“Without Me” Singer, Halsey, stopped by the sixth annual Capitol Congress, Aug. 7 at Hollywood’s ArcLight Theater for a funny, open, and honest Q&A with author/journalist Lizzy Goodman. During the Q&A they addressed topics such as recording her third album, growing up in the age of social media and her pending quarter-life crisis.
“I’m going to be 25 in two months. I’m a quarter of century old. I didn’t think I was going to be alive that long. I grew up in a world where being 25 [meant] having three kids and being in a sh***y relationship or I was going to be dead because young people with bi-polar disorder who grow up with no resources don’t usually end up thriving at 25.”
Halsey, known for activism, also addressed her partnerships with Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. “Female rage is a tight subject for me right now,” she said. “I’m interested in female everything right now…I went from only wanting to hang out with boys to ‘I love women, they’re awesome.’ I’ve grown out of my internalized misogyny.”
“Nightmare,” Halsey’s current song is a “one-off thing in the amount of rage,” she said, adding that the forthcoming album — of which “Nightmare” is not a part — “has anger, betrayal and confusion, but it’s more inward that I intended it to be.” She intended to write about the world around her, “but I got two songs in and [realized] I only know about me… This album is less dystopian fantasy world and more like ‘this is what I’m thinking right now: ‘the world sucks. F**k.’”