’t want to fail and I desperately didn’t want to get sent back home.” They maxed out budgets and collaborated with people on that 2017 album just because they could. It was so different from the time she spent generally unsupervised while making her debut. When she took in the scene during a television performance — her hair platinum blonde and pulled into a ponytail, and a crew of backup dangers surrounding her — she wondered what the hell she was even doing. She didn’t know how it all got so complicated. 

It was the first time Halsey really ached to go back to the beginning. That yearning returned in 2020, when they planned to go all out for Badlands‘ fifth anniversary. The pandemic guaranteed that wouldn’t happen, so they decided to wait another five years. In that time, they became a mother, then shortly after was diagnosed with lupus and a rare T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder. By then, they had learned what it was like to both win and fail, but this was something entirely different. For all of her meticulous planning that built stories within her albums and live shows, Halsey couldn’t write the next scene. Instead, she retreated to the familiar solitude of Tumblr where it all began. She reblogged and published poetry and obscure images, just like she used to. Then, when the timing was right, she went back to the Badlands.

In celebration of the record’s 10th anniversary, Halsey will embark this fall on an intimate run of shows that she’s calling the Back to Badlands Tour. They also released a long-awaited music video for the Badlands track “Drive” (as part of a double feature with “Gasoline”) — something they first teased at the end of the “New Americana” video in 2015, before saying later that it was only ever a plot device and never actually existed. Now it does, and it comes with a message that couldn’t have been delivered without the wisdom earned from their lived experiences. “They raised us to believe that the Badlands are an inescapable truth when you’re in captivity,” Halsey says in the video. “But I’ve seen behind the walls and I recorded this to let you know there is more out there. You’re probably wondering who I am. But my name doesn’t matter, my voice does. And now, so does yours.”

Tumblr is such a weird place in the sense that so much deleted content still exists in these out-of-context fragments scattered across the site, like when you were accused of stealing the “Colors” bridge because the lyrics you shared became a viral post before you actually released the song. 
That was the funniest thing that’s ever happened to me. I was actually really scared at the time that I would never beat those allegations, because it felt so much bigger than me. I was 18 and I had never made anything before, and now suddenly I was being accused of plagiarism. I can’t wrap my mind around the concept of me, a teenager who’s never made or released or published or printed anything, and now suddenly this is a new problem I have to deal with? That was a real indication for me. Like, the types of problems you have are about to change in a big way. I was worried about my dating life, my parents, my relationship with myself and my body — normal things for an 18- or 19-year-old to be worrying about. There’s no handbook for being 19 and having to deal with plagiarism allegations.

How has your relationship with that particular site changed as you return to this record? 
I went back to it for a year or two in a more consistent way ahead of The Great Impersonator, mostly because it was kind of like a safe place to speak, and also to speak sort of cryptically. People don’t demand answers on there in the same way that they do on Twitter or Instagram. I wasn’t ready to share my illnesses yet. I was still processing. Naturally, my way of dealing with that was by writing. I was writing all this poetry separate from what would eventually become the album, just about these real feelings of isolation that I was having, which, ironically, is where Badlands came from. 

It came from Tumblr being a place where I could write about feelings of isolation. I was really adamant at the time that the Badlands represented a state of mind, a place where you’re trapped and you try to leave — it’s almost like the Severance door. You walk out and then all of a sudden you’re walking back in and you can’t escape it. I was having a lot of those same feelings of entrapment and isolation, and the idea that myself and my relationship with the world is changing against my will. I was writing on Tumblr quite a bit at that time and it felt really safe. 

Your posts about the Badlands anniversary only have around 3000 notes, if that. There’s such a small community of people that still exist there and are still engaging in the same way they would have a decade ago. 
Most of the people who followed me on my Tumblr — and there were millions — had no idea what I looked like. I was posting my face, but if you didn’t see that reblog, or you weren’t on my page at that time, then you could very well be engaging with my blog and only be engaging with my poetry and my playlist recommendation. There was this real, separate relationship that wasn’t so based on the ability to take a selfie, or take a video, or talk to an audience. I certainly felt confident in crafting an aesthetic. The album was obviously really cinematic, and I think that one of the great success stories of it is that people can look at an unrelated image and be able to go, “Oh, that’s so Badlands.” I feel like that’s the hallmark of a cohesive aesthetic. 

