“Isn’t it so beautiful that we are all connected in a way?”
Nandi Rose, singer, songwriter, and co-producer of the alternative music project Half Waif, flipped the roles of our conversation, and in turn, planted the most important question of my day onto me. It’s become an overwhelmingly important question — a question I keep reminding myself to ask.
Since she was fourteen, Rose has considered herself a writer, and ever since, her voice has found its way into many creative endeavors. Whether through Half Waif, Rose’s creative essays, frequent appearances in Pinegrove, or dance, her cardinal philosophies — collectivism and human connection — have stood at the heart of them all. It was around the same age, fourteen, that I discovered Rose’s work. Since then, this awareness of collectivism, or in Rose’s words, an “ecstatic togetherness,” has remained forever entrenched in my foundation.
Throughout her entire career, Half Waif’s impetus has been bound and tethered by this overarching sense of togetherness. Despite writing most of her music, including her recent fall release, See You At The Maypole, within the deep solitudes of Upstate New York, Rose has found that the pain she surmounts through music has only brought her closer to the rest of the world.
“When you go through grief, it feels like the most isolating experience. Yet, surprisingly, I sometimes would describe grief — this may sound strange — as almost a delicious thing,” Rose said. “It was so sumptuous, so rich. In those moments, you could shoot to the other side and there would be joy.”
During the early months of 2022, it was a barren, desolate winter in the Hudson Valley. Rose was experiencing a missed miscarriage, the prolonged recovery that followed, while at the same time, was grappling with the news that her beloved mother-in-law had been diagnosed with cancer. As one grief piled onto the other, the season became satirically difficult.
“I felt like I had dropped out of the world,” Rose said. “The world was going on and I wasn’t a part of it anymore. I was completely flattened. So for me, the period of writing this album [See You At The Maypole] was a way of getting back on the ride, of getting back into the world.”
Half Waif’s artistic realm is historically a space that holds love and ache all in one hand, and as a product, discovers an entirely new inner landscape throughout the process of making music. For Rose, recording and releasing See You At The Maypole was a way of bringing the outside world in, of “scavenging through the fodder of the world to feel more a part of it.”
From its initial inception, See You At The Maypole was intended to be a light, shining ode to Rose’s forthcoming chapter of motherhood, diverging from the previously darker works of Half Waif. Mythopoetics, Rose’s last album, was released in the summer of 2021. Mythopoetics was big, cathartic, and largely focused on trudging through the generational traumas of Rose’s past. It was more pop, synth, and undulating with active sound — Rose was even screaming on the cover.
In the wake of unimaginable loss, Half Waif’s new chapter is one defined by hope. By morphing the words, poetics, and movements derived from personal loss and embroidering them into the fabric of her life, Rose has spun her story into the collective fabric of humanity — of collective loss — with each track embodying “the ribbons of our lives braided and joined into something colorful, incapable of unraveling.”
“There was a softness,” Rose said, when explaining the initial scope of See You At The Maypole that was envisioned prior to Rose’s miscarriage. “I wanted to challenge myself as a writer to not write from a place of anguish, and I wondered what it would sound like if I wasn’t. But I didn’t get to do that — the world had a different path for me.
See You At The Maypole required Rose to surrender her story to exactly what it was: slow music. Rose stripped down the tracks, resisted the urge to tune up the electronics, and wrote truthfully, from the exact situation in which the world had handed her.
Figurine’s demo, for instance, was initially a track resonant with Half Waif’s prior discography; it was more synth, dressed-up, and scintillating. Rose credits her immense trust in her co-producer, Zubin Hensler, for changing the arrangement of the song, and stripping it down to its organic state. This shift away from Rose’s past synth-experimental-pop genre is evident throughout See You At The Maypole, as Rose floats between just two major chords in both “Sunset Hunting” and “Figurine.”
“That is not something I would have felt comfortable doing in the past, but it’s also kind of the beauty of getting older. You don’t care as much about what people are going to think. I wanted to write a two-chord chorus, and damn it feels good to go between the one and the four chords.”
While Rose did not get to write from a purely buoyant point of view, she did not let her aspiration for softness dissolve within the body of her grief. Rose turned the motionless, leaden weight of her insurmountable present moment into words that dreamed and insisted on levity — of spinning around once again alongside the world. “It’s gonna get so much better/You’ll see/And all the world is turning/around/Like a figurine,” Rose echoes on Figurine. The chorus, which is a constant reminder of the inevitability of change, spins around in my head, too.
“It takes courage to let yourself be led in the process [of songwriting]. I did resist it initially,” Rose said. “I thought, no way was I going to write about this, no way I am going to make this album, because who wants to hear that? But then, I didn’t make it for other people — it was ultimately what I needed to make.”
