Hadley Talks About Her Struggle With Stardom

Pop Singer Halsey Talks About Horrible Experience With Miscarriage

Halsey’s been on our radar for the last year or so thanks to her collaborations with Justin Bieber and opening for the Weeknd, but we only recently learned she is half black after she was criticized for sharing her status as “biracial, bisexual and bipolar.” We were also really stunned to hear that she’d gotten pregnant and miscarried on tour last year — she explores all these topics and more in a recent interview with Rolling Stone:

She’s gotten hated on for being bisexual but mainly singing about her relationships with men (“I’ve had female relationships, but you could have dated no one and be bisexual”); being biracial (her mom is white, her dad black) but looking like a white girl (“Colorism is really bizarre”); and purportedly using her mental illness as a marketing ploy. She took flak after The New York Times quoted her as calling herself “tri-bi” – a trivializing term that Halsey claims she never used. “The funniest thing is that the biggest battle that I’ve had to overcome in my career was not being bisexual, was not being biracial, was not being bipolar,” she says. “It was everybody thinking that I was exploiting those things.” She recently shaved her head during a photo shoot because she was tired of her hair defining her as a lesbian or not, or a sexual being or not.

Is it just us or does it sound like Halsey cares TOO MUCH about what other people think? We get it that she’s a new artist but why would she care if people think she’s exploiting who she actually is?

Anyway, it turns out the perils of stardom are a lot deeper than people’s opinions. For example, she once felt pressured to perform after having a MISCARRIAGE!

“…last year on tour I got pregnant.” Then, at a breathless pace, she’s describing being in a hotel room in Chicago before Badlands even came out, back when her whole career could have easily been ruined (“What happens? Do I lose my record deal? Do I lose everything? Or do I keep [the pregnancy]? What are the fans going to think? What are the moms going to think? What is the Midwest going to think? What’s fucking everyone going to think?”), and before she can even decide what to do, she’s screaming on a hotel bed, bloody, naked from the waist down, hours before she’s to go onstage. “I’m like, ‘I have to cancel this show!’ And everyone’s kind of like, ‘Well, it’s Vevo LIFT, and it’s 3 million impressions, so …’ No one knew what to do.” Eventually, Halsey sent her assistant to the drugstore to buy adult diapers. She put one on, took two Percocet and went to the venue to do her job. “It’s the angriest performance that I’ve ever done in my life,” she says, her voice breaking. “That was the moment of my life where I thought to myself, ‘I don’t feel like a fucking human being anymore.’ This thing, this music, Halsey, whatever it is that I’m doing, took precedence and priority over every decision that I made regarding this entire situation from the moment I found out until the moment it went wrong. I walked offstage and went into the parking lot and just started throwing up.”

Halsey says she isn’t sure why she had a miscarriage, but it’s easy for her to blame herself. “I beat myself up for it,” she tells me, “because I think that the reason it happened is just the lifestyle I was living. I wasn’t drinking. I wasn’t doing drugs. I was fucking overworked – in the hospital every couple of weeks because I was dehydrated, needing bags of IVs brought to my greenroom. I was anemic, I was fainting. My body just broke the fuck down.” The part that bothers her most is that, as insane as it was to play that concert, no one forced her to do it. “I had a choice,” she says, though she did the thing that made her feel like she didn’t. She looks off toward the fields where children play in the distance. “I want to be a mom more than I want to be a pop star. More than I want to be anything in the world.”

We just hope for her sake she is taking better care of herself now. Prayers up for this one.

WENN