Halsey Offers a Look Behind the Scenes of Her ‘For My Last Trick’ Tour

Never ask Halsey to be just one thing at a time, whether it’s on record or in person. The singer’s current outing, dubbed the “For My Last Trick” Tour, is one of this year’s most impressive pop road shows — a must-see for veteran tour-watchers, even if you don’t think you care about Halsey (although you should), just for its high level of creative ambition and innovation. But ask any two fans what the overriding nature of the show is, and you might get two distinctly different answers.

One might tell you that it’s a highly stylized succession of Broadway-style setpieces, with drastic changes in scenery, costuming and choreography from one production number to the next, and lots of filmed content, in the tradition of the most elaborately theatrical tours by Taylor Swift or Madonna. Another might say that it’s Halsey delivering a straight-up rock ‘n’ roll show, offering highly charged versions of her greatest hits with a smoking band, no dancers at all and hardly anything in the way of unnecessary unadornment. They’d both be right, depending on whether they’re descriving the first half or second half of the show. It’s that drastically bifurcated… and it’s that successful in giving you what you want from Halsey, whether it’s an elaborately designed conceptual show or a back-to-basics concert or, as it turns out, a canny combination of both.

“I think probably my whole career can probably like be summarized as me trying to have it both ways, all the time,” Halsey admits from a stop along the tour route — describing the dichotomies of “wanting to be big, but also be small… and also wanting to be weird but then also connect with large, vast audiences and make stuff that’s relatable and feels universal. Then, I also want to be theatrical and high-production and high-performance, but I also resent the sterility of that and the box of needing everything to go according to plan. So every creative venture that I get, every fresh canvas for me, is a new opportunity for me to kind of be like, ‘OK, cool. How do I get everything this time?’ You know, famous last words. Obviously, the challenge is trying to do that while always keeping it cohesive, and that was the big challenge with this one.”

In other words, as a touring artist, Halsey wants to be the girl with the most cake. If you think that’s a Courtney Love reference, well, it kind of is; Halsey brings just enough feral energy in the second half of these concerts for that allusion to not feel entirely off-base. But really, it’s a reference to another legendary cake-eater: Alice in Wonderland. The first half of these concerts Halsey assuming the role created by Lewis Carroll, seen in a series of interstitial video pieces going down an actual rabbit hole, where she meets a bunny who has the voice of no less a voice-over artist than Bono… yes, that Bono. (Although Halsey mentions that a second figure of note also recorded the magical rabbit’s dialogue, which will be cycled in later on the tour.) From there, the singer proceeds through a series of high-concept costumes and sets that find her sometimes becoming too big or too small — that familiar artistic dilemma, literalized — before some kind of symbolic balance is achieved at the show’s mid-point, allowing Halsey to then put on something that feels more like an elevated club concert than the Broadway-style show we were just seeing.

To get a glimpse behind the curtain as well as down the hole, Variety talked with Halsey and longtime manager Anthony Li and also several crucial collaborators on the “For My Last Trick” Tour, which began in mid-May and runs through early July. “We were very fortunate to be inspired by a lot of people who were working on Broadway or the West End,” says Li, noting how they went after some creatives whose expereince was primarily on the legit stage, not the concert stage.  

Among them is designer Derek McLane, doubly nominated at the Tony Awards this year in the best scenic design category, for his work on Broadway’s “Death Becomes Her” and “Just in Time.” (He says, “My mom texted me and said, “Do you think they could just combine the votes for your two shows into one?’”) Before Halsey and Li came calling, the closest he’d come to something like this was designing the tours for film composer Hans Zimmer, but the Zimmer shows mostly involved big screens, not practical sets.

“This was exciting because Ash is really the creative vision behind her own concerts,” McLane says, “and she loves theater and sees quite a bit of it, including some shows that I’ve done before, so she came to me referencing some of that work. She described herself as a little bit of a Broadway geek, which I thought was charming. … She really wanted to lean into physical scenery, stuff that had texture and its own life to it, things that could be lit as objects.”