But for me at the time, if I’m going to be completely honest with you, I was just really far behind [other artists] in terms of image creation. That is actually what ended up becoming my image at that time. I really did just look like another kid. My hair was all fucked up, my dye job was bad, or my hair was bleached, or my weave was terrible. My clothes all came from American Apparel or Urban Outfitters. It wasn’t fancy, it wasn’t costumes. I was really not ready to become a famous person. I had dental work I needed to get done. I was too embarrassed to smile. I didn’t have a workout routine. I didn’t know how to pose on a red carpet for years — I still don’t, to be honest with you. I put so much stock and so much emphasis on the visual environment of the record and the music itself that when people started evaluating me, I was really unprepared. 

When did you first realize how much your audience had grown beyond those fans who witnessed the Badlands rollout in real time?
I still have a hard time remembering that my audience has grown beyond that initial fandom. I used to be able to go online at a certain point in time and basically see everyone who was a fan of mine. The concept of casual fans was a really hard thing for me to wrap my head around and continues to be. Another thing that was so unique about that record cycle that caused a real existential change for me as my career started to grow was that I built my fan base from a point of accessibility. I think people initially were like, “That’s my friend Ashley who makes music. We talk online sometimes.” And then when I had to go become a celebrity, my life changed. I couldn’t have those relationships anymore. It was hard for me because I was like, I don’t know how to engage a fan without being their best friend — and now I have to because there’s just way too many people. 

When I did my first few tours, I would go outside after the show and I would meet every single person. I’d be out there in the cold till three o’clock in the morning by the buses. I took pictures with everyone. I remembered things about everyone, and I still do to a certain extent. I so deeply and earnestly see everybody as a real fucking person. It was so personal in the beginning, so I have a very hard time divorcing myself from the fact that that’s a real person who I let down because I’m not coming to their city. It’s just different than it used to be, and it’s really hard for me sometimes to divorce myself from the only way that I ever knew it to be, which was the way that I was inducted into it. 

Badlands really gave people a world to exist in, and an identity to try on and find themselves through.
I remember having a conversation with my mom a couple years before I got kicked out of the house, and her being like, “What are you doing up there all day?” I’m like, “I’m building my brand, talking to fans.” And she was like, “I’m gonna have to put my kid in a mental hospital. She’s in her bedroom in our two-bedroom condo and she thinks that she’s gonna be famous and that she’s building a brand, whatever the fuck that means.” She tells that story all the time now, because obviously it’s so funny in retrospect. Leading up to Badlands, I didn’t know it at the time, but I guess I was kind of functioning like an early internet influencer.

I was just completely unaware of it because we never really had a word for it at the time. We had just started calling YouTubers “YouTubers.” But that’s not really what I was doing. I was really just on Tumblr. That’s one thing that I think was important in the creation of Halsey. I just had so much time. I had time to research references and films and music and poetry, and I didn’t have a ton of friends, so I was online all the time. I could really put in the hours, put in the legwork. I took that dedication and I applied it to the way that I made a record. So it only felt natural to me to do a record that was more than just songs and music videos, and then you go do a tour. I wanted to cross-reference it with a bunch of other different types of media. 

You just self-directed new videos for two tracks from Badlands, “Drive” and “Gasoline.” Why was that important to do?
The “Drive” video is connected to the “Gasoline” video, so it’s a little bit more exposition on some of the other Badlands characters. It puts a nice pin on the album cycle in a way that I’m really pleased with. Part of the reason that I knew I had to direct them myself was because the map and the language for this all lies within my own mind. I simply cannot sit down and explain to someone this nuanced aesthetic, this feeling, the set design, the costuming, any of it. 

I shot them both at the same time. So I had the edit in my head, and I knew how it was supposed to go. It was one of those things where everyone just had to trust me with what I was shooting, which is exactly how it was during Badlands. I had to go to the label at 19, being like, “I want to go to Hawaii, and it’s all these kids, and then there’s these cops, and then we’re in a bunker.” And everyone’s like, [hesitantly] “OK, sure.” I had to do a lot of fighting and a lot of campaigning to get these ideas across.

