Halsey's electrifying If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is up for Best Alternative Music Album at the 2022 Grammys, and the singer recently spoke to NME about how the rock-leaning record came to be, and how scary it was to approach Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross about producing it.

Halsey admitted that NIN's discography "informed and educated" most of their musical taste, so getting up the courage to ask them to collaborate was "the scariest moment of my life." She planned to pen a letter describing the project to them.

“First of all, I thought I was writing a letter to Santa being like, ‘I’ve been a very good girl’,” Halsey quipped. “I was just really honest and said I was a huge fan and I’ve been plagiarizing you guys for years – badly – and I’m not arrogant enough to believe that I have anything new to offer you, but this album is about pregnancy, gender identity, body horror. The most important thing to me is that this album has tension – it needs to be visceral, or I’m doing a disservice to the message.”

Of course, Reznor and Ross said yes, and when they began working together Halsey began to see they weren't so different from each other after all.

“When we started to unravel a little bit, we saw that underneath all of us are just creatives who just really want to make s**t that their friends think is cool," they said. "At the end of the day, if you take away their Oscars and accolades, all of us are just sitting behind our laptops being like,‘God, I hope they like this’ when you press send. That was really, really cool for me.”

The Fred Show

About The Fred Show