Kayla does some ballasting work on the basement we run the Singles Jukebox out of…
Jeffrey Brister: As a millennial whose first shared musical experience with the woman who would become my wife was listening to “Lithium” at midnight on a chilly Thursday in January 2007—this ain’t it. But what it is is a slab of deliciously slow and deliberate rock: a rolling wall of cresting and crashing guitars, with a hot-and-cold Halsey performance that slithers around the edges before landing squarely in the middle of a maelstrom, taking real swings with early-2000s post-hardcore screams. As for the lyrics, historically, they’ve never been the draw for me, but this one did grow. At first, they struck me as comically melodramatic and insecure, which, as a jaded 38-year-old, seemed like the easiest read (to be fair, “I’ve earned platinum airline status” didn’t make it hard). But then I kept listening. And listening. Because the music is so exquisite: gorgeous, yearning, and aggressive in perfect measure. In late summer and early fall, as I recovered from COVID and dropped a medication that wasn’t serving me, I still felt a wall between me and the song—but something was starting to shift. By October, as I adjusted to new meds and began reconnecting with myself, I tried to be ironic about it. After all, platinum airline status is still objectively funny. But in November, as I cracked myself open creatively and started accessing parts of myself I’d ignored for years, I finally got it. It reminded me of people who made me feel that way—an experience I’d also had with wonderful-but-underwritten “You Should Be Sad“: another Halsey song born from darkness but refusing to let it define you (“Lonely”, though, is overwritten and overwrought (complimentary)) . Pain and insecurity exist everywhere, twisting us into shapes that feel isolating and threaten to cut us off from the world. But the longer and deeper you look, it becomes something more, if not ordinary, at least bearable. Owning them and making them yours is how you break their hold over you. I don’t hand out gold stars for effort, but I can recognize when shit comes from a real place.
[10]
Alfred Soto: Sounding like a crisper Sky Ferreira with access to a budget, Halsey chants self-help bromides with the assurance of a woman who has dwelt in the hinterlands and would happily draw you a map.
[7]
Jonathan Bradley: Building music from AIM away messages: Halsey’s The Great Impersonator is a grandiose work of self-pity that knows well how self-pity is nothing without grandeur. What use is a misery in which one cannot wallow? “Lonely is the Muse” is, according to its author, the album’s Evanescence track, and while its chorus storms like Amy Lee, the arrangement of dulled and stubborn down-strumming and soft-loud dynamics positions it decidedly in the alternative era rather than in its aftermath. A flange colors the riffing: this song moves slow like river water and is stony like a riverbed. As with Brand New’s Science Fiction, this is a 1990s throwback in sound because it’s also a 1990s throwback in theme; we might more kindly name self-pity — its angst — as introspection, and Halsey turns away from the world on “Lonely is the Muse” to turn away from themself. Their preoccupations are those of fame and celebrity, but, meaningfully, they’re not only that: is Halsey cool or liked, and does it matter if those are sometimes the same thing? Are they successful or just rich, and where lies the distinction? Is it possible to disassociate from yourself so thoroughly that teleology can supplant meaning in your mind? “I’m just an apparatus,” they wail. “I was built from special pieces that I learned how to unscrew.” Is making oneself into an object clever? Can an object — a muse — ever exist for only itself? What will everybody think of these messages I’ve left behind while I’m afk?
[8]
Taylor Alatorre: The Great Impersonator is 66 minutes of Halsey fishing for compliments, and that isn’t a bad thing. The album’s conceit, somewhat like Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville concept filtered through the lens of “Weird” Al-style parodies, contains an implicit invitation: “Here is my pantheon of musical heroes; feel free to enshrine me into yours… or not.” Of course, it is rarely so simple a transaction as that, and “Lonely Is the Muse” amplifies the self-pitying side of fame by taking after that singular totem of Millennial melodrama, Evanescence. Halsey’s love for the band — and not just Amy Lee — is evident in the restrained heaviness and meticulously midtempo pacing of the song, ensuring that you will know every word of the chorus after one listen. I don’t know if the Jesus pose works because they’re channeling a quasi-Christian rock band, or because it’s a consciously overblown gesture in a song and album where such gestures are life-and-death matters, but merits are deserved for that bit of needle-threading alone. Nothing is new about Halsey’s agonizing over being forgotten or misused, except maybe the lengths they’re willing to go to re-re-emphasize that there’s nothing new about it. Call it false modesty if you like; they seem to want you to.