“Sunset Hunting” is another track that was entirely discased from its initial demo. Hensler suggested that the song ring out in order to let its bare moment and its lasting, reverberating weight resound on its own. In the first portion of the song, you hear nothing but Rose’s fervent vocals unaccompanied before the singular chord of the piano swells in.
In that awful, colorless winter of 2022, Rose began sunset hunting to regain the light inside of her. She wrote about her afternoons spent by the train tracks, watching the abundantly bright sun sink over the bleak landscape. These recurring afternoons represented one of the few ways Rose gathered life in a time defined by loss — a loss deepened by the unrelenting climate. With that, “Sunset Hunting”, and its collective wail to the earth, was born crying for connection, “How can winter light be golden when/Everything else is dead? How can there be life inside me/And then death?”
Half Waif’s artistry is so distinct — I hesitate to say esoteric — because it resides at the coordinates of numerous expressions that enhance the other. Not only does she songwrite and compose her own sound, but Rose frequently authors poetry and creative prose as well, all of which seamlessly tackle the gift so many writers spend lifetimes trying to hone: the ability to describe the indescribable. No matter the form, each of Rose’s mediums embeds her within the surrounding nature of her environment, writing about the earth in ways that have never been written about before. Rose writes about nature in the exact vein it’s meant to be written about: with recognition that the least she can do is give the world her truthful, acknowledging words.
Through reading Rose’s Substack, where one can find her prolific essays and meandering thoughts, I learned that “Heartwood” was initially a poem. “Heartwood” is about imagining yourself as an oak tree, “Okay but let me be oak/My branches curved back down to earth/The reaching and bowing of a perpetual arc.” The maypole — the backbone and panoptic emblem of the album — was initially a tree in ancient times, with its branches stripped and decorated with ribbons, leaves, and flowers of an approaching spring.
“Songwriting feels so good because it is the confluence of so many different languages, so that they heighten each other, or when one doesn’t suffice you have these other languages at your fingertips,” Rose said, when explaining her usage of other writing forms. “You can say things directly or poetically or not at all and the music can say it for you.”
“Velvet Coil” is another track on the LP that was first a poem. Rose refers to those two experimental tracks as the “weirdo bubbles” of the album.
Throughout Half Waif’s discography, songwriting is used as a tool to endure and reckon with the limitations of language. Within See You At The Maypole, especially, when mere words are unable to invoke the layers and corners of Rose’s grief, the paired dance ritual Rose has recently added into her live performance allows the crest of full expression to be reachable.
“I always said in a parallel life, in another universe, I would be a dancer,” Rose prefaced, when explaining the addition of her ritualistic-like movement and choreography embedded into the live performance of See You At The Maypole. “It was the first time I felt this — I keep using the word alignment — because I felt aligned in using music, dance, and theater all coming together,” Rose said.
Kora Radella, Rose’s former dance teacher at Kenyon College, encouraged this incorporation of movement into her live shows. “Kora really believes in me and saw something in me,” Rose said. “She had been to a lot of my shows in the past and was like, ‘I can see that you have something in your body that you want to express but you’re not letting yourself do it.’ I felt very seen.” Radella has been collaborating with Rose throughout the album’s trajectory, pairing the sacred and embodied movement alongside each track for both the live performances and visual stills.
The See You At The Maypole release shows, in both Chatham and Brooklyn, NY, marked the first time that Rose performed in such an abundantly physical nature. At the Brooklyn Made release show, Radella, Rose’s choreographer, happened to be standing next to me. Radella tapped on my shoulder, warning me that I ought to know when to move out of the way, as I was leaning against the exact spot on stage where Rose would lie flattened on the edge of the stage. The night felt like a sacred experience, one in which I, myself, am struggling to adequately describe. And Radella was right — I did have to reposition myself many times, and it was so incredibly worth it.
“You are a part of this!” Rose told me, after I recounted to her my experience at the Brooklyn show. In this moment of our discussion, in the moments she laid in front of me onstage, or even each time I turn on See You At The Maypole and hear the collective howling on the opening track, “Fog Winter Balsam Jade”, I do feel like a part of a larger story.
This winter, Rose is generating her own warmth. Although the solstice is bound to shift, and the lunar colors of Upstate New York are imminent, this time Rose stands at the precipice of hope and a collective joy that has forever been inseparable to that of a collective grief.
Like the maypole ritual itself, every song on Half Waif’s new LP is meant to be congregated around. Each one is meant to be sung, hoped for, and danced to, and as the final track resolves, it is meant to remain as a symbol of its origin: an unceasing, unifying collective of fertility, strength, and an inevitable spring.
“It’s funny, I was so afraid of writing another sad album, but the process itself was so joyful and celebratory, and the process of performing it and bringing it together was so joyful with all of these musicians, that now I don’t actually think of it as a sad album. I mean, it’s not a happy album. But in that way, it feels like the maypole — it’s all of the colors.”