The album isn’t a commentary on mental health - the reason I called it ‘Manic’ is because I wrote it manic. Which I’ve never really done before - usually I’m too distracted or too impulsive to wrangle myself into a room and do something productive. It was my first time ‘off’ in a while, and usually I vent a lot of that [energy] into the chaos of my lifestyle and the chaos of my schedule; it brings me comfort because it gives me a way to exhaust that energy. Having time off - even though I was out promoting ‘Without Me’, which is pretty demanding, but not on tour - I bought a house in LA and built a studio, and surrounded myself with a grand piano, guitars, mandolins, violins, all this accessibility, so that when that behaviour and state of mind came I had something to do with it. Sometimes I’m unable to harness it, but this time I was in the perfect position to do that. It had been two years since I put out an album and I felt like the public narrative about me was built around me and other people - people I’d dated or people I’d collaborated with. I had very little narrative, zeitgeist presence on my own, because it’d been so long since I’d spoken singularly. I thought it was time to do this sort of re-introduction to me. When I first started making music I was this open book because I was so naive. I would tell anyone everything about me, but the problem was no one was really listening, no one fucking cared; I didn’t have an audience. I was giving all this shit away to nobody. And by the time people started paying attention I was already jaded and scared, and really wanted to protect myself and not give things away for fear they’d be changed or abandoned. So I wanted to give everyone a little crash course in me, that isn’t so controlled or polished or, you know, commercialised. When I first started making music I didn’t really intend to be a pop star. I wanted to play indie showcases and do fucking Reading and Leeds for the rest of my life. And I will play Reading and Leeds for the rest of my life - that’s something really cool about how my career has defined itself: I have the luxury of being able to exist in two spaces, which has been an exercise in allowing myself to adapt and evolve. I didn’t intend to be this kind of artist, but then I have this year where I’m the most played artist on the radio in the US; there are millions more people engaging with my content, but they're judging me or forming an opinion on me in like three minutes, on the radio. And this started happening two years after I released my last album, which was a concept album, so I thought, ‘Okay, I’m a different kind of artist now. I need to tell people about me.
HALSEY for Clash Magazine.