[8]
Katherine St. Asaph: Apparently we learned literally not a fucking thing when Chappell Roan — or Lucy Dacus, or Allison Crutchfield, or Sidney Gish, or Maq McDonald — talked about how alienating and gross it is when people tell famous musicians to shut up and accept all the heavy parasocial shit they get. I felt like I was losing my mind when, only a few months after seemingly every music publication in the world applauded Roan for saying “I don’t care that this crazy type of behavior comes along with the job, that doesn’t make it OK,” I saw and heard those exact words echoed in various Halsey reviews that said, nearly verbatim, that actually that crazy type of behavior does come along with the job and it is OK. “Lonely Is the Muse” in particular has been the target of so much disingenuous tabloid-brained shit. People are really out here just spitballing that this song is about G-Eazy, whom Halsey broke up with six years ago before having a whole-ass child with another man. (In the promo and cover art, Halsey straddles a statue of Parisian journalist Victor Noir, primarily known for the legend that women will become pregnant if they conjugally visit his tomb. That would seem relevant.) They’re scolding Halsey for mentioning the fact that they are famous and had hit singles, rather than affecting a contrite modesty no one would believe anyway; while I wouldn’t go so far to call the reviews misogynistic — no, not even Anthony’s — it must be said that such demands for humility are rarely leveled at men. They’re implying that it’s self-absorbed or a sign of “main character syndrome” for Halsey to write about their feelings in the way the confessional songwriters they invoke on this album did for decades. (Also, like, if you wanted to do a sick burn about playing the victim, this is a song with the actual lyric “I always knew I was a martyr and that Jesus was one too.” People can’t even be bitchy properly!) Fuck me, I guess, for thinking that people might apply their principles even to musicians they don’t like, or that after almost 10 years making music to increasing acclaim, culminating in a Trent Reznor collaboration that pled “please take me seriously for once, I got an auteur and everything!”, Halsey might finally be free of the reflexive sneering of all those old “millennial created in a lab” profiles. This isn’t just me complaining about the discourse; hearing “Lonely Is the Muse” as a whine about fame is mishearing the song. This is not a song about celebrity, not really. It’s about spending years trying to escape and disown your upbringing, then seeing someone from your old life — the first verse only really makes sense if it’s about someone you knew back then, i.e., not G-Eazy — and being reminded that you’re always one chance encounter away from your old hometown loser self reclaiming you. (I hear the “platinum airline status” line as sardonic: sure, my life is a lonely hell, but at least I can now sit 25 seats closer to the front of a plane.) It’s about suppressing and contorting your personality for a series of lovers and their unspoken but real expectations, until you don’t remember what your psychic ship of Theseus ever used to be. It’s about indulging your inner emo kid with a level of Twilight-core vengeful-ex melodrama that even pop’s reigning girl-angst queens are too demure and mindful to touch; the closest recent analogue to “Lonely Is the Muse” is Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire,” and the difference in put-togetherness is vast. Specifically, “Lonely Is the Muse” is a pastiche of Amy Lee of Evanescence — a band that was also mocked at the time for their angst, their earnestness, their mallgothiness, the Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way of it all. This is a trait many of The Great Impersonator‘s inspirations share, not coincidentally: from Marilyn Monroe to Tori Amos to Fiona Apple to Britney Spears, they’re a catalogue of celebrities who were mocked for their perceived self-indulgence and instability until their reappraisals came later: apologetically, begrudgingly, and most of all belatedly. Maybe one day we can skip the first part.
[8]
Will Adams: The inspiration for “Lonely Is the Muse” being Amy Lee seems confusing at first — the arrangement doesn’t exhibit the nu-metal crunch of Evanescence, and their vocal tones couldn’t be more different. What I think Halsey is drawing from is lesser-known Fallen single “Everybody’s Fool” — also about the façade of celebrity perfection and the betrayal that comes when a fan realizes their hero isn’t what they thought. But where “Fool” excoriates the pop star for peddling falsehoods, “Muse” turns the mirror on the listener, inviting them to recognize their role in this relationship. The martyr/Jesus line is eye-rolly, but in the final minute, the actual martyrdom becomes clear: “I will fill your life with sounds… and when you’re done, you can discard me.” Is Halsey the muse, or the fool? Is the tragedy that it’s both? Or is the tragedy that it’s always been?
