The Confession and Chaos: An Interview with Haiden Henderson on the Tension Deluxe EP

The rising pop sensation expands his intensely personal story with the deluxe edition of Tension, opening up about shared heartbreak, finding community, and the awkward honesty that fuels his ambition.

The vampire aesthetic synonymous with Haiden Henderson—all sharp lyricism, leather jackets, and an intentional, moody gloom is the perfect reflection of an artist who pours the most vital parts of his soul into his music. His recent project, the Tension EP (and its newly released deluxe version), is less a pop record and more a documentary of a fractured relationship. It’s an intensely personal sonic diary detailing love, obsession, heartbreak, and the chaotic aftermath that forces one to confront their emotional landscape.

From sleeping in the back of his truck while falling in love with guitar to selling out a global tour just months after releasing Tension, Haiden’s journey is one of rapid, emotionally charged ascent. In a candid chat, the singer-songwriter reflects on the necessity of visual language in the age of TikTok, the pressures of using his real life as material, and the profound connection he’s forged with a fanbase that found him right when he needed them most.

On the Narrative of Tension and the New Tracks

Q: The storytelling and track sequencing on an EP are always fascinating. Can you walk us through the logic behind the final track order for Tension? Specifically, how do the new songs on the deluxe version tie into the established narrative?

Haiden: Every time I make a project, I want to get creative with the tracklist. I think, "Oh, I want to do something weird and conceptual, I want it to be subversive." But I always come back to putting the songs in the order of the story. It is always chronological.

Tension as a whole is just the story of a situation. It's very clearly laid out through each of the songs. "One Track Mind" is the opening, the street noise in the beginning literally feels like you are walking into a club. That song is me flirting and spitting game with somebody very much out of my league. By the end, the title track "Tension" encapsulates a post-fallout world, the limbo I am now living in after the complicated relationship with my best friend ended.

The deluxe tracklist is not very creative, just a couple of extra songs that were floating around. One of them, a feature with my friend MICO, felt like a great moment for our fan bases to come together, as they had always hoped we would work together. The final song, "Chemicals," is very "Love Sucker-ish" it’s about this obsessive, compulsive need for a person, and it felt like a good period to put on the end of the project after "Parasite."

The Power of Collaboration and Specificity

Q: "Parasite," your collaboration with MICO, is the only feature on this entire EP. How did that partnership come about? Was it a song you wrote and then sought another voice for, or was the process more collaborative?

Haiden: Interestingly, it was the opposite. MICO had written a version of "Parasite" a year ago. It was sitting there, a general song that was just a "vibe," and he brought it to me saying it was missing something. My first instinct is always to take a song that is just a vibe and try to put an actual story and an actual emotion to it.

I was practically forcing him at gunpoint! I told him, "You have to feel something, we have to make this about something specific." My part of the song was going to be hyper-specific, as is the rest of the Tension project, and for it to fit into this world, it had to be about this story. So, he and I rewrote the song together. It was originally just a shell, and then we came together and made it our song.

Building a Visual World for the Fanbase

Q: Your descriptions are very visual, from walking into a club to the story's fallout. How important are visual elements. music videos, Reels, TikToks, in telling the story of these songs and building a world for your fans?

Haiden: It is so much more important than people realize. Videos are now just content, they are what pictures were ten years ago. Because videos are so casual, people can forget that they actually mean something. If you have a visual language to even your TikToks, you are subconsciously training people to think a certain thing about you.

I want a wide variety of things; I want people to be able to swipe through just my videos and stay entertained. So, we have live videos, silly ones for the fans, and everything is, in some way, dark and grungy.

Music videos are especially difficult to get a label to pay for nowadays. My way of pitching it to them is that it creates community. The number of memes and videos my fans have made off of the "Tension" music video alone has been drastic. Every single detail in that video, no matter how random it seems, was for a very specific reason. The RC car is because many of the things in the relationship happened in a car. The red phone I am talking on is because she uses a bright red phone case.

I see music videos the same way I see songs: I am making them for the person I am talking about. Sometimes that's me, too.

On Documentary-Style Lyricism and Creative Depth

Q: You have cited lyricists like Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan as inspirations. How do you channel that kind of lyrical depth and narrative focus while still composing a very modern pop track?