Also on board with the team, in charge of all things video, are Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom, who are also the toast of Broadway at present for their innovative work on “Sunset Blvd.” They characterize themselves as both cinematographers and video designers on the tour, overseeing the interstitial pieces that feature Halsey in Alice-in-Wonderland mode but also directing the use of live footage throughout the performance. While the filmed pieces may get the most attention, the video elements of the concerts are about 80% live material executed by the team on hand and 20% stuff that they pre-recorded, by their estimate.

Not everyone collaborating here is from the world of theater. The choreographer who worked out routines for Halsey and the tour’s four female dancers is Janelle Ginestra, whose entrepreneurship includes creating Naughty Girl Fitness. Ginestra has worked with a slew of big-name performers, like Nicki Minaj, J.Lo and Bad Bunny, and Halsey first slipped into her DMs 10 years ago, although this goes beyond anything the two had done together as a singular moment before.

Says Ginestra, “Audience reaction is everything, and what made me really happy watching this at the Hollywood Bowl was how people would start to sing their favorite song, but then just kind of stop” — their jaws dropping not out of disinterest, the choreographer says, but because “they get so locked in in the visual experience that it became less a sing-along and more ‘Watch this, I’m putting on a show and you have no idea what’s coming next.’ The first half is very ‘Let me watch so I can take in everything that’s being fed to me.’ But the second half lets that cathartic thing take over: ‘Oh yeah, this is my song. I’m gonna sing along and rock out and bob my head with her.’ So the show allows both of those feelings to go through you.”

There are four distinct production designs in the first half of the show. First up is a vintage Vegas-style set, with a giant cocktail glass Halsey steps in and out of, accompanied by four dancers in showgirl-type cosutmes. Then there’s a stark transition as Halsey trades in glittery pastels for leather and a down-and-dirty look in a bondage-styled segment. The next look leaves the dungeon behind for a more wistful trip into some witchy woods. Finally, there’s the sweetest design, with Halsey reclining on a floating half-moon as two of the dancers do a romantic pas de deux. Combine these live setpieces with the “Wonderland” motif in the video interstitials and it’s a lot to take in, before the show drops all that whiplash in the back-to-basic second half… at least until the theatricality and the dancers return for the encore.

The show was not conceived to exactly duplicate the themes and looks of Halsey’s latest album, “The Great Impersonator,” although it definitely has much in common with that, inasmuch as there are different layers happening simultaneously, for the fans who care to think it through that much. One of 2024’s best albums, “The Great Impersonator” was full of scorched-earth songs about illness, mortality and devastating breakups — yet it arrived in the guise of a pure pop record, promoted as mostly being about Halsey paying stylistic tribute to her superstar-diva forebears. In other words, it was a bracingly sad and autobiographical record that was kind of impersonating a more fun, less personal record about professional impersonation. (That make sense, right?)

Halsey explains why she came up with a whole new set of themes for the tour— part of which just comes down to restlessness and constant rethinking. “I consider myself a pretty impatient creative,” she says, “so I want to move on to graduated and developed versions of ideas very quickly. You know, for my fourth album, (2021’s) ‘If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power,’ we paired that record with a pseudo-Victorian, feminist body-horror film that was a like a non-period-specific period piece. [The film was shown in Imax theaters.] It was full of gowns and corsets and high headpieces and magic. And then I didn’t tour until a year later, so by the time we took it on the road, we took a little bit more of a Cronenbergian approach to it. As long as the core sentiment remains the same, I like to have fun experimenting with different executions of these things, I guess.

“And with this record,” Halsey continues, “it boiled down to a pretty elementary sentiment, which is really just: Things aren’t always what they seem. And it’s really hard to unchange after you’ve been changed. With this album, going into this tour, I knew I wasn’t doing the ‘Great Impersonator’ Tour, which is why we didn’t call it that. We called it ‘For My Last Trick’ because it couldn’t just be about the last record. It had to be about the whole thing, all of the last 11 years, in some ways, because I felt like I was coming back to touring and back to the stage with so much more perspective and such a changed point of view on everything that I had done for years before that. And Alice came up quite a bit when I was making the album, just as something I was interested in. It’s about this girl who, against her will, ends up in this unfamiliar place where she’s stretched and shrunk and changed and grown and beaten and educated in all of these ways — and then she shows up on the other side of the rabbit hole once again, and she’s expected to return to high society and act like the daydream never happened.

