Halsey wants to get outside. We’re in L.A., and she’s just wrapped her photo shoot for Glamour. A few blocks away from the studio, we find Hollywood Forever, a historic cemetery and tourist attraction, and I learn she’s never been. It feels like kismet. After all, it’s not every day you get the opportunity to give a dizzyingly famous superstar a spontaneous tour of other dizzyingly famous superstars’ final resting places without a single security guard or manager in sight. Of course we head right in. There are water fountains and preening peacocks, and our footsteps echo against crumbling marble steps. I’d worried we might get swarmed by the singer’s fans, but the grounds are nearly deserted—a detail Halsey immediately picks up. “Dude, how fucking meta is that?” she notes with a sly grin. “You needed to be remembered enough to be buried in Hollywood Forever, but nobody comes to visit you. That’s so Gatsby. That is Hollywood in a nutshell.”

A beat later she adds, “If I die, please don’t let them bury me here.”

It’s not surprising that immortality is on Halsey's mind, given that we’re, you know, in a cemetery. “So there’s a Native American proverb, and it’s like you have two deaths in your life, right?” she says as we weave through the tombstones. “The first is when your physical body obviously decays, and you are buried, and you are dead. And the second is the last time somebody ever says your name.” Halsey may never experience that second death: She’s only 24, but the singer-songwriter is already a voice of her generation, so caught up in the zeitgeist that she can’t sneeze without making headlines. The challenge she now faces is every pop star’s struggle: How do you smash the charts while making art that fulfills you?

Halsey started out as a Tumblr star. After cowriting and being featured on The Chainsmokers’ number-one song “Closer” in 2016, she became a household name and built on that big break with a string of buzzy collaborations and high-concept albums to become one of the biggest pop stars in the world. Her latest single, “Without Me,” claimed the number-one spot on Billboard’s Hot 100. Now you can’t leave the house without hearing Halsey’s heartbroken wail soaring through the radio, the mall speakers, the airport terminal. It played in my Lyft to our interview—twice.

As I power-walk to keep up with her (she moves fast), Halsey tells me a little about how she got to this moment. Born in blue-collar New Jersey to an African American father and Italian Hungarian mother, Halsey says her storytelling abilities come from a combination of her parents. Her dad, a car salesman, was a people person who never forgot a face, the kind of person who bumps into old customers in the supermarket and remembers where their kids went to college. “Watching my dad be like that affected me as an artist tremendously,” Halsey says. “I have met tens of thousands of fans; I don’t forget any of them. Ever.” (Given that she has a lot of them—including 11 million followers on Instagram as of press time—I find this a bit hard to believe but let it go; Halsey’s sweet sincerity is endearing.) Her mother, on the other hand, is bipolar, covered in tattoos and piercings, and more creatively minded. Halsey remembers sitting in the backseat while her mom smoked out the car window and went on long rants about Robert Smith, the lead singer of The Cure. She ate up every word and says her mom was the one who encouraged her artistic pursuits. (There was the Christmas she asked for a violin; her dad said it wasn’t practical—“You’re going to play it for like three months and never touch it again”—but her mom found one secondhand, telling him, “We can't hold her back. We don't know what she can become.”)