Haiden: Honestly, my lyrics are really nothing like Bob Dylan. What I learned from Joni Mitchell was to just write about the things that are in front of you. You don't need to overthink it. Bob was always trying to fit the galaxy into a glass of water, but you can do that inadvertently by just writing about the glass of water. Joni taught me to just talk about the bird singing outside your window; it's so simple, and people will find their own meaning in it.

I'm a very unimaginative writer. Every single line in all of my songs is pulled directly from somewhere, a text I sent, a journal entry, words from someone else's mouth or mine. It's a very uncreative process; it’s very documentary. Since this relationship ended in a fallout with no communication, this project became my way of getting my side of the story out. A lot of it was dedicated to serving somebody's words back to them. I'm just imagining what it would be like for them to hear it.

Q: Does being this committed to absolute honesty in your writing create a kind of pressure to seek or tolerate emotional chaos in your life just to generate this kind of material?

Haiden: You should talk to my therapist! That is a much deeper question than I expected. I thought you were going to ask if it creates pressure to write good songs, and I actually think it takes that pressure off.

But to your question: abso-f*cking-lutely, I do. I’m trying to figure that out now. I experienced this relationship, wrote a project about it, and went on a world tour within three months. I had never been so immediately compelled to write something. It was maybe the craziest emotional rollercoaster I’ve ever been on, and it sucks that when you’re going through it, you just have so much to say.

The Challenges of Touring an Open Wound

Q: Was touring this album challenging, given that you were singing about this deeply personal relationship every night?

Haiden: It was difficult. I experienced a lot of these things and wrote many of these songs while I was on tour, not my tour, but while traveling. And many of the venues I played on my tour were revisiting the very cities and hotel rooms where I wrote the songs. I was seeing a ghost in all of them. I was doing a tour of not only my music, but taking a tour of my emotional past. That was a very difficult time.

Q: Touring is already intense on its own. How did you navigate adding that emotional weight on top of the physical demand?

Haiden: It is tough. I would go into shows, meet-and-greets, and meeting people with that exhausted, lonely energy. Sometimes it was hard to get back into it, but often, they were giving me the energy that I needed. It was really helpful. I recently posted my tour recap and said that the tour and everyone who came to the shows made me feel so much less alone. I really went into it feeling like I just lost my best friend, my home, all of my personal life stuff, it was a wreck, as you can hear in the EP. Seeing that we played a sold-out world tour on this project, I was like, "Holy sh*t, you guys are out there, and I’m not alone." That was really cool.

From Car to Headliner

Q: Is it true that you were living out of your car when you first started focusing on music?

Haiden: Yeah. I lived in the back of my truck for a year. I couldn't afford an apartment and was trying to save money. That was where I started playing guitar and just falling in love with music. It was a really good life experience; it taught me how to live with less. I think that was a good, humbling experience.

Q: Now that you’re headlining shows, how has your life fundamentally changed, and how do you navigate that balance of staying humble while maintaining ambition for your career?

Haiden: I have a roof over my head now, so that's exciting. In the beginning, I was making music literally just trying to pay for food. I was worried about survival, and now I'm a lot less worried about that.

As for staying humble, I think I am just naturally such a shameful person, compliments just bounce off me like armor. All the people in my life are not the type of people who agree with me and compliment me all the time. I keep people who challenge me. I’m really bad at taking compliments, actually. If you listen to my songs, that’s why even in the horny songs, I’m not being confident, I'm being a total simp. I'll have a good time, I’ll be anything she needs me to be. The whole thing is me being self-deprecatingly awkward and attempting to be "rizzy." I always feel like they are out of my league.

The Next Chapter

While Tension may be remembered for its painful conclusion, as Haiden points out, 80 to 90% of the project is, at its core, a love project, a reflection of the sweetness and obsession that came before the crash. This dichotomy between the darkness and the devotion is what makes his music so compelling.

With the Tension era drawing to a close, Haiden Henderson isn't just closing a chapter, he's processing the emotional fallout and finding gratitude in the community he's built. Having already conquered the world on his first headline tour, the focus now shifts. Whether his next project chronicles the new, happier path he is carving out or continues his streak of profoundly honest confession, one thing is certain: he will not be writing into the void. His fans are waiting, ready to join him for the next, hyper-specific chapter of his life.

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Article By Inês Barny