“That, I think, was really poignant for me. I’ve always really related to it,” Halsey notes. “And I don’t think that that’s revolutionary as a musician or a famous person; I think everybody has that sort of ‘once you go down the rabbit hole’ kind of thing. It’s not unique to me. But I definitely felt it a lot more once I had come out on the other side of this health battle that I had been dealing with for a couple years.” (Halsey was diagnosed in 2022 with systemic lupus erythematosus as well as a rare T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder.)

“I did feel a little bit like I wanted everything to go back to normal so badly, and I wanted to go back on tour and have big records and make amazing things and jump back into this life that I felt like I had barely even had the chance to properly enjoy or explore or navigate. But at the same time, I couldn’t go back to being who I was before that happened to me.” So, when it comes to find a way to talk about or at least visualize that abnormal return to normalcy, Halsey thought: Go ask Alice: “It just became a really easy allegory, I think, for expressing that feeling.”

* * *

One matter at hand, in the “Alice in Wonderland” interstitial videos in the show, was who would voice the rabbit. (Don’t worry, there is no animation, or superimposition of moving lips over a bunny’s face, just almost comically simple shots of a live critter with voiceover.)

“I’ve known Bono for a long time and, honestly, just asked him,” Halsey says. “He and I both are in the same franchise together” — they were the two vocal leads in “Sing 2” — “and he’s just such a cool guy and always just down to do fun and interesting things, so I couldn’t picture anybody else, really.” Or, maybe she could. “There’s a couple people involved in (that part of) the show because it is gonna evolve, if you want to keep it fresh. But I really wanted to start with Bono just because I wanted a really mythical voice.

“The cheek that he adds to it also is so special, because there’s a knowingness; when I got his takes back, you could just hear that he deeply understood the metaphor. I have a great take of him, actually, where you can hear my line where I go ‘Ever since I fell down that fucking rabbit hole’ and you can hear him cracking up in the background, because without me even having to say it, he knows I’m talking about the industry…. Also, he’s just like a wizard, isn’t he?” she laughs. “He’s just so believable as a magical entity.”

When it came to conceiving the sets, Halsey says, “I’m so proud that we made the commitment to use these practical set pieces and to reference practical theater production in that section of the show, because it really paid off.” Li makes special note just of the theatrical frame towering over the stage: “The audience’s reaction when the proscenium lights up for the very first time, and you kind of realize you’re about to get this grand spectacle, gets all these oohs and aahs and gasps, and we both were blown away when we saw Derek’s sketch come to life in person.” Adds Halsey, “I don’t have to overexplain to the audience that something theatrical is happening, because the proscenium does it for them. It tells them this is the container within which the show is occurring.”

But before that proscenium even lights up, Halsey does one song alone at the piano, as a solemn prelude — “Darwinism,” one of the highlights from the latest album and easily one of the best things they’ve ever written, even if it’s the farthest thing from a potential hit, as a ballad that somehow explores self-loathing in the context of evolution and the entire expansive history of the universe.

“If you’re a big nerd, you know that Darwin was really into rabbits,” Halsey points out. “It’s a little tie as well, because starting to show with ‘Darwinism’ and then opening with a talking rabbit is just a funny thing to do.”

But there are other reasons to start a concert off with such a dramatic ballad, even if it’s one not everyone in the audience will recognize. “I had really wanted that song to be track one on the album; I was being a little too nerdy about it where I was like, ‘The song is about the origin of man and like the origin of time. I have to start the record with it!’ That didn’t happen, but I got to check that off my list by starting the show with it. It is kind of a weird one to start the show with, a little bit. But it’s almost kind of a disclaimer. Because then when we go next into the fucking fireworks and the ‘Bad at Love’ martini-glass situation, it’s ‘Darwinism’ has been your reassurance that, like, ‘There’s subtext! Don’t take it at face value.’ The person who’s gonna go do a whole ‘Bad at Love’ show wouldn’t start it with ‘Darwinism.’ I guess it’s almost kind of a little like a secret handshake.”

