@tiredandlonelymuse—any guesses whose handle this belongs to? Super fans, sit this one out. Still nothing? This angsty little game of Guess Who isn’t baiting well. Maybe it belongs to a grungy artist sitting comfortably in Spotify’s billions club—ironic, given their most-streamed song is ‘Without Me’—or perhaps it’s the trickster behind the Alice in Wonderland tattoo on your friend’s arm. Very The Great Impersonator of them, their favorite globally trendsetting artist’s fifth album. The same artist whose essence may just leak into G-Eazy’s ‘Hate the Way’—a polarized relationship whose music video and lyrics do a lot of pointing.
Well, on December 3, 2022, Halsey named their official Tumblr @tiredandlonelymuse, announcing it to fans via Instagram story later that month—a quiet signal that would eventually morph into a rock-heavy single-slash-elongated-poem: ‘Lonely is the Muse.’ Co-written with Stuart Price—the architect behind Madonna and Dua Lipa’s most meticulous moments—the cover art depicts Halsey stepping on the grave of Victor Noir, whose statue carries one of history’s more provocative folklores: that any woman who wants to fall pregnant should touch its erection.
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But the song itself is a complete juxtaposition of who Halsey has built themselves up to be: poignant, celebrated, with a microphone in one hand and a very deliberate middle finger pointed at the industry in the other. There’s a bitter but earned taste to ‘Lonely is the Muse’—the suggestion that the same esteemed essence that fueled someone else’s platinum run has been quietly discarded, only resurfacing in the X threads where fans curate their little shrines. Barely a footnote. Barely a thank you.
The Greek Ideal
It’s a far cry from how things used to be. In ancient Greece, around the 12th–9th centuries BC, not a single piece of art forgoes at least one mention of the nine Muses—not one. Festivals today are a dedication to our playlists; back then, they were religious acts of offering to the gods. The Mouseia Festival, held every four to five years in the Valley of the Muses on the slopes of Mount Helicon in Boeotia, wasn’t a casual acknowledgment—it was a pilgrimage. The word museum itself derives from the Ancient Greek mouseion, meaning “seat of the Muses.” They weren’t an afterthought. They were the prerequisite.
Then history folds, the present begins, and the deal quietly changes. The muse contributes materially, gets her name in the title at best, and fades entirely from the credit conversation once the relationship does. Take Lee Miller—muse to Man Ray, the American-born visual artist who made his life in Paris. Before falling in love with him, she had her own first love: painting. She studied it alongside drawing, became a high-fashion model, and around 1929, sought Man Ray out specifically to teach her photography.
They fell in love in the process, because of course they did. Her lips take the spotlight in Observatory Time—The Lovers (c. 1934), and together they developed solarization—the Sabattier effect, where a partially developed print is exposed to light, reshaping the image entirely. She went on to become the first female war correspondent embedded with the Allied troops in World War II. When they split, he took full credit for solarization. Her name wasn’t etched beside it in art history until after her death, when her son discovered 60,000 negatives, 20,000 prints, contact sheets, documents, and writings—all boxed up in her attic. Lonely, as it turns out, isn’t just the muse. It’s her archive too.
Current Vs. Discarded
This same rise-and-fall plays out in sharper relief when you look at Taylor Swift—just named one of the 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters by The New York Times, and every bit of it earned. But the muse conversation lands here, too, and it cuts both ways.
Under the pseudonym Nils Sjöberg, fearing that her profile would overshadow the song itself, Taylor co-wrote Calvin Harris’s Rihanna-featuring hit ‘This Is What You Came For’—handling lyrics, melody, and backing vocals. Weeks after its release, Calvin told Ryan Seacrest he couldn’t see himself collaborating with her, quietly burying her involvement entirely. It was only after they split that her team set the record straight, and she has since performed it solo. The contribution existed. The ending of the relationship made it visible.
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The inverse is equally telling. Joe Alwyn—under the pseudonym William Bowery—co-wrote some of the most critically lauded works of Taylor’s career: ‘betty’ and ‘exile’ from Grammy-acclaimed folklore, and ‘evermore,’ ‘champagne problems,’ and ‘coney island’ from evermore, fleshing out piano, shaping melodies, and working on lyrics throughout. Fan discourse has largely erased him from that narrative entirely, the pseudonym doing what pseudonyms do—creating just enough distance to make the credit deniable. Meanwhile, fiancé Travis Kelce is publicly celebrated as the muse behind ‘So High School’ while the relationship is front-page news. The difference between the two is timing, visibility, and whether the relationship is still considered worth celebrating by the public. The muse, it seems, only counts when it’s convenient. Lonely is the muse—and forgotten is the one whose relationship expired before the album cycle did.
