How Halsey Is Keeping the Spirit of Tumblr Alive

In November 2014, someone on Tumblr submitted an anonymous question to the popular blog Se7enteenblack. “Describe the color black without using the word,” the user wrote, presenting more of a test than a query.

The question went to the person behind the blog: a 20-year-old Halsey. She had released her debut EP Room 93 one month prior and was more than up for the challenge. “Close your eyes. Plug your ears. Hold your breath,” she responded, plunging into darker descriptions with each sentence. “Fall in love with somebody. Give them every single inch of your body. Give them every beat of your heart. And now imagine them gone.” Then she issued an assignment of her own: “And after you’ve done all this, lose the attachment to your senses and fade into nothingness. What color do you see?”

There were more challenges like this, all centered around musings on love, self-perception, and art. Write a paragraph without using the letter E. Describe love using the five senses. Advise a stranger on how to love their body. Each time, Halsey contorted her words to fit the prompt. Tumblr was like her personal open mic and she loved the pageantry of it all. Her ruminations would often start in her mind, maybe make it to her diary, then end up on her blog, and eventually take shape as conceptual, genre-mixing songs. After more than a decade, Halsey is still sharpening her craft as a great pop illusionist. 

Each of her albums have shown different versions of herself like reflections from a funhouse mirror — but none with the level of self-interrogation as her upcoming record, The Great Impersonator, out Oct. 25. “Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! Behold the marvel of a century! Witness the uncanny ability of a woman who can become anyone, anything your heart desires,” a message on the album cover reads. “She transforms before your very eyes, her voice and visage a reflection of your deepest dreams and darkest fears.” And even now, Tumblr functions as an essential haven for her. It’s the one social media platform that she has never had to pretend on.
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In June, Halsey previewed “The End,” the first offering from The Great Impersonator, revealing news of the health struggles that she kept secret for two years. In 2022, Halsey was diagnosed with Lupus SLE and a rare T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder. While quietly undergoing treatment, she turned to a familiar outlet: a new Tumblr blog called Tiredandlonelymuse, which she launched in December 2022 as a clean slate for her musings.

A month later, Halsey revealed more of The Great Impersonator with the blistering rock single “Lonely Is the Muse.” It marked the latest entry in her catalog to have gone from poem, to blog post, to song. “This is how I originally wrote it … I posted a fragment of this on Tumblr a while back, but here’s the initial piece in its entirety,” the singer wrote beneath the complete origin poem.

On Tumblr, Halsey fills her blog with art and writing — both her own and that of film directors, photographers, and nameless Tumblr users — without the distortion of pop stardom. “Gonna be a tough thing deciding which writing to post here and which to save for the records,” she shared when she started her new account. “Lately I’ve been writing constantly from morning to night. Not for any reason. Just a compulsion.”

Se7enteenblack was deactivated in August 2015, just a few weeks before Halsey released her debut album Badlands. She revived it later with a password-protected wall, but then it was gone again — kind of. The thing about Tumblr is that the content on it doesn’t always disappear when the blog that first shared it does. Those posts just end up scattered across the website, accessible only through whichever accounts reblogged them. The fewer notes — likes, reblogs, and replies — on a post, the harder it is to track down later. Everything that remains from Se7enteenblack is now marked as being posted by Se7enteenblack-deactivated20150. There’s no one place to see all of the account’s posts in one place, leaving fragments of Halsey’s writing frozen in time, out of place and out of context. 
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Perhaps the most crucial artifact of that early online era is the poem that eventually turned into the Badlands single “Colors.” “You were red. You liked me cause I was blue. You touched me and suddenly I was a lilac sky and you decided purple just wasn’t for you,” Halsey shared via Se7enteenblack in August 2014. It is quintessentially 2014. Today, that post has more than 888,000 notes. The song wouldn’t be released until the following year, at which point the rising pop star would be called out for plagiarizing its lyrics from a popular Tumblr post. Not everyone made the connection; Halsey was being accused, essentially, of impersonating herself. When she looks back on her early posts now, it sometimes feels as though she was. 

“Very curious seeing writing I did on here (when I was a teenager) having such a resurgence ten years later … Do you ever read something you wrote when you were younger and feel like it belongs to a stranger?” Halsey wrote in one of her earliest posts as Tiredandlonelymuse. “I could shudder and shrink when I read it, and judge the work of a different version of me based on the standards to which I hold THIS version of me. But I think I will choose not to, and instead choose to commend my younger self for being brave enough to try. Ultimately that journey is what got me here, no?” There’s a rare sense of acceptance in her ideology towards Tumblr at a time when artists have increasingly complicated relationships with their digital footprint.

Like her fellow pop stars, Halsey has participated in the popular practice of wiping out her entire Instagram grid in anticipation of a new album. Dua Lipa, for example, cleared her profile last October ahead of Radical Optimism, just as Taylor Swift did before releasing Reputation. It’s become a routine way of signaling that a shift is coming — a new record, a fresh look, a departure from the past. But Tumblr — where there are no restrictive character limits and no public follower counts — feels like less of a spectacle than something like Instagram, or even X (formerly Twitter). 

Plus, no one is really paying all that much attention to Halsey there. Most of her recent posts barely crack 3,000 notes. “I came back to Tumblr when it all went down, because I think something special happens here,” the singer shared on Tiredandlonelymuse in June 2024. “This is the quiet space in between screaming observation and lethargic loneliness. It’s shared solitude. The platform gave me everything once upon a time, so many years ago. It felt right to return in my weakest moment.” It’s not like she doesn’t have an artist profile on the site. She once shared a few posts under the handle iamhalseymusic; but the blog has been dormant for seven years, deserted in the middle of the Hopeless Fountain Kingdom era. 

With each album since then — 2020’s Manic and 2021’s If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power — Halsey has performed microscopic examinations of the blurring lines between Halsey and Ashley, the person singing the songs and the one publishing early versions of them online. Her artist profile has really only ever been about the former, even when she did try to open up there. Two of the four remaining posts on the blog are lengthy written entries filled with cryptic metaphors. The comments beneath them dissected who they might be about, or ignored the content entirely in favor of begging for updates on tour dates. It wasn’t as easy for Halsey to be someone else there.
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On the fourth The Great Impersonator single, “Ego,” she shares her feelings directly. “I’m doing way worse than I’m admitting,” Halsey sings before diving back into a chorus that confesses: “I’m all grown up but somehow lately/I’m acting like a fucking baby/I’m really not as happy as I seem … I’m really not that happy being me.” For years, Tumblr has been a haven for young people who resonate with that same sentiment. There’s an element of world building involved in curating a blog. It’s especially helpful for those hoping to make sense of their complicated emotions, or yearning for their life to look more like the art and words that they share and repost. 

Halsey accesses a version of that escapism while creating her albums. Then, it’s time to hand the music over to the public. Her musings become products to be shared and sold. Promotional materials, pre-order links, and merchandise drops are shared across Instagram, TikTok, and X. But over on Tumblr, Halsey rarely has to make that switch. “It was here that I could tell small fragmented truths about what I was going through, in my own baroque way,” she wrote on Tiredandlonelymuse. “Thanks for keeping my secret until I was ready.” For once, the great impersonator doesn’t have to become anyone else.