Amzi, the co-cinematographer and video designer, discussed his team’s pleasure in letting concert audiences “not just seeing a person zoomed in on the screen. You are also seeing this amazing martini glass that Derek designed for this kind of Dita Von Teese element of the show, which is when she says, ‘I want to be big.’ So everything’s quite big, and if you notice in that section, she’s winking at the camera and being very presentational in the way that she delivers. And then when she comes back to the rabbit, she says, ‘Oh, that was too big,’ like, you know, ‘What I was doing was too much.’ And so she says, ‘I want to be small.’ And that’s when she goes into the submissive state of being tied to a deck. And then she’s like, ‘Whoa, that’s more submissive than I wanted to be.’ So each section and setpiece feeds a story, and how we layer that with the video.”

Says Ginestra, the choreographer: “When she brought the idea of the show to me, I was very excited, because I really like practical sets because it doesn’t feel extraterrestrial. It’s like, OK, this is human, and how can we emulate a human experience? She was like, ‘I want to show all of these different sides of me… I want everything to be vignettes of what that core emotion is going to entail and dictate. So I want to start with this martini glass, and it’ll be super girly and pop…’ So we started in pop girly land, and then she was like, ‘I want to bring out a fucking checkerboard and be chained to the board and do this whole BDSM section.’ And I said, ‘Ooh, fun. Let me like pull out some inner fantasies and see how I can really dive in and push the limits.’ Anything I presented to her, she was like, ‘Fuck it. Let’s try it.’ I wanted one of the dancers to hold the microphone in her crotch area, emulating this masculinity of her having like a strap-on or something. Nothing was too much for her.”

Was Ginestra surprised at how readily Halsey took to the ideas for a bondage segment? “Not after I saw her ‘Safeword’ video, I wasn’t.” (That was a recent one-off single that is not included in the touring show.) “For the number ‘Control,’ the dancers wrap her up and ride her, and I’ve been wanting to do that concept for years, but I have not had the opportunity to put it on stage. So when she said there’s a BDSM section, I’m like, we could definitely use the concept of tying her up with a charro rope that’s tied to her microphone and make it this total battle where the dancers have control over her, and her being the complete sub in that moment.”

Ginestra notes the progression that happens in the first half: “We go from the martini to the checkerboard with the BDSM to the the witchy world with the vine arch. Then, she has this song called ‘Angel on Fire,’ and it’s about her feeling like she’s missed her time, like she’s not in her prime anymore. The dancers are covering her and she’s fighting them and trying to run up to the fire” — yes, this show has pyro — “and they keep pushing her back. Seeing her being able to commit and fully go into acting mode, to portray that kind of theatrical experience, was really fun.

“And then the last section is a folky section with the light moon that turns to a dark moon.” For that last, most romantic section, Ginestra relays that Halsey “told me, ‘I would love to almost not be the focal point of ‘Panic Attack,’ but would love to kind of narrate a sequence on stage and let the dancers be the main focus.’ And so we decided to just kind of make a love story between two of the girls, and the two girls that do it are so emotive, both in their bodies and their faces. They waltz, they connect and they emote to the nth degree of how it feels to be in a trying relationship that you know was loving, but also makes you feel like you’re having a panic attack. Being able to have that variety and versatility as a choreographer for her was so cool, because usually, an artist has a tone, and she let us layer upon layer upon layer.

“I’ve never worked with an artist that gave that much range in a show. Never. People have range, but to go from those extremes, I’ve never been able to do in one show. So this was a treat.  And imagine how the dancers feel, to have glitter on their hands at the start, and then to come out and be like raw, animalistic, humping each other… and then whip into falling in love and wanting to cry. What a mind spasm and a massive release they must feel. … What I love the most about her is she knows exactly what the fuck she wants, but she also trusts you and your department to know exactly what you want, and she allows the people in their departments to flourish and gives that full trust that allows me to create from such a genuine and non-pressured place, which is very freeing.”

