The Pop Star Next Door

Don’t let the wild backstory, romantic rebellions, and soulful anger fool you. Really, Halsey is a 24-year-old from New Jersey named Ashley Frangipane. And she has feelings too.

- Meaghan Garvey

I’m not sure who to expect.

During my cab ride through Los Angeles’s winding side streets, two songs come on the radio that sound like they have nothing in common: “Eastside,” an electro-pop smash about puppy love, and “Nightmare,” an alt-rock thrasher about punching mirrors and tasting blood. They both belong to one of the biggest pop stars on the planet. And I’m on my way to her house.

Well, one of her houses. (She has two places in L.A. because, what the hell, she’s one of the biggest pop stars on the planet.) The driveway gate skates open and here’s Halsey—Oasis tee, baggy sweats, bare feet—curled over an ashtray in the backyard. Where the Halsey of Google Images is an endless mood board of raver wigs and shaved heads, the Halsey of right now has her dark-brown bob pulled back casually à la Rosie the Riveter, traces of glitter from her Cosmo cover shoot smudged around her eyes.

Halsey swears her fans think of her as a friend from camp, which is kind of absurd coming from someone with more than 15 million Instagram followers, two Grammy noms, and a handful of hits that have nabbed top spots on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. But after 10 minutes of chain-smoking together (yes, she tweeted last year that she’d quit her decade-old habit; also yes, she’s a human being and quitting things is hard) and comparing our questionable tattoos, I nearly forget I’m not here to just shoot the shit in a cool mid-century bachelorette pad with, um, a girl I know from camp.