Halsey Compares Asking Trent Reznor To Collaborate To Writing A Letter To Santa

Halsey teamed up with Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to make If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, one of the year’s best pop albums (or at least, album by an often-pop-leaning artist). They have spoken on multiple occasions about how thrilled they are to have worked with the duo, and in a new interview, they revealed that first reaching out to them felt like writing a letter to Santa.

In a new NME feature, Halsey said, “First of all, I thought I was writing a letter to Santa being like, ‘I’ve been a very good girl.’ 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.”

They then compared the experience of asking Reznor and Ross to collaborate like trying to get into famously exclusive Berlin nightclub Berghain: “I’ve been to Berlin like 15 times and still won’t go to Berghain because I’m scared they’re gonna turn me away at the door. If they say no to me, I’m literally never gonna recover, so I just don’t even wanna go. That’s kind of what this felt like — waiting outside Berghain being like, ‘Are they gonna think I’m cool enough?’”

Meanwhile, Reznor recently noted that he was also intimated by the idea of the collaboration, saying, “To come along and work with Halsey, I think initially, we were intimidated. ‘Is it a pop star, and does that mean there are big businesses affiliated with it and it has to feel a certain way?’ We don’t want to f*ck that up, and we’re not out to troll. We were envisioning, to go to [the] worst-case scenario, ‘At some point, someone’s going to talk sense into Halsey that this could be career-sabotaging because it’s not going to be a TikTok track.’”