In working for the first time with a touring pop star, set designer McLane had to deal with the limitations of what you can do with a series of quick one-night-stands, although he’s had experience dealing with theatrical productions hitting the road. “Anything that’s big, you have to figure out how it’s gonna piece together and how it can get on and off trucks quickly. I mean, it’s a problem that I have to solve for a lot of Broadway shows that end up touring. You know, I designed the set for ‘Moulin Rouge,’ which, when we did it on Broadway, took about two months to load into the theater. It was a long, long process. And now that it’s on tour, it has to load in in 12 hours. So I’ve been through the process a number of times and I think I’m pretty familiar with what can work…

“I would say a difference, though, is that on a Broadway tour, you can make a lot of things out of soft drops, which are good for touring because they’re easy to pack up and easy to load into the theater,” McLane points out. “But you can’t really do that to the same extent with this, because there are so many outdoor venues where you have to contend with wind. So it’s another layer of challenge.” (At one of the early stops on the tour, in Durant, Oklahoma, the whole production proved too big for the stage, and so Halsey and band did without the sets and basically improvised an entirely different show, giving that audience a unique treat… even if they missed out on martini glasses and checkerboards.)

McLane and Ginestra have a lot less to do with the second half of the show, which proceeds without any further set or costume changes and no dancers, until the encore of the latest album’s title track brings back the theatrical elements and brings everything full circle. “She talked about wanting to start with all these different images,” says McLane, “but she’s aware that people also want that kind of rock ‘n’ roll concert. And I think dramatically it makes sense, that structure, as a build toward a bigger sound.”

There is a sort of intermission — not labeled as such, and the auditorium never goes back — in which we see footage of a depleted Halsey going backstage and passing out at their dressing room table for several minutes, while the audience chants, “Wake up, Halsey!” The singer reemerges as a punkier-looking figure for a bare-boned second set that starts off with another one of the recent album’s best tracks, “Lonely Is the Muse,” kind of a more energetized counterpart to the “Darwinism” that started off Act 1.

Says Halsey, “’Lonely Is the Muse’ is a really important opening to Act 2 because this song is about my relationship with being sort of … objectified is not the right word, but more like turned into like a symbol or a concept. So it’s interesting to play archetype for an hour, and then come back with a song that is really sort of an act of rebellion. It’s also a song that in a way kind of also holds the audience accountable — which my fans all know; it’s not a call-out, but more just like an observation. I think it’s just interesting to come back in Act 2 and say, ‘Hey, so these last 10 years that I’ve spent representing something to you … we just spanned that whole decade in the past hour to come back with a song that talks about how doing that was a really lonely time for me.”

Contrasting the two halves of the show, Halsey says the second half represents “how I even made my career to begin with is. I really toured my ass off for eight years straight, building my fan base in an old-school way, where I’d play a show in a city, do a hundred people, come back six months later, play to 500 people, come back six months later, play to 1500 people, come back six months later, play 5000, so on and so forth — winning hearts and minds by being like, ‘I’m gonna do the best that I can with just myself and my music and what I have up here.’ The back half of the show is a return to form in that way. Not that I ever really diverted from that form, but I think it feels like a point of connection, I think, for me and the audience, when that part happens. Because it’s the most unrehearsed and un-choreographed part, and it’s changing every night. It’s alive in some way.”

If the set designer and choreographer have less to do in Act 2, that’s not so much the case with Amzi and Ransom, the cinematographers. “She’s an incredible actor,” says Ransom, “bringing all of that side of her into the half that is her Broadway show. And the second act, as we are calling it, is her rock show, is a bit more traditional Halsey and a bit more sort of ripping the plaster off, if you like.” And even with the interstitial videos going away at that point, the role of live photography is just as key as the show goes on.