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PR Teams & Manufactured Muses
Then there are times when the PR-trap sets in, and the artist’s “love story” becomes album mythology. Their teams don’t credit muses—they cast them. The relationship becomes part of the rollout, every interview stocked with their name as though we should feel blessed to have heard it. The muse gets absorbed into the brand rather than credited alongside it. We all think of the iconic bat and yellow dress when we think of Beyoncé’s Lemonade, but we’re also simultaneously thinking of Jay-Z, her husband, and the infidelity that shrouded that whole era. “Becky with the good hair,” from ‘Sorry,’ spiraled into memes, PopToonsTV created a cartoon parody of Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and Blue Ivy at a lemonade stand, and even The Late Late Show with James Corden featured a four-minute parody. The marriage became the product, the reconciliation became the sequel, and Everything Is Love was the joint album that closed the loop commercially. The muse mythology was so thoroughly manufactured into a redemption arc that it stopped being about the wound at all and became about the brand surviving it.
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Or worse—and we’ve all seen this—there’s Backgrid, the organization celebrities call to stage their own paparazzi moments while quietly living another life entirely. The PR muse gets their name glued to the songs, a spot in the sound booth, a seat at the album release party, selfies with fans, and publicly acknowledged as “the muse,” whether they are or not. The real muse gets subtext—or total invisibility while strangers make art about their love story and attribute it elsewhere. If they’re lucky, they surface years later when the press cycle has moved on, and nobody’s really paying attention anymore. By then, fans scroll past their name, wondering, “Who are they again?”—even with years of history quietly archived in the work itself. And if you’re looking for an example? That’s exactly the point.
And then sometimes, it’s the artists themselves playing it strategically. Take Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain.’ Released in 1972, she told an interviewer the song was about “men,” not a specific man. David Bowie, David Cassidy, and Cat Stevens were all floated by the press as possibilities, and Mick Jagger—who contributed uncredited backing vocals—was widely rumored despite Carly denying it. It wasn’t until 43 years later, while promoting her memoir in 2015, that she confirmed the second verse was about Warren Beatty. By then, the muses were so numerous, so prominent, and so convinced of their own starring role that the real story had long since dissolved into noise. Warren spent decades taking credit for a song that was only partially about him. The mystery itself had become the product, which, when you think about it, is the most vain thing of all.
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The Negative Muse
Not every muse lives like a Shakespearean love story. Sometimes they’re platonic, a blood pact to your closest people rendered in verse—or something far more painful: a parental wound. Eminem’s ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’ is one of rap’s most celebrated confessional moments, a scathing, grief-soaked reckoning with his mother Debbie Mathers that he performed at the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards, cementing it as one of the defining live moments of his career. But sometimes the muse fights back. Debbie sued him for defamation, originally seeking $10 million before settling for $25,000. 12 years later, Eminem released ‘Headlights’ as a direct apology—“I’m sorry mama for ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet,’ at the time I was angry”—and has since refused to perform the original live, admitting he cringes every time it comes on the radio.
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Debbie has since passed away on December 2, 2024, at the age of 69, but she remains one of the clearest examples of what happens to the negative muse: even when apologies come, even when fences get mended posthumously, nobody asks whether she deserved credit. There was no credit conversation—only uproar and vilification. Two distinct bodies of work. One person is at the center of both. Her name will never appear on Genius.
The Genius Gap
Which leaves us with the question: what should happen to muses? They didn’t write the song—nobody’s claiming they did. But your favorite song carries an echo of its creation, whether that’s two voices booming in a hotel room fighting for dominance, or someone at a writing camp dreaming about their crush with the quiet realization they still haven’t woken up beside them. The inspiration arrives loud or quiet, but it’s still there. And if it weren’t, the song wouldn’t exist.
Just as session musicians receive instrumental credits and sound engineers receive engineering credits, should there be an entirely new category created? A space on Genius where the right muse gets to sit—acknowledged, named, real.
How exactly we’d go about it is perhaps better pondered for now. But the conversation is overdue—and we want to hear where you stand on it. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and tell us: should muses get recognition?
