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.