I wear my personality on my sleeve, for sure, and my look is constantly changing because so am I.

I'm open about having bipolar disorder. I'm open about being of mixed race. I'm open about being bisexual, and I have this wantingness to talk about it, and for me, it's about more than being a role model for any specific community.

The environment around you shapes who you are. How you handle an emergency or how you react when someone is rude to you, that's you.

Being bisexual, being bipolar, being biracial - it's been used to define me, but I am desperate to be indefinable.

I'm a human, and I'm multidimensional. If I was the perfect form of anything, I'd be boring. If I was a free spirit all the time, I would be boring; I would lack depth. If I was dark and enigmatic all the time, then I would lack relatability.

It's hard because I think I fall into this in-between space where there's something that's innately feminine about me, and there's also something that's kind of androgynous. I carry myself somewhere in between, and I think my music lends itself to that as well.

My EP, 'Room 93,' was all about isolation - it was based on the idea of being in a hotel room and being totally alone with yourself or that other person.

I end up pleading my case to alternative programmers - you're telling me that my music is too dark for pop, too pop for alternative, and urban radio won't touch it - so we have a record that doesn't fit in. And what is more alternative than that?

Growing up in the suburbs, I used to listen to punk rock, Brand New, Taking Back Sunday. And no one from my high school listened to it.

I'm a fixer, unfortunately. I'm like, 'Oh, I can fix you.' But it's not just guys I'm dating anymore. It's this entire legion of young girls who tell me they need me to maintain any sort of sanity or peace.

My mom is awesome. She's really young. My mom is 40, and she raised me listening to Nirvana and Courtney Love and Coldplay, Gin Blossoms, The Cranberries, and stuff. Like, my early, early memories are of being a little kid running around in floral skirts and Doc Martens when I was, like, three.

I consider myself someone who takes a lot of beauty risks, and I've realized what I liar I am. I change my hair a lot, from blue to blonde to bald, but I'm trying to branch out a little more with makeup.

I had a crazy life for a teenager. I lived in New Jersey, but I'd go to Vermont for three weeks, join a commune, take pictures with the guy I was dating, come back home, and post photos.

I don't want to be 'Halsey: America's Sweetheart,' or 'Halsey: Bad Girl.' If you can sum up my career in a clickbait headline, I've done something wrong.

There are conspiracy theorists who think I was crafted in a boardroom. Because I'm so very relatable and so very topical and so very Tumblr.

I love pop music, but at the same time, I'm seeking to write whatever I'm organically inclined to.

Being a pop-leaning, female artist, you'd think that I'd have my record company breathing down my neck and trying to control everything I'm doing. Actually, they've just kind of let me take the wheel.

In a city, there's more room to be, where in a small town, you have to squish yourself down a little bit. And it's exciting for me to be pursuing a career where I don't have to be small.

I love Quentin Tarantino; I love Harmony Korine, Larry Clarke.

All the musicians I loved growing up were men. I loved Leonard Cohen, Mick Jagger. I loved Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys. Even today, I love Van McCann from Catfish and the Bottlemen and Matt Healy from The 1975.

You can tell if there's magic in something. When you start it, you want to finish it and you want it to be perfect. If you're not inspired, and you're working hard to pull inspiration from somewhere and make a song something it's not, then it's very contrived, and I don't like to write music that's contrived.

I'm used to packing up and leaving, to condensing myself into a digestible version because people don't have much time to get to know me.

You don't know fear until it's 7 A.M. and freezing cold on live television, and you're not sure if Justin Bieber is going to kiss you or not.

I'm not going to present myself one way all the time just because it will make me sell best.

I love Kanye West. I think he's a visionary. He's one of those people for whom I separate his personality from his artistry.

When I was in high school, I was a bad kid and a good student.

I'm 21 years old, and it's kind of uncomfortable for me to talk about, but I'm in the 1 percent as far as my income and tax bracket. But now that I'm here, there's no amount of money you can wave in front of my face that will make me understand depriving people of human rights.

I was always running off to the city, whether it was Philly or New York, going somewhere where there was something more for me.

I cultivated this fan base that I really didn't really understand or appreciate until I put my first headlining tour up for sale. 500- to 1,000-capacity rooms weren't an underplay for me at the time. I'd never done a tour before!

If I am who I am, I'm provocative, candid, and androgynous; there's nothing I can do that will make any fan think, 'I didn't expect that from her.'

I'm learning slowly to not be as much of a control freak. I can't afford to be all the time, but I'm getting better at communicating. Delegating parts of my vision for other people to execute has made it an easier process for knowing what I want, and what people can handle, and what I should probably save for myself.

People are so afraid to talk about real things, but they're experiences that everyone goes through.

I put 'Ghost' online hoping to make a couple hundred bucks, but then the next day, I took meetings with five different record companies.

I feel like, if I'm going to have young, impressionable people listening to my music, then I'm going to respect that.

I love films that show people in a way that's so real it's almost unsettling, and that's what really inspires me because I write about people. I write about people that I know, so I want to portray them and portray myself in a way that is unapologetic.

When you're a teenage girl, a lot of being pretty has to do with your hair.

It's really exciting to see all those people that exist in numbers online translate into tickets and then into faces, handshakes, pictures, stories.

Every time I got to play a show, even if it's already sold out, I'm so scared no one's going to come.

I was doing some YouTube covers, and I had a decently popular blog on Tumblr.

I think escapism is something artists write about pretty frequently - it's something everyone can relate to, the concept of wanting something more, wanting to find solace, wanting to have something better.

The hardest thing about writing my second album is that I had 20 years to write my first album.

I wouldn't trivialize my existence into a hashtag.

'Badlands' is a very tangible record; a lot of the sounds were actual things: they were pots and pans, and they were rocks, and they were voices,and instruments used in a way to create a landscape of sound.

It usually takes me 20 to 90 minutes to write a song because once I start, I don't stop. If I start writing a song, and you try to have a conversation with me, you're a bad person.

Whether it's writing songs, being on stage, being interviewed, meeting fans - I just try to be myself, which is kind of exhausting because it almost feels like it never shuts off.

For me, writing about hotels is like writing about being in a parallel universe. The sense of voyeurism, and the sense of removedness, and there are all these people silently above you and next to you.

I'm a musician with a very unique mental state, I suppose. I'm agoraphobic. I'm scared to leave my house. I haven't been alone in, like, two years. I'm either with my boyfriend or my assistant, my manager or my tour manager. I won't go anywhere by myself; I'm too terrified.

I would love to write a screenplay for 'Badlands' one day. I don't think I could ever have the patience to do it; I don't even have the patience to write songs. I write some of the shortest songs ever because I don't have the patience.

Even if you can't relate to what I'm singing, I hope you can believe in it and see it as something that it is real.

That's one thing the musicians don't remember: you don't choose your demographic - they choose you.