Halsey Says Mac Miller’s Death Was the ‘Reality Check’ She Needed to Leave a Bad Relationship
Mac Miller’s death shocked the world. The late rapper died of an accidental overdose on Sept. 7, 2018, and now, Halsey has shared how his death affected her life.
During an interview with Dax Shepard on his Armchair Expert podcast, the “Bad At Love” singer revealed that Miller’s death prompted her to leave an unhealthy relationship.
Were Halsey and Mac Miller friends?
The 26-year-old star and Miller were friends before his death in 2018. Her latest album, Manic, ended up being released on Jan. 17, 2020, the same day Miller’s posthumous album, Circles, came out. In a February 2020 interview with The Guardian, the singer mourned the loss of Miller and Juice WRLD, who also died of an accidental overdose on Dec. 8, 2019.
“It’s terrifying seeing your friends put out posthumous records,” she said. “Should I be prepared? Do I need to tell my team what to do if anything happened to me, what I wouldn’t want to go out? I used to say music immortalises you—then it got real. Hopefully, it’s a good thing that we’re talking about it because artists need to take better care of themselves.”
Halsey called Mac Miller’s death a ‘turning point’ in her life
During her conversation with Shepard, the pop star said she learned a hard lesson from Miller’s death, calling it a “turning point.”
“This is a terrible thing to say because I think it puts a positive connotation on a heinously tragic event,” she said, “but it gave me the courage and the faith to leave the relationship I was in. It gave me that real f*cking reality check that I needed and I think it probably did the same for a lot of other people too.”
“I was lucky enough to be in a position where I was like, ‘Okay, cool I’m not ruining my life yet,'” she continued, “but I never would’ve expected some of the people that I know and loved and lost—to see them go down that path so aggressively and so rapidly. I kind of recognized the spiral early and was like, ‘Alright, now I know.'”
She didn’t note which of her exes she was referring to in the interview. She simply noted that they used to do drugs together, and described how she realized that dynamic became unhealthy for her.
Halsey says Mac Miller was good at ‘writing with responsibilty’
“As a result, my currency of expressing love with them became doing drugs with them,” she said, later adding, “There was a lot of infidelity in the relationship too. It was like if I don’t do it with you, you’re going to go do it with someone else and then probably f*ck them and I’m going to take you back anyway because this is what we do.”
The “Still Learning” singer lives with bipolar disorder, and she told Shepard that leaving this ex and getting sober helped her to better manage the disorder.
“One of the first steps of doing that was removing myself from a situation where there’s a literal chemical interference,” she said. “I’m going to remove myself from that, figure out what my baseline is and then kind of fix it from there.”
The star also shared that she will no longer romanticize unhealthy relationships and drug use in her music. She credits Miller for this lesson, saying he had a good habit of “writing with responsibility” when making music about drug abuse.
