Halsey: A Rebel At Peace

She is pop’s most outspoken young hitmaker. Now she’s coming to terms with the person behind the persona.

- Alex Morris

THIS MAY COME as a surprise to no one, but Halsey is pretty good with a knife. Today she is wielding it against a cucumber, which would seem like a joke or a meme — given her man-eater rep in the popstar pantheon — were it not for the bowls of lettuce idling nearby. “I’m kind of on autopilot,” she says over her shoulder, blade flashing. A few days back, she’d thrown friends an Easter feast of “baked ziti, rosemary rack of lamb, garlic Parmesan chicken, angel-hair pasta, meatballs, a fillet, mashed potatoes, bacon-wrapped asparagus, green beans, and roasted potatoes,” she says. And this being L.A., “It kind of stressed me the fuck out because I was like, ‘Of the four trays of ziti I’m cooking, which one’s vegan? Which one’s gluten-free?’ ”

Today, she’s making a spicy rigatoni, a dish in which she takes much pride. “Have you ever been to Carbone?” she asks, referencing a New York establishment famed for its version, with which everyone is obsessed because they haven’t yet tasted Halsey’s. “With all due respect to the chef — because they’re so nice to me there — every time I eat their spicy rigatoni, I’m like, ‘I can make this way better.’ ” She decisively plops some cucumber into the bowls.

Her house is lovely: an unpretentious and airy midcentury gem perched on the sloping side of one of L.A.’s affluent hills and designed by the same architecture firm that built the tower of Capitol Records, her current label. She has another house, one that’s more “like a bachelorette pad with a crazy bar that’s themed like the Playboy mansion,” but she moved here about a month ago to work on her third album — a studio is currently being constructed out back — and the house has grown on her in a way she hadn’t expected.