The videos were one of the more challenging things that I’ve done, and I’ve always had a really heavy hand. I’ve written almost all of my videos. There’s probably more than a few that I probably deserved to co-direct on, but that’s just not how the business really was at the time. It was like, “You’re a musician, I have to get you a music video director, and I am the label, so that’s how we do stuff.” At the time, I was just like, I can do this. And they were like, we simply will not give you the money.

Tell me about bringing Tyler Posey back from the “Colors” video to appear in this double feature.
It was so surreal for us. Both of our lives have changed so much since then. He’s always so easy to work with and he’s such a professional. It was the best part of my day, because all he and I had to do was basically hang out on camera and believably like to be around each other, which is so easy to do. He’s the best and he’s the nicest person. Teen Wolf and Badlands were happening at the same time, so we also both really relate to each other in terms of that high-octane pop culture time that he and I were a part of. 

I will say one thing, when that initial casting went out for the “Colors” video, it went to three people. It went to Tyler Posey, Dylan O’Brien, and Avan Jogia. [Note: Halsey and Jogia announced their engagement in September 2024.] So I also have a lot of reasons to thank [Tyler], because I definitely was not ready to meet that man yet. Him saying yes stopped me from potentially missing out on a great thing happening many years later. I always just thought that was so serendipitous and so funny. I don’t think I’ve ever actually told that story before either, I’m glad I’m gonna tell it here. It’s definitely the best place for it and one of the cooler Badlands tidbits, in my opinion.

Thinking about your relationship with the people who inspired this record, who worked on these songs, and even just the places that influenced that world, how has that changed since then?
Badlands and its era are kind of a safe space for me, because it was the only time in my life that I was ever a musician and a regular person at the same time. It took my lifestyle a lot of time to catch up with the success of the record. I’m pretty agoraphobic in L.A., and that’s due to a number of reasons. I’m gonna say this sort of vaguely, but ever since that pre-“Without Me” era, it was like something shifted for me. I was going through a lot in my life and I became a more scared person. Anyone with eyes who saw a sliver of Badlands while it was happening knew that I was fearless to a flaw. And then I got knocked on my ass by the universe and by people that I knew and that I loved. I still don’t really engage with Los Angeles in a very homely or natural way. I’m very anxious about it. I don’t go out very much, I’m home most of the time.

When Avan and I went to Brooklyn together for the first time, I was walking around and I’m like, standing a little taller, and I’m walking faster, and I’m like, “Let’s pop into this store, let’s go to this coffee shop, let’s go here.” And he was like, “What the fuck, who is this? I love her, but what’s going on?” It’s like when I come back here, my body almost snaps back into my last memories of the place. And my last memories are a time where I was more fearless and more social and more self-assured. The places and the people, revisiting them kind of allows me to reinhabit or revisit a version of myself that I do miss quite a bit, I’ll be honest. I think there’s something really nice about that.

You recreated the Badlands album cover during The Great Impersonator rollout, and then some of the songs on that record felt rooted in the reality that Badlands was made in versus the world that you were building in these videos. 
Being on the set and putting on the coat, pulling together all the lore and the paraphernalia of the time, there’s a bit of sadness in it for me as well. You put on the same clothes as 10 years ago and you just realize how small you were. I mean that spiritually. It wasn’t until this past year, just ahead of Great Impersonator, that I really started to internalize and understand the fact that I was essentially still a child when I made that record. There’s no way that I was allowed to go do any of the stuff that I was doing, much less run a business and have employees and familial responsibilities. 

As soon as I made Badlands and it was like, “OK, this is really happening” … everything I made that wasn’t going back into the project was going to support my family. It was a lot of pressure. If someone gave me the option to decide if this is what I want to do, I would say yes every single time. But I wasn’t given the option then. It was just happening to me, and I had to just keep doing it. There was no other option. Even though I’m glad and I love it, it is a bit weird and a lot of pressure for a young person to not have the choice, essentially. I have so much sympathy for myself at that time.

You were also part of this group of women in music who debuted in the early 2010s and were positioned as leaders for their generation. Young people were being told they had all the tools to fix the world that was broken before they had a chance to do anything. And so fans looked at artists like yourself and asked, “Who am I and what am I supposed to be doing?”
That’s another thing, too, is the timing of the record. I was coming of age in the industry just before we entered the Trump era. Everything was informing itself in a way that I wasn’t aware of at the time. The success of Badlands is due to all that, as well as people feeling kind of powerless. My success was personal. It was like, “I feel really bad about myself because I am a teenager and I’m powerless. I’m experiencing pitfalls in my mental health for the first time, which is terrifying to me, and I don’t know how to deal with it. None of the adults are listening and the world is changing around me so fast.” It’s like the people that were rooting for me saw it happen, and it was symbolic in a way. 

