You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh, your way.

This episode contains explicit language.

Halsey is an award-winning singer and songwriter from New Jersey. She's been nominated for two Grammys and she sold over a million records.

In August, she released her fourth album, If I Can't Have Love I Want Power, which was produced by the Grammy and Oscar-winning duo Trent Resner and Atticus Ross from Nine Inch Nails.

Halsey wrote one of the songs on the album, you asked for this, with Greg Kirsten, who's won eight Grammys himself, including producer of the year.

In this episode, Halsey tells the story of making this song while pregnant with her son and how that shaped the lyrics and the music.

Go on and be a big girl, your last but not the sound, let's draw my talks online.

I'm Halsey.

When I first started, you asked for this. I was 26 and I was pregnant and I didn't have many peers in the industry who were having kids as young as me.

I was having this full existential crisis of like, what is my life going to be? Do I have to give up everything that I love? Do I have to give up the parts of me that I think make me the best artist that I am?

I was working with Greg Kirsten, who's experienced and seasoned and knows how to get right to the guts of what makes a really good song.

I'm in his home, his kids doing homework at the kitchen table, you know, in the room outside the studio.

And he has like a really wonderful relationship with his wife, he's a great dad and his daughter is riding her scooter around in the front yard and it's like a completely different world.

So it really taps into this duality for me, which is me still as like, you know, someone who's kind of spontaneous and maybe sometimes irresponsible and like a little bit more lawless.

And then the version of me who's like tender and mature and compassionate and wants to hang out with somebody's kids and this kind of flip flop is happening in the midst of me being pregnant trying to figure out, who am I going to be on the other side of this? Which one? Do I have to pick?

So I walked into the studio in Hawaii and I looked at Greg who's a tremendous guitarist like incredible instrumentalist and I was like, I want to make something kind of shoe gazing like my bloody Valentine.

I wanted the song to feel like I was floating in between two spaces, you know, like that feeling when you go to sit down and there's two chairs and like you don't land on either of them, you kind of fall through the middle.

That was the feeling that I was having in this, you know, transitional space in my life. And so Greg, he kind of just started playing guitar.

The first thing I did, which is what I usually do when I start writing music is I started writing a poem and the ambiance of him playing this guitar kind of like put this poem into my head.

I'm barefoot and I've been in the sun and I'm in these like rip jeans that I can't put in because my belly's getting bigger and I'm sitting on the couch and so, you know, the song opens up with, I don't know what you want from me.

I'm sunburned lips and summer feet. I'm tattered like these Levi jeans punch wasted on redundancy.

I was exactly who and how I was in that moment when the first notes of this song kind of came into conception.

...