Says Amzi, “Because it fed into the title of the tour, which is ‘For My Last Trick,’ we wanted to make sure that there were trick elements in there. So we’d go out, secretly, covertly, into the audience and film them with super slow-mo cameras. Then we bring back that footage, make sure that it’s slowed down to the right speed and then feed it back into a later moment lighting-wise, so the audience are watching themselves, thinking, ‘Wait, there’s no cameras around me.’ There’s this surreal, slow-motion version of themselves being played out as she’s singing ‘Without You,’ which is, you know, singing about being without her fans. She’s really tried to weave in that story, as well.”

Amzi says they were approached because Halsey and Li saw their work on “Sunset Bvld.” and reached out via email to set up an evening before the night was over. Of their acclaimed work on that show, which involves some kind of cinematography stuntwork of its own, with actors going outside of and back into the theater, “It’s not that we’re not doing it because we can do it, but we’re doing it because it was right for that story.” He thinks that’s true of their Halsey work as well, which is neither just about nor just about putting up giant IMAG screens for the people in the back. “We are working with a group of people who have been touring for years and have a way of doing things, kind of rocking the boat in how we want them to present and maintain the show and remember camera moves and storytelling and all these things that we’re used to doing in theater, but they’re not used to doing in a concert.”

Halsey’s team was well-prepared for this level of integration, with know-how and curiosity coming from the top. “In all the people we’ve worked with,” says Amzi, “I don’t think I’ve ever worked with an artist who literally knows what she’s talking about with every department — about music, about lighting, about video. She was asking what lenses we were using, and what’s the gamma space…  She told us that’s because she didn’t ever want to be the person that was trying to talk about something but didn’t actually know.”

* * *

It might seem obvious in retrospect that Halsey, who has identified with both she and them pronouns, would be the ideal candidate to come up with a show that plays with binary states, not limited to — but most obviously exemplified by — that obvious split down the middle between the two acts of the show.

“In this ‘Moulin Rouge’ Act 1 part, coming off ‘The Great Impersonator’… I guess I had this alter ego in mind of a very glitzy, old-Hollywood performer. The first time I did it, I remember looking out into the audience, and you see these guys in their Nine Inch Nails band tees and these girls in their shit-kicking, fucking Doc Martin boots and their goth makeup. And they’re watching me in this sparkly leotard doing jazz hands, and I can watch them for a second almost being like, ‘Oh, no, what is this concert about to be?’ And as a performer, you never want to lose the audience, ever, even if it’s on purpose. So there’s a part of you for a second that almost wants to get on the microphone and be like, ‘No, no, no, no, no. Just wait. I’m gonna pull a fast one on you. This is all an illusion.’ But I have to just really, really commit to it.

“And then it’s so much more rewarding when we pull that veneer off and then I come back out for the ‘Dog Years’ reveal, which is me chained to the deck. And it’s so cool to watch them buy in even more because I’ve kind of mind-fucked ’em a little bit and subverted their expectations. But it’s a recurrent theme through the entire show that makes each setpiece so special. Just as there are those kids who are like, ‘Oh, I came to see a rock show! Why is she in sparkly gloves?,’ there are also people who are like, ‘Oh, I came to see the big pop hits. Why is she chained to a deck in a leather bikini?’ I feel like there’s so many people at a Halsey show who came to see a different show. And what you get to do is kind of, in a way, give them everything by giving them something completely different that they didn’t know that they wanted or were going to get. And I think because that first set sets the tone for that in such a committed way, I just love it every time.”

For Halsey, sharing the experience of designing and executing the show with some creatives who were working just a little outside their known wheelhouses added up to a collective thrill. Or at least she believes it was that, for them, when they got to see the results in a place like the Hollywood Bowl.