A lot of the initial press out the gate was just, like, “The Voice of a Generation.” At the time, I was like, “OK, cool, great, let’s go.” But I look at that now and I’m like, “Oh my God. I don’t know that I want the responsibility right now of being the voice of a generation. I’m still trying to figure out how to take care of myself.” I was experiencing fame for the very first time, and I was so young that I did feel personally responsible for every political tragedy that was happening. I had this sense of responsibility that was like, if I had only used my voice better, or if I’d only organized better, if I had only fundraised better or donated more, or spoke out more, or been braver, then maybe I could have stopped this from happening. Which is insane. 

That shit ate me alive. It really did. I wasn’t online and being political because I thought that it was edgy or because I thought that it was a cool branding thing to do. Nobody was telling me to. If anything, people were begging me to stop. It would make me sick to my stomach every day that something happened to a cause that I was speaking for, and I just felt responsible and I really felt like I was failing all the time because of it. 

When you came back with The Great Impersonator, you revealed that you had been sick and you created this record essentially believing it could have been your last. A few years prior, you were planning on celebrating Badlands for its fifth anniversary, but delayed it because of the pandemic. Did you have a moment of thinking, “I’m not going to get to close this chapter the right way?”
I felt that about everything. It’s all I ruminated on at the time, all the stuff that I wanted to do and might not get the chance to do. Badlands was definitely one of them. I was just like, I would have loved to have made the “Drive” video. I would have loved to have done an anniversary tour. I would have loved to have revisited and opened that time capsule, separate from the concepts and not wanting to break the fourth wall too much and ruin the illusion. It’s been 10 years now. I want to start talking about it and talk about the concepts and the marketing and explaining stuff that I was playing too close to the chest to explain back in that time. 

There’s an argument to be made that Badlands is so special to me because it was my first record, but I actually think that if it had been my third or fifth, or whatever, it still would be special to me. It was such a unique record. It is kind of like lightning in a bottle. When I look back on that, I’m like, I had no business making that record. I had none of the experience or skills or ability. I listen to some of those songs now, and I just can’t believe that I wrote them. I think we go through phases with these things. You find your notebook from when you were 16 at 20 and you’re like, “God, I’m so cringy.” And then you find your notebook from when you were 16 at 25 and you’re like, “I was actually pretty fucking smart and cool and interesting.”

“Gasoline” was a last-minute addition to Badlands and has since become this essential piece of it. How did that song complete this album for you?
I can’t even imagine Badlands without it. I knew what Badlands was conceptually when I was making it. I started Badlands not in the system, and then by the time I wrote “Gasoline,” I was in the system. I was like, “Oh, I have a lot to say about the way that I feel being a part of that system.” Obviously, through the lens of this cyber future dystopia, “Gasoline” really, really works. It was my final pen to paper. I wrote it after I had started dealing with all the red tape of the album. I wrote an album, and then I delivered it, and I was like, “OK, cool, now you’re gonna put it out and everything’s gonna be good.” It was my first experience with the give and take system of the record cycle. Especially at that time — it’s not really like this anymore — it turns into like, “OK, you gotta go do five radio interviews before sound check, and then you have to meet this executive and this radio programmer and these people. And Target wants an extra song, and Walmart wants an extra thing.” And I was just like, “I thought I just had to write the album.”

“Gasoline” is sort of a reflection of that, and I love it. It’s my favorite song to play live. It’s been a mainstay of every set I’ve ever played ever since. The good news is that this lifestyle keeps posing new and more complicated experiences that continue to make “Gasoline” ring more and more true to me. But I think that also, as the culture is evolving and the political landscape is evolving, there’s new kids discovering that song every single day who are like, “This is how I feel about being in the world right now.” And I think there’s something really beautiful and special about that. “With your face all made up, living on a screen” — I didn’t write that with this generation in mind that’s dealing with their entire lives being documented from the time that they’re born and their parents have posted them and every single kid at school is watching their page.

