LOGAN WHITE
Nandi Rose of Half Waif.
See You at the Maypole, the latest album by Half Waif (featuring singer-songwriter Nandi Rose), is a gorgeous collection of songs with a strong undercurrent of nature and a hopeful message about finding color in our cold, dark personal winters. Nandi writes eloquently and evocatively about creating and then losing a life when she miscarried, and about finding the strength to move past disappointment.
Waking up to the renewal from the sun’s warmth, she reminds us, is an important survival skill after falling into the depths of sadness and regret. Coming from a young woman, I find her gratitude a relief and a useful reminder. When “the mist in morning light” goes missing, as it does in her opening track “Fog Winter Balsam Jade,” she places her “hands into the earth” and says thank you for her first shot at becoming a mother. She sings: “And now every July will never feel the same, and cutting an apple and hearing your name, or watching the heron take flight in the rain.”
Her majestic songs contain haunting lines and meditative rhythms. In “Collect Color,” she has to “wake up here to collect color on the walk.” In “Figurine,” she whispers “I love you when it’s snowing/I love you when it’s warm,” and even though “everything is gone,” she ponders a figurine turning on its axis and acknowledges that “it’s gonna get so much better.”
Never have I listened to a collection of songs that brings me so completely on a walk through the woods of grief, and on a path that encounters the inevitable sun that often shines through in moments of despair. Nandi asks in “Sunset Hunting”:
How can winter light be golden when everything else is dead.
How can there be life inside me and then death?
Where is my gold?
And how do I hold onto it?
There’s not another soul around.
Still, I go hunting for something and this cold season is alive with the warmest glow
And I know, I know it’s possible I will collect color
I will face the grave and come up smiling
Nandi — who will present a Half Waif show at The Outpost in the Burbs in Montclair, Feb. 22 — and I spoke via Zoom and emails about her music, her son River, and more.
The cover of Half Waif’s album, “See You at the Maypole.”
Q: See You at the Maypole beautifully expresses loss, pain and hope. Can you tell me what inspired this album?
A: I set out to make an album about the journey into motherhood — something I’d been looking forward to for a long time. The first few songs I wrote for the album — including “King of Tides,” “I-90,” “Heartwood” and “Collect Color” — were written from a place of peering into a crystal ball, trying to decipher my future. I was excited and hopeful and unsure of what was ahead, and yet fully open-hearted.
A few months after that, I experienced a missed miscarriage with my first pregnancy, where I didn’t realize the life had stopped growing until I went to my first ultrasound and was told there was no heartbeat. It was devastating — that flipped switch where one moment I was carrying life and the next I was carrying death. When my body failed to recover over the next four months — an entire season, from just before the winter solstice until just after the spring equinox — I fell into a very dark place.
But it’s in my nature to find the bright spark, the beauty, the hidden exit, the opening in every shut-door moment. And that’s what the album became: a journey out of lifeless winter and into the promise of spring. A reminder that that springtime — that sense of being alive — is with us all the time, even when we feel the most dead.
It was also a way for me to find faith in the future again, to not fear the fog of what was ahead.
Q: Do you use sensory details and natural landscapes to evoke hope for renewal? What do they mean to you?
A: Absolutely. It sounds trite, but I really do believe nature is the best teacher. I live in Upstate New York, just about an hour from where I grew up in Western Massachusetts, and the seasonal shifts there are dramatic. I hate the cold, but I don’t think I could ever leave this part of the world. Each season is an opportunity for reorienting, for reconnecting with the earth, for reestablishing harmony with the environment. Whenever I feel off-kilter or adrift, I look to the land and learn so much about how to trust, how to let go, how to conserve or expend energy.
LOGAN WHITE
NANDI ROSE
Q: You referenced in your songs and press materials that need to see color in the midst of our personal winters. What does that mean to you?
A: “Collecting Color” was a concept that came to me when I was on a walk to the recording studio in Brooklyn one day. Where I live upstate, beauty is so obvious, so easy to access. But on that walk in the industrial part of Sunset Park, I was passing by chickens in cages ready for slaughter, and construction sites, and pavement laden with trash and chewing gum stains.
My eye was drawn to a single blue morning glory coming through a chain link fence, and that seemed to sum everything up: the need sometimes to actively seek out something good in life, to collect the color, to pay attention to the beauty that’s there in the midst of the ugly. It doesn’t always bash you over the head, but it’s there. After the miscarriage, as I faced a very long stretch of winter both literally and figuratively, I came back to that idea again and again.
