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 like a fitting stage name. Plus, Halsey is an anagram of Ashley!
In an interview in 2020 with cosmopolitanHalsey also revealed that 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 personality” when she started a career in music and so Halsey was born.
“I think I had the foresight to know that being myself wasn’t enough,” the singer said cosmopolitan† “I had to become someone completely different. At the time, I thought Ashley didn’t deserve to be famous and successful because she wasn’t that special, but if I made Halsey, maybe she could be.”
In 2015 she released her debut album badlandswhich debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 charts in the US.