In 2016, you told Rolling Stone about the shattering experience of losing a pregnancy just before going onstage for one of those early career promotional shows prior to Badlands being released. What has it been like re-entering the world of this album with the perspective of motherhood and how much you’ve grown from that moment?
For starters, I realized eight years too late that songs are spells. I wrote Badlands about my regular, real life problems. I just dramatized them and hyperbolized them into the concept. But then once I started touring and promoting Badlands, the songs started coming to life in a really terrifying way. “Castle” meant something new that it didn’t before. “Hold Me Down” was not about what I associate it with now. “Hold Me Down” is one of the songs I was performing at that concert when I miscarried. I remember connecting with those lyrics in a whole different way at the time, which is the idea of this unseen entity forcing you into submission. I didn’t know shit about that separate of the toxicity of my household, and just the general trials of being a fucking teenager and having no control or access in the world. And all of a sudden, an actual entity is forcing me into submission, and the song means something so much different than it did when I wrote it. It certainly made me more cautious about the way that I write. It was like, “Oh God, I’m a power manifester, and I should have known that my whole life.” But I’m starting to see it in a different way. 

It all comes full circle with the Back to Badlands Tour. 
This is what I hope the tour is about. I’m a storyteller and I like to storytell with my sets as well, with my set list. The Back to Badlands Tour really is about everything Badlands is about, but in the context of what I’ve learned now and which of those subjects remain in my life, which ones I’ve grown from, and which ones have changed. There’s a really humbling experience as a musician when you sing a song that you wrote 10 years ago and you realize that it’s still relevant, and you’re like, “I guess I haven’t learned my goddamn lesson.” You’re being forced to relive that all the time. That’s really what this tour is going to be about for me. 

And I think that it’s going to be about that for the audience too, for the bulk of them who engaged with this material at 13, 15, 20, 25, however old they were when they fell in love with Badlands. To go revisit those themes and be like, “What does this mean to me now? What have I grown from? What have I overcome? What’s still oppressing me? How do I relate to these subjects at this age?” Or maybe even hearing songs that didn’t affect them because they were younger, and being like, “Oh, this actually hits me harder now, because I’ve lived so much more life, and I understand what the song is trying to say in a different way.”

Is there anything left in the Badlands chapter that feels unfinished?
I’d love to re-record it someday. I’d love to reimagine the songs in different genres or with new production. I play a lot of the songs differently live. I was so embedded in the live versions of “Gasoline” and “Drive” that when I got into the edit to make the music videos, I was like, “What the fuck is this?” I forgot what the recorded versions of the songs sounded like, because the only time I’m ever hearing them is in the context of when I’m performing them. Going back and having to edit to the record versions of them that I haven’t listened to in years, I was like, “Oh, it’d be really cool to put out the versions that I’ve come to know.” At some point, I think that would be a cool thing to do.

What about the Badlands Hotel you’ve been teasing?
I can’t say that. It’s a very, very cool thing, and it’s been a long time in the making, but I can’t say anything.

You said recently that it has been kind of surreal to watch the perception of Badlands evolve over time. What changed?
The reception to Badlands changing in the way that it did is the best thing that’s ever happened to me, because it made me braver as a writer. When Manic came out, people were like, “Can we go back and talk about Badlands?” I was watching the same publications that shit on that record when it came out posting articles being like, “Let’s talk about how Badlands was ahead of its time. It shaped a generation. It was a formative sound.” My initial gut instinct, I was like, “Fucking really?” 

I’m so glad that I have graduated from evaluating my success or failure or the worth of my work based on everyone’s instantaneous reaction to it, which was a really hard thing to grow and evolve from when your debut album sells 115,000 copies in the first week. I was taught from the very beginning it should always be instant success because the very first time I did anything, it went that way. I came to the conclusion that that’s how it was always going to be, and then when it wasn’t, I was like, “What the fuck is going on?” I don’t have to feed that beast anymore. 

If the only people who ever listen to my music ever again for the rest of forever are the same 115,000 people who loved Badlands, then so be it. I’m really grateful that my first swing at it produced such lifelong fans, and so now, when I get people that are extra, it’s a blessing and it’s a benefit. But in a way, I kind of feel like it only needs to be me and them forever, and I’d still be pretty happy about how I’m doing.