Real name: Ashley Nicolette Frangipane
Why she changed it: The singer got her stage name from a street in Brooklyn, Halsey Street, where her friend used to live. Halsey spent a lot of time there making music, so it seemed a fitting stage name. Plus, Halsey is an anagram of Ashley!
In a 2020 interview with Cosmopolitan, Halsey also revealed she never felt good enough growing up in poverty and her birth name was a constant reminder of that.
So she took the “opportunity to create a new persona” when she embarked on a career in music and thus Halsey was born.
“I think I had the foresight to know that being me wasn’t enough,” the singer told Cosmopolitan. “I had to become somebody completely different. At the time, I felt that Ashley didn’t deserve to be famous and successful because she wasn’t that special, but if I made Halsey, maybe she could be.”
It was in 2015 that she released her debut album Badlands, which debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 charts in the US.
