Room 93 (Commentary)

"Is There Somewhere"Hey guys. What's up? It's Halsey..um, I'm here to tell you a little bit more about my EP. The first song is "Is There Somewhere" and I actually wrote and recorded this song on Garage Band at first like a couple of months before I signed, um ... and I put it up on Youtube and um, it was like the most amateur thing ever. It was like I had put up this video and the end of it had like a little black slide that said, like, insert title here because I had no idea how to use technology. Basically, "Is There Somewhere" is like a prologue to the EP cause the EP is called "Room 93" and um, it basically just touches on like the human intimacy of hotel rooms and how it's like an alternate universe and "Is There Somewhere" is like a prologue to that. It kinda tells the story of a couple in a hotel room, experiencing, like, a tender moment together and the most notable line is "Is there somewhere you can meet me?" because it's like a frequently exchanged text message between myself and the person this song's about. It was kinda like, "Is there somewhere you can meet me?" and it usually ended up being an hotel room. So that's where "Is There Somewhere" came from and I think it's one of my favorite songs... I've ever written."Ghost""Ghost" was one of the first songs I ever wrote in like, an actual studio environment. I wrote it with my friend Dylan Scott, whose in a band called "Young Rising Sons." I just started The Halsey project, I had no idea what I was doing and I was writing like, acoustic songs before this. We sat down and we started like, messing with sounds and we wanted like these, "church-y, scary, shimmery sounds" -- the words I used. Most people when you're like, "Hey, I want shimmery sounds," are like, "What?" but he knew right away. So we came up with "Ghost" and it ended up just being like my signature. It was like how I knew what the Halsey project was gonna sound like. It was our single and, you know, SiriusXM started playing it which was awesome. A lot of people give me a lot of weird looks for it because it's like two minutes and thirty seconds long, it starts with the bridge, doesn't make any sense, there's like a rap, white girl part in the beginning in it, but we moved forward with it because we had faith in it, and I'm really glad we did ... and it's the fan favorite."Hurricane""Hurricane," mmm...is like the trippy song, I love this song. When I play this live, I, like, close my eyes and zone out super hard and kinda like forget that I'm on stage cause it's so dreamy. It's about a girl that kinda like falls for this guy who supposedly gonna make things hard on her and is gonna take advantage of her, but she kinda ends up turning it around in the end and she says: "I'm a wanderess/I'm a one night stand/Don't belong to no city/Don't belong to no man." So it's kinda like her response to him, saying like you know, "You can think you got me all you want, but I don't belong to anyone but me." And you know, I talk about Brooklyn, Brooklyn's my place. That's where Halsey comes from. It's definitely a very special song to me and I love it. Yeah."Empty Gold"Man, we must've sent "Empty Gold" to get additional production on it like eight times because it just has this HUGE cinematic feeling to it. Just like, this big action scene, like ... things are gonna come to a resolve, walking to the end of the sunset, credits-rolling kind of feeling, and we really wanted someone who was gonna nail that 'cause you know I tell you guys all the time that I want my music to have a cinematic quality and a very visual aspect. "Empty Gold" is like one of those songs that really just built up for me and had like a lot of swa-gger. Swagger? Oh yeah, swagger, I'll use that one. It was also kind of like, hikening and there's like a build up and it's like really exciting. So when we finally got this version back, we were all ecstatic about it because it gives you like this reckless, breathless feeling, but there's also a sense of triumph in it, and I think that was really important to us in putting this song out."Trouble - Stripped"So we had a couple of versions of "Trouble" that were really big- and vindicated-sounding, but we kind of decided to just put this demo version on the EP instead because we felt like it had a lot more feeling. I think "Trouble" is one of the most emotional pre-chorus, choruses, I ever written in my life; "Let's cause a little trouble/Oh, you make me feel so weak/I bet you kiss your knuckles/Right before they touch my cheek." And that's a metaphor in itself, and it means that someone who takes pleasure and takes some, like, sadistic joy in making you feel bad and hurting you in a mental way. And I kinda took that and put it in physical words so you could really understand how sadistic and twisted it is to be in a relationship where someone enjoys hurting you and that's that line: "I bet you kiss your knuckles before you touch my cheek." It's this kinda like pompous, there's like a smirk; there's a smugness in this sense of like, this person is proud of what they're doing to you. But then the chorus is very vindicated and it says you know, "I've got my mind made up this time." You know it's about having control and wanting to leave and that's the thing that I sing about a lot. There's a lot of honesty in what I sing, but I also make sure that I never play the victim, and that my protagonist always has the option and the intention to leave and take care of themselves, and that's kinda what "Trouble" is to me.