Halsey on how new music from 'The Great Impersonator' sparked an emotional moment with her mom

Halsey checked in with Audacy’s Mike Adam at the Hard Rock Hotel in New York, to chat all about her new single “EGO,” forthcoming album The Great Impersonator, arriving October 25, and more.

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With her 30th birthday coming up, Halsey started the conversation off by reflecting on just how much has happened in the last decade, both personally and professionally.

“I'm excited for this birthday… because it means a lot to me. It's been a hard couple of years and I'm about to turn 30. It's a big, big birthday. It's also, you know, 10 years since I put out my first album, Badlands ." She continued, “so… that decade from being 19 turning 20, putting out my first album, now being 29 turning 30 about to put out my fifth album. It all just feels mystical… feels like a lot of synchronicity in that.”

As for feeling her age, Halsey admitted, “I’ve felt 30 since I was like 15. I’m catching up now."

“Sometimes, there's certain people in this life who are the age they are and then they stay that way… Like my mom, for example, is just perpetually 21. She had me when she was 20, and has just been 21 for as long as I've known her. She's 51 and she is like tatted up, tongue piercing, like super cool girl, but she just gives off the energy of someone who's like 21. I've been 35 since I was born.”

Halsey who outwardly loves Halloween, also shared she has some costume ideas for this year, but didn’t feel like sharing them. Noting, “I’m a big gatekeeper about Halloween,” not wanting to give any ideas away.

“I love Halloween, every couple of years I throw a huge Halloween party in LA, and we do it to benefit My Friend's Place , which is a charity organization and a resource center for unhoused youth in Los Angeles. It’s super awesome, super close to my heart, and I love it,” Halsey expressed. “I prepare for my costume for like months.”

Ultimately deciding to share her idea after all, Halsey revealed the costume idea she wants to do with her son. “I really want to do The Shining , and I want to get him on his little tricycle as Danny, and I want to be Shelley Duvall and I just want to like take these pictures with my creepy little kid on a tricycle and his hair is like the perfect, he's got those long bangs.” Naturally shifting the conversation from Halloween to parenthood, Mike asked Halsey if having a child has changed her relationship with her parents.

“Oh my gosh, I'm actually really glad you asked me this question because there's a lot of this on the album actually,” Halsey answered. “So when I was writing The Great Impersonator , I was going through a lot in my personal life, a lot of those changes were becoming a new mom, and I also, I got really sick. I got the kind of sick that makes you think about your life and look at it in that way,” Halsey reflected. “I started thinking about my childhood, and there's a lot of songs on this album that kind of touch on that, touch on my relationship with my parents.”

Noting that “one in particular” is “just about watching my mom grow older. Like I said, she's perpetually 21 to me, just watching her age… it’s like this cognitive dissonance, like your brain can't compute.”

“In the song, I talk about when I was a kid listening, hearing my dad, like make a snide remark about her or like, you know, me and my dad kind of ganging up on my mom. I wanted his approval so much and I did it at the cost of like kind of ganging up on her. And I say in the song, that alliance didn't save me from her fate. Like, aligning with my dad didn't stop my life from turning out almost exactly like hers. I became a single mom, and I look back on that and I go ‘wow, I should have had more compassion for her,’ and I say in the record, ‘I hope my son realizes it before it's too late,' like I did.”

Sharing about what her mom’s reaction was to hearing the track, Halsey said, “my mom cried like a baby.” Before delving into the specifics of how she played the song for her mom at “the worst time,” after she had stayed up all night taking care of her after getting sick in the studio and going to the hospital. “It was just like this crazy moment where I looked at her and I was like, I'm a mom too. We are more the same right now at this moment in life than we ever have been,” she said of the emotional moment.

With the Badlands anniversary coming up next year, this year Halsey gets to celebrate 10 years of her OG EP, Room 93 . A project she looks at with nothing but love, “I love Room 93,” Halsey expressed, “I loved it so much that I took half the songs and put them on the debut, you know, ‘Hurricane,’ ‘Ghost,’ like I still play ‘Is There Somewhere’ live a lot of the time, it's definitely a fan favorite.”

“You know, it's funny, I love Room 93 so much. I actually reference it in a way… there’s a single on this album called ‘EGO,’ and in the song I say ‘I want to go back to the beginning when it all felt right / a rooftop lower East side I'm singing.’” Sharing how “that story is real,” Halsey continued, “it's about a time where I was at a friend's apartment… on Orchard Street, this little apartment above Hair of the Dog, like on the roof. And I have these demos from my EP on my iPhone and I'm playing them at the table for all my friends… and they're all like, this is sick. And all that mattered to me in that moment was making music that like my friends and my peers and the people I spent every day with would like and would think was cool music.”

“Then obviously comes all these expectations and this pressure and everything about the way I make music changes,” she added. “But Room 93 is kind of like the perfect moment where I was just making something because I felt like it. So I just love it for that.”

Halsey also went on to discuss the eclectic theme of The Great Impersonator, which she describes “as a confessional concept album” that sees the musician explore herself and her musical identity through the lens of different time periods, as if she were an artist during the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s. She shared which of those decades happens to be her favorite, listing off artists of that era she loves and draws inspiration from, and more. To catch it all, check out Halsey’s entire Check In above.

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