[7]
Al Varela: Halsey’s best lane has always been the alternative metal and rock they grew up with. They have the rasp and angst to sell it on vocals alone, but coupling this a wave of fuzzed-out guitars and crashing cymbals harkens right back to Evanescence and that era of emo and nu metal. The lyrics befit the times: anger and frustration at how people treat them and their art as disposable toys to project their own insecurities and fleeting moments of sorrow onto before moving on to the next shiny object. To be clear, this is a ridiculously immature and self-absorbed sentiment. But after the exhausting, turbulent past couple of years Halsey has had regarding their relationships and impending mortality, I don’t blame them for being afraid of being forgotten and discarded should their illness take their life. Halsey made this album thinking it might be their last — why not go out without a single stone unturned?
[8]
Jackie Powell: “Lonely is the Muse” is incredibly well-written poetry — it’s obvious that it began as a full-length poem before it was put to music. But the melody is boring and even calculated. It sounds a bit like Taylor Swift’s most Jack Antonoff-produced songs, where the music and the lyrics just don’t achieve a synergy, and doesn’t convey what they’re writing about — a breakup with an abusive lover and an abusive record label that prevented Halsey from releasing their music because they didn’t create a viral TikTok Moment. “Lonely Is the Muse” is a slow-burn of a song, as Halsey didn’t want the hook to be the emotional apex. But the payoff I was desperately waiting for didn’t come, or maybe it just came later than I would have wanted. The Amy Lee and Evanescence influences are apparent and well done in a vacuum, but not across the full four minutes. What made Lee and her band most compelling was their ability to go full throttle when it came to expressing some of the most vulnerable emotions; the angst and anger in “Bring Me to Life,” the grief in “My Immortal.” Halsey holds their emotions back, both in their delivery and the melody. Even when the song finally reaches a culmination on the phrases “And I will always reassemble to fit perfectly in view / For anybody that decides that I’m of use,” it’s too late.
[5]
Hannah Jocelyn: The thing that strikes me about Halsey’s lyrics is that they always feel like they need to come out in the way they do, even when they’re artless or “cringe,” and “Lonely Is the Muse” is no exception. The lines about being “built from special parts” and “platinum airline stats” serve a purpose beyond generic “lonely at the top” posturing, but Halsey still feels at the mercy of anyone who can take advantage of them. That said, as much as I deeply admire The Great Impersonator and will defend it, this particular song should be slightly better coming from someone so rooted in verbose alt-rock songwriting. It’s still compelling, as Impersonator always is, but songs like the easy [10] “Ego” are rawer, even if they’re not as beholden to their influences.I wish Halsey went even further and recruited a modern rock producer instead of electro-pop journeyman Stuart Price, because Price is ill-suited for this genre. “Muse” is missing the grandeur of Evanescence as well as the grit of Halsey’s last record with Trent Reznor. Don’t add a string pad and pretend that’s equal to David Campbell’s strings on “Bring Me To Life”!
[7]
Nortey Dowuona: This is the first introduction to Evanescence and Amy Lee — drawn-out, agonized venting about the despair and defeat that come with and deliver coping. Lee’s repressive partner slowly suffocates her desire to exist — gripping and electrifying as a young woman listening to it, possibly embarrassing and amateurish to a older woman or an older man. The thing about transparently, explicitly spelling out your intentions and beliefs is that if you do too much, or seem to do too much, a jaded or emotionally closed-off adult might dismiss your work as uncool or insincere pandering — especially if that adult is less mature than they think. But for someone young and earnest, this kind of music feels like a godsend — finally, somebody’s fucking saying it all! I’m not alone in this, someone hears me!!! When it’s criticized, they may take it far too deeply to heart. Halsey was one of those kids, and thus they are now one of those artists. While Lee has a deep respect for the love shown by her fans to her most gripping project, she probably didn’t know she was to be honored in this way. Hopefully it does not insult her — but knowing Halsey’s luck, it probably did. I will always be a martyr, I will fill your life with sounds; I’ll be a wind chime in the window, catching light to throw around. For most of their career, they’ve been a critical scapegoat and target, a safe place to aim deeply-rooted criticisms of pop music that can no longer be cheaply thrown around now that we have passed through the eye of the needle of “poptimism” (aka highfalutin praise for me but not for thee or thee, not for lack of trying). And I will tear apart your bedroom, I’ll call you in the night; I will exist in every second, just to decorate your life. Halsey has been more liked and respected when they’ve cast aside their “pretensions” (her beliefs and personhood) to accept being “more pop” (the industry standards and practices we all happily adhere to), and they’ve been very successful at that. But it’s come at a price — one they seem unwilling to to pay. And when you’re done, you can discard me, like the others always do; and I will nurse my wounds until another artist needs me new. Since the heyday of Evanescence, Amy Lee has mostly been known for doing features with her now fully-grown subjects, including Lindsey Stirling (yay!) and Bring Me the Horizon (yuck!). Her own band is scattered to the winds, and her own solo projects include a pretty nice ballad for a movie that showed a worrying downturn in Emilia Clarke’s career. And I will always reassemble to fit perfectly in view; for anybody who decides I’m of use. Popstars like Halsey can chase the approval of the cool (us), the uncool (industry lifers), or the fans, but no matter what choice they make, it depends upon an external desire for validation and approval that will never be filled, unless by her. And each note of “Lonely Is the Muse” feels just as drawn-out and agonized as Amy’s introduction. Muses are always lonely, disrespected, marginalized. We are also that abusive partner, demanding more and more. Amy started off Evanescence with Ben Moody in 1994 as equals, but he pushed her back to become the creative fulcrum, for her to be his muse. Eventually she fired both him and their manager, Moody having urged her to become more poppy and accessible, to reach the young Ashley Frangipane as a child. But Amy was no muse — she was a creative in her own right. Now that you’re gone, I feel like myself again. Hopefully, Halsey now feels the same way.