Q: Tell me what the exquisite song “Figurine” expresses, including the opening line “I love you when it’s snowing/I love you when it’s warm/I felt it growing in me and now everything is gone.”
A: I wrote “Figurine” when a friend of mine was staying with us right after a breakup, only a few weeks after the miscarriage. We were both wounded and hurting and in need of this reminder that things were moving and shifting and changing, even when we were seasonally, emotionally and even physically in a time when things were still and dead. I wanted to conjure up this image for us of a figurine spinning in a music box. “I love you when it’s snowing/I love you when it’s warm” was a way of expressing the pain of losing something, or someone, that was loved through all seasons, all times of day, all moments. And yet the world keeps spinning, and we do learn to move on.
Q: Can you tell me about the musicians who have inspired you?
A: My first inspirations, back when I was in middle school, were Joni Mitchell and Tori Amos for their fearless voices and experimentalism. Imogen Heap was another early influence for the same reasons.
For See You at the Maypole, I was listening to a lot of Judee Sill and Jane Siberry — drawn to that sound of folk-pop songwriting from the past, as well as Sibylle Baier, who crafted such lovely, aching, naked songs that reminded me you don’t need a lot of sonic bells and whistles to make something memorable.
As for more contemporary artists, I love the abstract, deconstructed compositions of Claire Rousay, who recently did a remix of my song “Ephemeral Being,” and Alex G’s often bizarre, always beautiful songs.
LOGAN WHITE
NANDI ROSE
Q: Can you tell me about your creative and expressive use of vocals on this album?
A: I think of the voice as my primary instrument. It’s the instrument I feel like I know the best and have the most control over.
With all my past albums, I’ve mostly done my own harmonizing, creating stacks of my own vocals, in part out of necessity and conservation of resources, but also in part out of fear of bringing other people in. After this experience of loss, though, I very much needed to not be alone.
I craved other voices. I wanted them to swoop in and carry me on the wings of their sound. On See You at the Maypole, I was so thrilled to work with a New York-based choir called Khorikos on a number of songs — our voices together felt like a collective wailing. These vocal compositions were almost like a sonic representation of the maypole: different voices threaded and braided together like colorful ribbons.
Q: When did you first get involved with music as a vocalist and songwriter. Did your early experiences give you a keen eye?
A: I was always singing and making up songs as a kid. It felt like the most natural way for me to be in the world. My dad played guitar and a number of Irish instruments, and we’d do these family jams at all our gatherings, singing along to Joni Mitchell and Simon & Garfunkel and Bob Dylan and The Beatles.
I started my first band when I was 9 years old, and then in middle school I began to really call myself a songwriter and claim that as part of my identity, right when my parents split up and I most needed an outlet to process the fracture. I was also very involved in musical theater growing up, and I wrote a few musicals. For a while, I was sort of embarrassed by that history, how “uncool” it was. But with these new shows, where I’m incorporating more theatrics and choreography, it feels like I’m getting back to those roots, embracing my past. It feels like a homecoming in a way.
Q: Tell me about your use of dance in the video for “Figurine” (watch below). What were you expressing?
A: I worked with my college dance teacher, Kora Radella, for all the choreography across the Maypole visuals, including the live show. She has such an incredibly beautiful, fine-tuned sense of creating ritual through gesture. Her movements are poetry in motion. We talked about “preacher arms” for the “Figurine” video, which meant a kind of swaying, surrendered motion that I think perfectly sums up the vibe of the record as a whole. Drinking from the hands as if cleansing the soul with the holy current of the atmosphere. Creating circles in the water as if initiating a protection spell around the self.
Q: I love your delicate song “Slow Music” and the line “I stick my tongue out to taste the sky.”
A: “Slow Music” was actually the earliest song I wrote for the album. It was in the beginning of the pandemic, when I was feeling so stuck and needed the reminder that even in silence, even in stillness, there is music. It’s also a bit of an homage to an Angel Olsen lyric that has always stuck with me: “I am silence now, but I am always song.” Later, putting together the collection that became See You at the Maypole, the lines resonated in a new way, as I faced that deadly still winter and needed reassurance that things were still moving forward.
ALEX S.K. BROWN
NANDI ROSE
Q: In “Sunset Hunting,” you sing “I will collect color” and reference having life and death inside you. Can you tell me about this song?
