Transcription

Exercise 2: Transcription
Transcribe and/or digitize a text that has never existed in digital form before. The resulting transcript should be in plain text format.

In this assignment, I transcribing interview with my favorite artist Halsey. In this interview, she talks about her vision for ‘Badlands’, about her place in the pop cosmos, and about how the music industry works in 2015.

What are your UK fans like?

It’s so funny because it’s a little different to the US. It’s a bit more diverse here. There were a lot of girls, but also a lot of guys. Now I’m focus grouping, trying to get to know my UK fans as best I can.

What did you want to do with ‘Badlands’?

I kind of got stuck on this idea last winter: Badlands. I didn’t know what it meant but I said to my managers, ‘I’m naming the record BADLANDS’. They’re like, ‘we’re not even thinking about the album right now’. Then a month later I’m like, ‘okay, so for Badlands…’, and they’re like, ‘oh, you do want to name it that’. I’m like, ‘Yes!’.

‘Badlands’ is a concept record, about a dystopian society. I became kind of obsessive about this idea of a dystopian society in the future. I moved into an apartment in LA after my headline tour — no furniture, just paper on the wall. It looked like a serial killer’s house. It was me just writing notes about the album, tearing pages out of things, so

Can you describe your state of mind when you were making the album?

Neurotic. The interesting thing about ‘Badlands’ is that here I am in this imaginary world and my life is changing in the US and I’m 3000 miles away from my house, I’m flying somewhere new every day and I’m busy and all of a sudden people fucking care about me.

Six months ago no one gave a shit about me and all of sudden a company turns around and says, ‘look at you, look what you did when none of us fucking cared about you at all. Let’s talk about this now!’ I’m in this whirlwind with everything happening really quickly and I think I was regressing almost to like a childlike defence mechanism where I was hiding in this world because it was easier for me to think about the record and give all my time to the Badlands, rather than deal with what was actually happening to me in my real life.

So about midway through the record it occurs to me: ‘holy shit — this is all a metaphor’. And it’s so funny because it wasn’t a metaphor initially. That’s something that had to reveal itself to me. This idea of a booming metropolis is the centre of my head and it’s filled with the gluttony, commercialism, toxic behaviours and whatever else, and this is then surrounded by a wasteland and what that wasteland or desert does is it keeps people from coming in but it also keeps me from leaving, so I am left with this place which is all I’ve ever known.

So I came to that realisation halfway through and it’s kind of therapeutic for me to acknowledge that I’m living in these mental badlands. ‘Can I leave?’ ‘Can I escape this state of mind?’ It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Midway through the record I changed everything. A couple of months later I’d shaved my head — I was slowly figuring out how to leave that state of mind and how to deal with everything that was going on for me.

The breaking point for me was when I wrote ‘Drive’ which is track four on the album. It’s the first happy song I’ve ever written which is really cool for me, because it’s an optimistic song. It’s a sweet song, it’s about being in a relationship, being in love with someone and not knowing how to tell them. The premise of the song is: all we do is drive, all we do is think about the feelings that we hide.

It’s the first happy song I ever wrote and it’s so ironic that it’s called ‘Drive’ because it symbolises this departure from the Badlands – this point where I drive away. I leave. After that come these pop songs — they’re bright, they’ve a different kind of energy, this coming-of-age, nostalgic sound to them. That was such an important thing for me as a songwriter, to be able to branch out into this new world an embrace this pop sensibility that’s been hiding in my music all along.

Embracing that was the best thing I did because I made this record that is uninhibited and uncensored.