In November 2014, Someone on Tumblr sent 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: 20-year-old Halsey. She released her first EP Room 93 a month earlier and was more than ready for the challenge. “Close your eyes. Cover your ears. Hold your breath,” she replied, delving into darker descriptions with each sentence. “Fall in love with someone. Give them every inch of your body. Give them every beat of your heart. And now imagine that they are gone. Then she issued an assignment of her own: “And after doing all this, lose attachment to your senses and disappear into nothingness. What color do you see?
There were more challenges like this, all centered on reflections 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 request. Tumblr was like her personal open mic and she loved the pageantry of it all. His ruminations often started in his mind, perhaps made their way into his journal, then ended up on his blog, and eventually took shape as genre-blending concept songs. After more than a decade, Halsey is still honing her craft as a great pop illusionist.
Each of her albums showed different versions of herself, like reflections from a funhouse mirror – but none with the level of self-interrogation of her next album, The Great Imitatorreleased on October 25th. “Come closer, ladies and gentlemen! Behold the wonder of a century! Witness the incredible ability of a woman who can become anyone, anything her heart desires,” reads a message on the album cover. “She transforms before your eyes, her voice and face a reflection of her deepest dreams and darkest fears.” And even now, Tumblr serves as an essential refuge for her. It’s the only social media platform she’s never had to fake it on.
In June, Halsey previewed “The End,” the first offering from The Great Imitatorrevealing news of health struggles she kept secret for two years. In 2022, Halsey was diagnosed with lupus SLE and a rare T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder. As she quietly underwent treatment, she turned to a familiar medium: a new blog on Tumblr called Tiredandlonelymuse, which she launched in December 2022 as a whiteboard blank for your reflections.
A month later, Halsey revealed more about The Great Imitator with the rock single “Lonely Is the Muse”. It was the last entry in his catalog that went from poem to blog post to song. “That’s how I originally wrote it… I posted a snippet of it on Tumblr a while ago, but here’s the initial piece in its entirety,” the singer wrote below the full source poem.
On Tumblr, Halsey fills her blog with art and writing—both her own and that of film directors, photographers, and anonymous Tumblr users—without the distortion of pop stardom. “It’s going to be hard to decide which texts to post here and which to keep for the records,” she shared when starting her new account. “Lately I have been writing constantly, from morning to night. Not for any reason. Just a compulsion.
Se7enteenblack was deactivated in August 2015, just weeks before Halsey released her debut album Badlands. She revived it later with a password-protected wall, but then it disappeared again – sort of. The problem with Tumblr is that its content doesn’t always disappear when the blog that first shared it disappears. These posts end up scattered across the site, accessible only through the accounts that reblogged them. The fewer notes – likes, reblogs and replies – on a post, the harder it is to track it later. Everything that remains of Se7enteenblack is now marked as posted by Se7enteenblack-deactivated20150. There is no single place to see all of the account’s posts in one place, leaving snippets of Halsey’s writing frozen in time, out of place, and out of context.
Perhaps the most crucial artifact of that early online era is the poem that eventually became the Drylands single “Colors”. “You were red. You liked me because I was blue. You touched me and suddenly I was a lilac sky and you decided purple wasn’t for you,” Halsey shared via Se7enteenblack in August 2014. It’s essentially 2014. Today, that post has over 888,000 notes. The song wouldn’t be released until the following year, when the rising pop star would come under fire for plagiarizing lyrics from a popular Tumblr post. Not everyone made the connection; Halsey was being accused of, essentially, impersonating herself. When she looks back on her first posts now, sometimes it seems that way.
“Very curious to see what I wrote here (when I was a teenager) resurfacing ten years later… Have you ever read something you wrote when you were younger and felt like it belonged to a stranger?” Halsey wrote in one of her first posts as Tiredandlonelymuse. “I could shudder and cringe as I read it and judge the work of a different version of myself based on the standards I hold THIS version of myself to. But I think I’ll choose not to and instead choose to praise my younger self for being brave enough to try. Ultimately, it was this journey that brought me here, right? There’s a rare sense of acceptance in his ideology regarding Tumblr, at a time when artists have increasingly complicated relationships with their digital footprint.
Just like her fellow pop stars, Halsey has participated in the popular practice of destroying her entire Instagram network in anticipation of a new album. Dua Lipa, for example, cleaned up her profile last October, before Radical Optimismjust like Taylor Swift did before releasing Reputation. It’s become a routine way to signal that change is coming – a new record, a new look, a move away from the past. But Tumblr—where there are no restrictive character limits and no public follower count—feels like less of a spectacle than something like Instagram, or even X (formerly Twitter).
Plus, no one is paying much attention to Halsey there. Most of his recent posts barely reach 3,000 notes. “I came back to Tumblr when this all happened, because I think something special happens here,” the singer shared on Tiredandlonelymuse in June 2024. “This is the quiet space between stark observation and lethargic loneliness. It is shared loneliness. The platform gave me everything once, so many years ago. It felt right to come back at my weakest.” It’s not like she doesn’t have an artist profile on the site. She once shared some posts under the name iamhalseymusic; but the blog has been inactive for seven years, abandoned in the middle of Desperate Source Realm was.
With Every Album Since – 2020 Manic and 2021 If I can’t have love, I want power – Halsey performed microscopic examinations of the blurred lines between Halsey and Ashley, the person who sings the songs and who posts early versions of them online. Her artistic profile was always just about the former, even when she tried to open up there. Two of the four remaining blog posts are long written entries filled with cryptic metaphors. The comments below them either dissected about who they could be or ignored the content entirely in favor of begging for updates on tour dates. It wasn’t so easy for Halsey to be someone else there.
On the fourth The Great Imitator single, “Ego,” she shares her feelings directly. “I’m doing a lot worse than I admit,” Halsey sings before returning to 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 myself.” For years, Tumblr has been a haven for young people who resonate with this same sentiment. There is an element of world-building involved in curating a blog. It’s especially helpful for those who want to make sense of their complicated emotions or who want their life to be more like the art and words they share and pass along.
Halsey accesses a version of this escapism when creating her albums. So, it’s time to deliver the music to the public. Your reflections become products to be shared and sold. Promotional materials, pre-order links, and merchandise launches are shared on Instagram, TikTok, and X. But on Tumblr, Halsey rarely has to make that change. “It was here that I was able to tell little fragmented truths about what I was going through, in my own baroque way,” she wrote on Tiredandlonelymuse. “Thank you for keeping my secret until I was ready.” For once, the great imitator doesn’t have to become someone else.
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