Halsey opened up about how she came to sample Britney Spears‘ iconic hit “Lucky”
The 29-year-old musician recently dropped a song of the same name, which sampled the Princess of Pop’s hit from 2000.
During a recent interview, Halsey opened up about how their version of “Lucky” came to be. They also reflected on feeling a bond to Britney and revealed something that they learned from her career.
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When asked what led to their decision to sample “Lucky,” Halsey told Paper that it started from a “weird coping mechanism” that they have.
“If I’m not dealing with something internally, I’ll catch myself singing a song that relates to it,” she explained. “Often, the most random songs gets suck in my head, and I’ll be like, wait, why am I singing that?”
The hitmaker continued, saying, “‘Lucky’ became one of those songs” when she was receiving treatment for T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder. “I would lay there, attached to a pump, like ‘I’m so lucky, I’m a star.’ It was facetious, and then I was in the studio, and was singing it under my breath, and went ‘Wait, let’s do this. Has anyone done this? This has been done, right? Why hasn’t this been done? There’s no way I’m actually going to interpolate this Britney Spears song in this major way.’”
Once confirming that it had not been done, Halsey said that “the verses just came to me, and the bridge was the last thing to come.”
“It was obviously the most revealing part [of the song],” she said. “Not to connect it to another Britney moment, but I had never really had a ‘Gimme More’ moment. Most of my F-ck you, don’t criticize me! songs are about being in the world as this femme-presenting person and not necessarily about being a celebrity. I saw that everyone was like, ‘Oh my god, they look f-cking terrible, they lost all this weight, I bet it’s drugs. Did you hear they lost custody of their son? Did you hear that she’s this, and that.’ I’m like, you have no f-cking idea what’s going on! I can’t tell you because there’s so much going on, but I don’t even know how to update you all without sounding like a histrionic person, or because I didn’t even know that anyone would believe me.”
Halsey added that they say “a lot” of parallels between her career and Britney‘s.
“Obviously I will never know what it’s like to reach the magnitude and the monolith of fame and exposure and lack of autonomy that she’s experienced in her career,” they said. “I will never know that, but in a way, there are some parallels. She was the first pop star I fell in love with and I knew everything about her, and I was in love with her and I worshiped her. I was jealous of her. I thought she had the perfect life, as did most of us at the time, and I’ve always, through every stage of her career, really rooted for her. Not in the patronizing way like, ‘I’m rooting for you!’ But in the way that Femme Fatale is one of my favorite albums ever.”
They said that they realized it was a “privilege” of sorts to have people talking about them. Why? “The people we have these conversations about are people who really impacted culture,” Halsey said.
“Anyway, I just felt all these conversations happening, and I knew that they were, in a myopic way, relative to a lot of what Britney has experienced in her career, and I watched her experience. I was like, yo, babe, you are talking about Britney Spears. Whatever I’m going through, she’s been through, I better toughen up a little. You know what I mean? It just gave me perspective.”
After some confusion, Britney came out in support of Halsey‘s sample.
Halsey recently revealed a conversation that she had with Britney before the song arrived.
