Halsey Quotes

I think I see a lot of artists struggling to make their first album perfect, and I've been there.

I wrote 'Criminal' in 45 minutes when everyone else went to lunch because I had to have a hit. I can force myself to do the work, but only if someone is right up behind me.

We're putting a lot of pressure on ourselves for this second album and so we want to make it as great as we possibly can.

My second album was written while I was on the road promoting the first record. I tried to take my personal experiences and elevate them to universal experiences, so that I wasn't writing songs about living on a tour bus or being on a TV set for the first time.

Experience is definitely the high road once driven. It actually enhances the songwriting and song sourcing process.

It's funny how a song can start in your mind, and then when it goes through all the filters, it ends up in a totally different spot.

I had to go into a studio and compose and write and press up 12 songs in 14 hours. When you're recording a song from scratch it takes you 14 hours to do just one song.

I wrote 'Channel Orange' in two weeks. The end product wasn't always that gritty, real-life depiction of the real struggle that happened.

There is a lot of pressure to top yourself... to come up with a 'Rumours II,' and that seemed like a trap.

I call it a process of elimination. You're nurturing ideas, and that takes time. What happens is there's so many, what I say, 'great ideas.' What you have to do is try to consolidate them and put them into one song, and then your song becomes eight minutes long.

It's easy for me to write songs but hard for me to write an album; that's been my experience.

Writing a song is work. You have to go deep in order to mine the material and dig it out.

The songs will come as they come, and I'm excited because I haven't gotten to be really creative in a while. I'm excited to get back and do what I do and just write a song.

I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel. I'm just writing songs that I like, and that's where I've always come from.

It doesn't take long to make catchy songs. That's not my problem.

My initial ideas are just a starting place. As a record goes along, it becomes more about making discoveries and getting excited about new songs.

One night, I remember being really sick in bed with chills and a fever when Ann came in all excited and said, 'I have these lyrics! Let me read them to you!' They were the lyrics to 'Crazy on You,' and in my fever haze I said, 'Yeah! Those are really good!'

We travel so much as touring musicians and artists that sometimes, when you hear a great song that you really think could be on your project, you go ahead and record it instead of try to write it.

All day long you write little ideas on the piano and the guitar, but sometimes all you have to do is come in, set up the mic, press record and start the process.

It's hard to be in the limelight and write songs that cater to fans that have expectations of you. We just want to write songs that we love, but all the different people with different ideas coming in make it difficult. We have to ask ourselves if we're writing for the most important people: the fans.

Even when I'm making my own solo records, I'm collaborating with people. It keeps things interesting for me.

I'm always good for starting a bit of a tune and the first verse, but after that I just can never go anywhere. It takes me years, that's why I'm so slow.

I love the satisfaction of living in a world on a Wednesday where a song didn't exist that you're going to create on a Thursday that's going to change somebody's life, possibly, you're creating that from nothing.

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before. I'm still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that's really the thing that I work on when I make records with people.

I think that that spirit, or at least the raucousness of maybe that, is in there. And then yeah, like, along the way, you fine tune it 'cause you're thinking, like, OK, we need to now turn this into a song.