“There was a lot of people involved in this who either came from the theater world or the live installations world, but really, it made it feel like we were all doing something new,” the singer says. “You know, it’s a concert at the end of the day — it’s not revolutionary. But for our experience as the people working on it, I think it invigorated a sense of excitement and a constantly evolving conversation. And it was really exciting for me when a lot of the people who worked on the show got to see it for the first time in front of a live audience of 13,000 or more people because a lot of them are working in places where there are different expectations. There are a lot of rules in theater where the audience has to be really well-behaved — which is good, and I’m pro-that! But for people who have a show that really can’t evolve that much every night and has to follow a strict set of rules, in a smaller space. to drag them out to the middle of a fucking rock show and let them watch 13,000 people lose their minds … as much as all these guys live and die by theater, because it’s such an obviously powerful institution, it gave us all butterflies, a little bit.”

But not nerves. “Funnily enough, despite all of the different variables this time around, I was way more terrified on the last tour,” Halsey says. “I had a nine-month-old baby, and my life was changing in so many different ways… I’ve come into this like a little bit more calm and a little bit more confident, and it would make a lot of sense to say, ‘I’ve been through some real shit. This is just a concert. Everything’s gonna be OK.’”

* * *

How much does she expect her audience to understand what she’s been through, with her serious illness and other travails in recent years, based on what she’s revealed in statements or lyrics, versus, as she just said, having it be “just a concert at the end of the day”?

At the Hollywood Bowl, which she considered her “hometown show,” now that she lives in L.A., she had a moment of pretty full transparency near the end of the concert. “As some of you guys might know, I haven’t had the best time in the past couple of years. It could have been way worse, to be fair. At least they happened, you know?” she blurted, addressing the elephant in the room.

“You do know what I’m talking about, right?” she told the crowd. “I just pictured somebody waltzing in here unsuspectingly, being like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ There’s a special thing about a Halsey concert. A very special thing happens here gay guys who love pop music and then dads and lesbians who love rock music all come together for one night,” she joked. “And then there’s a special third group of people who have no idea what the fuck is going on, but they’re having a good time. And all I want to say is, the last time I played the Hollywood Bowl, I had a guest list full of friends that I do not speak to anymore. And tonight I had a guest list full of doctors, nurses, my son’s teachers, my neighbors, my friends, the people who make make it possible for me to get on stage. I am absolutely nothing without them, and I’m nothing without you.”

Reflecting weeks later on what she does or doesn’t directly convey to a crowd about the severity of the life experiences that led to this tour, Halsey says her level of levity or candor is really up to the moment.

“When I’m on stage, sometimes I’m being innocuous or I’m being vague; sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I’ll just say it like it is; sometimes I make jokes about it; sometimes I’m having a more emotional night and I get really heartfelt about it; sometimes I kind of skim over it. I think that the way I’ve tried to [do the art itself is that if you’re looking for it, it’s there and you can grab it and connect with it, but if you’re not, you can still have a good time and come along for the ride. I don’t think you have to be sick to relate to my music. I don’t think you have to be a mom, or in any way the same as me to relate to enjoy it. But if you are, then there are moments where I’m holding up a little flag and I’m saying, ‘Hey, you and I are the same.’ And do I do that for them, for those people, in those moments? Yeah.

“I guess I didn’t really know what was gonna happen after this record. I had to let the audience decide the direction that it was gonna go, and I was really prepared for any possibility. If everyone was like, ‘OK, let’s all be sad together,’ then I was ready to go and be sad about it. And if everybody instead was like, let’s just, let’s celebrate. And I was, I was ready for that too. I think you have to be nimble as a performer, because your work takes on a new life once it gets in the hands of the people who have it, and then it kind of becomes up to them in a way.”

And where did things end up, on that sadcore vs. celebrative scale? “I don’t think it’s sad. I think I find it’s actually quite… I don’t think stoic is the right word, bu, I think it’s like sort of radical acceptance. I’m enjoying this part of my career where I’ve just put out a project that very much is so separate from the rest of my discography in a way. It’s something I had to say, and I’m gonna see it through and do my due diligence to give it the attention that it deserves, and to weave it into my discography and into my general narrative and my personal history. And then who’s to say where the next one is going is going to go.

“But right now,” she adds, “I’m living in like the silence right after you tell everybody a really big secret, you know?” And having done that, in part, through the lens of a really big show.