A: That winter, I started a practice I called “sunset hunting,” where I’d get in the car and drive to find the sunset, since our house was too shaded by trees to get a good view of the sky. I really needed that blast of color and beauty, and that reminder that the world was turning and I was still a part of it. It was another form of collecting color.
It’s one of the most interesting songs to me, structure-wise. It was built off a voice memo that I recorded one day while driving down my street. I just started talking into my phone, narrating what was happening — the hawk flying over my house, passing by my neighbor Jimmy sleeping in his truck. I was so struck by the golden light coming through the bare trees, that there could be something so warm and aglow even in the middle of winter. I was in a lot of pain in that moment: physical pain that radiated throughout my pelvis and constantly reminded me of what I’d lost. This was another moment of nature being a teacher, a guide: If there could be gold in that landscape, I could find my gold, too.
Q: In “Heartwood,” you use spoken word with an interesting arrangement ending with instrumental vocals. Tell me about this poetic song.
A: This is one of my favorites on the record, I think because it feels so different. The lyrics existed originally as a poem. I had no intention of making it into a song. But then one day, I was noodling around on this synth riff, and I decided to try speaking the words over it. It was one of those flow state improvisation moments, where the marriage of the two just made sense. Then I harmonized the spoken word, which is a technique I was experimenting with across the album. The first line, “I always thought you were made of trees,” is something my friend Charlie actually said to me once, and I love how simultaneously silly and poetic it is.
The cover of the 2020 Half Waif album, “The Caretaker.”
Q: Do you think your new album is a departure from or part of a continuum with your last few albums?
A: I think it’s all a continuum. I’m learning so much about myself and about the craft of songwriting and arranging and producing with each album. Every time I make a new body of work, there’s always something I want to try that’s different from the album before. With this one, my co-producer Zubin (Hensler) and I really didn’t want to make any big electronic pop songs — that was a goal of ours for the previous record, Mythopoetics. This one wanted to be more organic, more of-the-earth. But I see the lineage, the through-line, in all of it. Whenever I have an inkling of regret or shame about something I’ve made or released in the past, I remind myself that I could never have gotten to where I am today if I hadn’t made that thing, and what an honor it is to get to share that process of growth with the world.
Q: Tell me about your writing process. Do you find that raw emotions lead to your best songs?
A: For sure. I honestly wish I could write from a place of less emotion sometimes. But it never turns out quite as good. I find that I really need the propulsion of emotion to get me going. That’s where my best work has come from. I used to feel kind of sheepish about the fact that I always write “sad” albums (though I don’t think of them as fully sad) until a friend of mine said, “But I come to your music when I’m feeling sad!” It made me feel better to think I could be a safe space for people going through some of these headier, heavier, pricklier, more complex emotional experiences. Though I do want to reiterate that I don’t actually think of this music as sad. It might come from a place of grief, but it’s much more colorful than that. It certainly doesn’t make me feel sad to perform it. It makes me feel very alive, and on the other side of that aliveness is a deep, delicious form of joy.
Q: Now you have a new life — your son, River — has he entered your songs?
A: Not yet! I honestly haven’t written much music at all since he was born. I’ve been working on a memoir, so all my creative energy has gone into that project, in addition to promoting See You at the Maypole and putting together the live show. I’m really curious how motherhood is going to affect my songwriting. Right now, I’m most interested in writing more theatrical, performance art-type pieces, as opposed to straight-up albums.
Q: What should we expect to hear at the upcoming show at Outpost in the Burbs?
A: A five-piece band of dear friends (we all got matching tattoos on this tour), processing life’s mishaps and adventures together, scavenging joy, foraging for communion, surrendering to the moment, conjuring harmony, alchemizing catharsis, all in real time. It’s very dynamic, organic, tender, emphatic and sacred.
Half Waif will perform at the Outpost in the Burbs series at the First Congregational Church in Montclair, Feb. 22 at 8 p.m., with Slowspin opening. Visit outpostintheburbs.org.
CONTRIBUTE TO NJARTS.NET
Since launching in September 2014, NJArts.net, a 501(c)(3) organization, has become one of the most important media outlets for the Garden State arts scene. And it has always offered its content without a subscription fee, or a paywall. Its continued existence depends on support from members of that scene, and the state’s arts lovers. Please consider making a contribution of any amount to NJArts.net via PayPal, or by sending a check made out to NJArts.net to 11 Skytop Terrace, Montclair, NJ 07043.
