Tag: Half Waif

singer/songwriters by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Half Waif Shares Cinematic “The Museum”

Last month, acclaimed singer/songwriter, musician and producer Nandi Rose, best known as Half Waif announced the release of her fourth studio album, See You At The Maypole. Slated for an October 4, 2024 release through ANTI- Records, the album’s material came to fruition after a newly pregnant Rose experienced a heartbreaking miscarriage in December 2021, followed by months of medical complications. “I was literally carrying death inside me,” she explains, “and then my body was frozen.” At the same time, Rose’s beloved mother-in-law was diagnosed with aggressive pancreatic cancer; for the acclaimed artist, it felt like the universe was playing an endless, cruel joke.

And so, Rose wrote to save herself. Before sunrise, she wrote in the quiet corner of the would-be nurses while her husband slept across the hall. These were lullabies for no one, whispers dissipating into the fog. Though the stem of many of the album’s songs were written in isolation, they would soon turn into a collective calling for anyone experiencing devastating loss. See You At The Maypole is a room for wailing, not just for catharsis, but for connection.

The album’s latest single “The Museum” is a breathtakingly cinematic track featuring soaring strings, twinkling keys, brooding oboe and a gently stuttering backbeat serving as a lush bed for Rose’s achingly tender vocal. Seemingly nodding at synthesis of film scores and Kate Bush, “The Museum” is anchored in loss, both real and anticipatory — and the absurdity of mundanity in a world on the brink of collapse.

“There’s a warehouse at the top of Main Street in my tiny town that’s being turned into a museum for Shaker art,” Rose explains. “It’s just down the road from my house, so I pass by it all the time. When I wrote ‘The Museum,’ I was thinking about how sort of beautifully delusional it is to create a museum at a time when the world is reaching the apex of climate crisis. This idea of preserving pieces of furniture in a pristine, white-walled space when outside, everything is collapsing.”

She continues, “I’d also read a headline about how people were vacationing in Iceland at an active volcano, and that seemed to hold the same feeling for me as the museum-under-construction. Tourism at the brink of apocalypse. Meanwhile, my husband and I were talking about building a family, building a future, and I was grappling with the responsibility of what it means to bring a child into this kind of world—where people pose for selfies while the earth explodes.”

Directed filmed and edited by Derrick Belcham and featuring choreography and movement direction by Kora Radella, the accompanying video for “The Museum,” is fittingly a museum painting-like visual.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Half Waif Shares a Breathtakingly Gorgeous Meditation on Grief and Loss

Back in May 2022, Nandi Rose, the creative mastermind behind the critically applauded Half Waif, was standing on the ridgeline in northeastern Wyoming, looking at the landscape, a layer cake of strata, the colors representing compressed geologic time. She was at an artist residency, where she found herself grappling with loss and looking for answers in the sagebrush.
The previous winter in Upstate New York, Rose’s life had been riddled with blows as she faced losing a family member to illness and moved through a medical recovery of her own.

As she was gazing out at the wide plains, she felt the beneficence of the passing of time. “I’m not a failure,” she thought to herself. “I’m an ephemeral being.”

Rose’s latest EP, the five-song Ephemeral Being EP is slated for a May 31, 2024 release through ANTI- Records. Recorded between the winter 2021 and into the following spring, the EP looks at the transience of life while celebrating the continuation of nature’s infinite cycles. The EP’s material, the first part of a larger body of work scheduled later this year, Rose finds comfort and hope in the natural world.

Sonically, the EP’s arrangement boldly blend elements of contemporary classical with indie rock and synth pop. And while being at turns fierce and delicate, the songs reportedly set e as a reminder of scale: that we are ephemeral and tiny in midst of geologic and cosmic time. It’s also a reminder that when you feel paralyzed by life’s disruptions, and when we are often at most desperate, that nature offers us perspective.

Ephemeral Being EP‘s first single “Big Dipper” is anchored around a breathtakingly lush arrangement of twinkling keys, skittering gated reverb-soaked beats, atmospheric synths, bursts of guitar. The Kate Bush-like arrangement serves as a satiny bed for Rose’s vulnerable and yearning delivery. And while the song conveys an overwhelming sense of loss and grief, the song’s viewpoint is not of devastating heartache, but of hope and resolve.

“This is a song about looking for answers, and finding none, and looking again,” Rose explains. ““It was written at a time when I was feeling very stuck in my body and overwhelmed by compounding griefs. I was inspired by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who had just passed away, and his idea of continuation–how we are not bound by our forms. We continue on. ‘This body is not me,’ he said. ‘So laugh with me, hold my hand, let us say good-bye, say good-bye to meet again soon.’”