[10]
Kayla Beardslee: My undergraduate thesis was a collection of poems inspired by pop music, often referencing specific artists or quoting specific lyrics. I live a boring life, so I ended up picking a topic that was aggressively not personal, because I needed to make sure I had enough to say. However, I kept getting feedback that my writing was too distant, so for one workshop, I made an attempt to venture out of my comfort zone and brought in a poem where each line started with “I” and gave a different example of my emotional relationship with music. It was a short and mediocre poem: the class politely expressed a lack of interest, and it certainly didn’t unlock anyone’s understanding of my project or writing style. That draft was banished to the vaults in record time, but I remember going back to my room after that class and crying. I had only written that poem because I felt like other people wanted me to, but even though I made the effort to do something genuinely uncomfortable and write about myself without the remove of references or characters, no one was interested, because it was clear my heart wasn’t in it anyway. All I did was end up feeling awkward, misunderstood, and like a worse writer than before — because what does it mean if I call myself a writer yet don’t have anything to say in my own voice? It took me almost until graduation to realize that I treat creative writing less like a direct channel of my unfiltered thoughts, and more like solving a puzzle of connections or weaving a tapestry of influences; not “How can I express this thing I already know?” (boring) but “What can I discover along the way?” I’ve never been a productive participant in the confessional free-verse world, and I haven’t written any poetry in over a year since I have nothing to say about myself that can’t just be worked out in my own head. Responding to others is what motivates me to write. So as people discoursed at concerning levels about Halsey’s The Great Impersonator, I wanted to see more critics engage on a structural level with the concept of building a project around impersonation and reference and the meaning of that as a creative choice in itself, because although I’ve stored most of my academic memories away, the question of whether I’m an imposter writer still lingers. It’s tricky, because I think the act of reference is so fundamental to music criticism that it rejects even being engaged with: if you start questioning the way we assign value based on originality, you risk bringing the whole system down. It would be ridiculous to dismiss the entire Halsey album as lesser-than just because the music is unoriginal — it’s a long body of work with plenty to say on its own terms. But my instinct to interpret the concept as smart, revealing, and worthy of critical engagement, rather than ideologically bankrupt, is probably also a defensive overcorrection to feeling out of place in the creative world around me. Because if you’re criticizing this album for its creative choices, well, then that means I haven’t put much of worth out into this world either. I don’t like thinking that, and for the most part I avoid caring about it, but certain ideas of the value of originality, truthfulness, and “I” are so deeply entrenched that I carry this fundamental sense of self-hatred for only being able to write in a way that feels unwanted. You could trace these questions all the way back to how we define originality and how we imagine art as the practice of being influenced to create — and if you did, you’d probably just find even more questions. For what it’s worth, I think “personality” is a much better measurement than “originality,” and if you can’t work through what makes another person’s art resonate with you, you don’t understand yourself. The blurbs for my last two Amnesty picks have been some of the only times I’ve written anything truly vulnerable in the last year, because these are places to write where it doesn’t have to be about me. I can lean on someone else’s songs and ideas as support, while still feeling comfortable enough to reveal a bit of who I am in their words. If I do it right, I feel like I’ve learned more about myself in conversation with the music than if I had tried to say something plainly on my own. I don’t know if I should be content with that, but for now, it’s the best I can do.
[8]