Halsey Wrote Britney Spears a Letter Before Using “Lucky” in New Album (Exclusive)

Halsey asked for permission the old-fashioned way when sampling Britney Spears‘ “Lucky” for her new album: She wrote the ’90s pop star a letter.

“She was so supportive out the gate,” Halsey says in The Hollywood Reporter‘s exclusive preview of the newest episode of the Sauce on the Side with Gandhi podcast, out Wednesday. Halsey adds that Spears’ support “surprised” her because “I thought it was gonna take some convincing because I didn’t think she knew who I was.”

Halsey’s new song, “Lucky,” is the second lead single from her forthcoming album, The Great Impersonator. It samples Britney’s 2000 song of the same name.

“I didn’t just reach out to her cold, because, what do you do? You don’t just reach out to Britney Spears,” Halsey continues. “I wrote this really long letter… just talking about her and how much I love her in the song. And you know, what I’d been going through and what it meant to me. And I’d also just become a single mom, you know? So I really related to her in that way as well.”

The singer tells Gandhi that she didn’t think Spears would ever read the letter, but she did. “I remember getting the call that was like, ‘You can use the song. She loves it.’ And I was just like, is this happening right now? Like, this is crazy. I was just like, shocked. Yeah. It was a really full circle moment from 6-year-old me.”

Halsey has spoken about Spears’ influence on her as an artist, saying recently she “was the first pop star I fell in love with.”

Elsewhere in the podcast, Halsey also spoke about her experience writing The Great Impersonator while battling multiple illnesses — in recent months, the singer has shared details of her experience with lupus, T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder, POTS, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, Sjogren’s syndrome and more.

“I got the kind of sick where you can’t really leave your house,” Halsey says. “Your body starts to look different. You lose your hair like it was really just a completely transformative experience.”

As a result, the singer adds, she wrote the album in a space between life and death. “I was in that in-between space, waiting for answers from doctors for months of like, you know, not only could I be not in a position where I get to be a musician anymore, but I don’t even know now if I’m going to get to be anymore. And that was terrifying.”

The singer adds that being a mom made the situation even more difficult. “Kind of like the greatest thing in the world ever happened to me [becoming a mom]. And then all of a sudden, a really scary thing happened to me,” she says. “And then I knew that I had to start writing because I knew that that was going to help me process what was going on.”

The Great Impersonator releases Oct. 25.