Singer-songwriter Halsey, kicking off the tour for her fifth studio album, has publicly responded on multiple social media accounts to fans criticizing the set list of her For My Last Trick Tour earlier this month. Halsey, who uses both she/they pronouns, posted a poem on Instagram about the careful selection of each song and a sillier Tiktok with the caption, “Getting ready to fight a bunch of bisexuals over my setlist.”
Halsey explains her setlist in a poem.
iamhalsey / Instagram
The top complaint among fans appears to be the exclusion of The Great Impersonator track “Ego,” which was an early single off the album leading up to its release, and also the song Halsey performed live at the VMAs. Fans online seemed taken by surprise that “Ego” isn’t a setlist staple for this tour, given the heavy marketing the track got upon its release. But others have been quick to defend Halsey, citing the lack of crowd response to certain songs at the Brooklyn release party for The Great Impersonator last October. After all, how else is a performing artist supposed to determine the structure of a show if not by audience feedback?@halsey ♬ Dress to impress - user00998981308
Setlist debates often revolve around one thing: are they playing the songs I want to hear? No? Well, then screw ‘em. Play the hits that are the artist’s bread and butter, the songs they owe her career to and someone is bound to call them basic or a sellout. If they go just for the deep cuts the “true” fans have crossed her fingers for, new listeners feel excluded without the familiar touchstone that likely introduced them to the music in the first place. And some of those diehards are likely to bemoan the missing classics, too.
The For My Last Trick Tour setlist so far features a healthy mix of songs from across all five of Halsey’s albums, with different songs played every night in the latter part of the show. These additions include iconic Badlands tracks like “Hold Me Down” and “Drive” as well as the The Great Impersonator bonus track “Alice of the Upper Class.” Since the start of the tour, fans have given Halsey an outpouring of love and support online.
Now that Halsey is well into her tour, if people are still complaining about the setlist, you can’t hear them over the roar of the crowds. In fact, at the May 17 show at the Dos Equis Pavilion in Dallas, Halsey appeared on stage to have sound issues with her monitors and gleefully announced during act two of the concert that she couldn’t hear herself sing over the noise of the audience. She posted a TikTok just after the show, thanking the attendees for “one of the best nights of my entire life.”
A lot of Halsey fans have taken any tour at all as a blessing, given the near-fatal chronic illnesses with which she was diagnosed over the last two years. The same Instagram post mentioned earlier also includes photos of her receiving treatment for lupus. Halsey’s a relatively open book about her personal life, sharing her diagnosis of bipolar disorder and her long-time struggle with endometriosis. Following the birth of her son in 2022, they became increasingly ill with mysterious, life-threatening allergic reactions that required repeated hospitalizations. She received a slew of diagnoses in the early attempts to identify the root causes of her health issues until doctors zeroed in on lupus and chronic leukemia.@halsey HEY NOW HEY NOW 🤍 THIS IS WHAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF DALLAS !!!!!!!!
♬ Sugar Storm - Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross
The Great Impersonator takes listeners through her experiences of nearly dying, the road to getting her conditions into remission and a new sense of self after having survived. The album captures all the rage, fear and resentment of living in a sick body and the dual joys and mourning that come with survival. Each song “impersonates” the style of an artist influential to Halsey, as they try new sounds they’d always wanted to but kept pushing off for the next album until she realized the next album is never guaranteed.
Adjusting to a new daily routine as demanded by her conditions also means adjusting her approach to touring and performing. Going on tour is grueling work—the constant travel, the exertion of performing every night, meet and greets—and the toll is doubled on a body fighting autoimmune disorders that are exacerbated by physical and mental stress.
But don’t take this to mean that Halsey’s performance is scaled back; just the opposite. The For My Last Trick Tour may be the most intensive, highly produced show she’s ever put on. It blends an immersive, world-building narrative performance with the raw, organic energy of a traditional concert structure of the artist laying it all out on the stage. The first act is split into chapters, each capped by a video interlude following Halsey’s descent, as Alice, into Wonderland and grappling with becoming too big, too small and tricked along her search for normalcy. All throughout, the White Rabbit—voiced by none other than U2’s Bono—alludes to “the show” Alice must get ready for.
If Act One wasn’t performance enough, the “real” show begins with Act Two when Halsey reemerges in black ruffles and Badlands blue hair to bring the house down. No theatrical sets are required, just her and the band.
And this is where we come back to the setlist. It’s as carefully curated as a museum exhibition, each song in conversation with the one before and after. The chapters into which the songs are organized recontextualize them in a way that expands the meanings from her original records. Halsey themself said recently in an interview on In Your Dreams With Owen Thiele's podcast, “I need all my other and future songs heard in the context of this post-Great Impersonator world.”
Sets, costumes and animated backdrops change with each chapter and alter the atmosphere, from a Vegas showgirl that nods to Dita Von Teese’s giant martini glass to a haunted, Gothic archway, and finally a soft, dreamy sky full of clouds with floating moons and stars. Dancers accompany Halsey in this choreographed first act, her characters vacillating between friendly and adversarial as per the tricky, changeable journey through Wonderland.
Sure, Halsey could change up the setlist for this act if she really wanted to, but that jeopardizes the decisions structuring the rest of the show. Swap out a song and risk the cohesion of the whole narrative. From the start, Halsey has always been an artist rooted in storytelling, with almost every record a concept album complete with its own world-building and lore. Sit with her for a while and listen to the whole story.
