Half Waif Keeps Her Promise

“To be a bird and tuck my head into my feathered neck, watch all the world turn dark,” Nandi Rose sang at the dawn of her last Half Waif album, Mythopoetics. “Wish I could live like that.” Three years ago, there was a softness worth gleaming from the murk—transcribed by Rose via an album fastened into a landscape of electronics. Her eye remained affixed onto details of living in the company of collapse. She sips on a cup of coffee getting colder, she fills her home with aromas that spark romance and creativity and ache. Her lostness never came to us in vehicles of platitudes. No, what she stirred within us then, it was vacancy swirling in the embarrassments of living. How absurd, that humans must go through all of this alone. How ridiculous, that that sentence could define someone else’s ending.

Mythopoetics was one of the first albums I ever reviewed, just a month into my freelancing life and for a magazine I no longer read. I suggested to my editor that the album merited a perfect score, but he was adamant that a 9 was the highest mark they could endorse, that 10s are reserved for instant classics or records that will move the needle on our culture. Frankly, I think that’s a crock of shit; perfect albums get released every week. Three years have passed and I still believe Mythopoetics is a perfect album—a lesson in love, loss and aging told through measurements of space and gestures of goodwill, confusion and gratitude. There is no person in this world I would want guiding me through the annals of grief more than Nandi Rose. With her poetry surrounding me, “sense” is a noun I can touch, argue with and breathe in.

When the fourth Half Waif LP, The Caretaker, came out in 2020, COVID-19 brought my trauma to a rupture. Three and four years had passed since I lost all of my grandparents within 12 months of each other, but I was in college and couldn’t allow myself to linger in what had been so devastatingly unsettled. But then I wasn’t in college—I was in lockdown in different cities, tending to a relationship fracturing in half without an income or sense of direction. And then I heard a voice: “In April, I felt cable. I didn’t need you here, eclipsed back into summer. God, how has it been a year?” Nandi Rose’s words trickled into my ears and then, after enough repeated listens, they fell back out of my own lips. A year passed and Mythopoetics arrived, and those 12 songs drew back the curtains and asked me to look head-on at a misery I’d wanted to so badly abandon.

I say all of this because I believe Nandi Rose is our greatest living songwriter—if only because, when I listen to her sing through the complicatedness of empty, upsetting existence, I think she puts me closer to God. Or, at the very least, she gets me closer to the idea of comfort. Today, Rose has released the new Half Waif album, a double-LP called See You at the Maypole—a declarative, guiding statement. “Meet me during warmer days,” she offers, but in five different words, as she wrote a majority of the album between December 2021 and May 2022. “I’ve always found winters very hard,” she says. “I’m a January baby, and it almost feels like this cosmic joke that I was born right in the heart of winter—because I’ve always fought against it.” And Rose came into a frozen world fighting, born without a breath as her mother’s umbilical cord wrapped around her neck.

But the winter of 2021 was a particularly hard season for Rose, as she went through a miscarriage but wasn’t recovering, because her body had retained tissue from the pregnancy but never expelled it. “It was very, very confusing,” she says. “I just didn’t get it. They were like, ‘People ovulate two weeks after a miscarriage. You’re gonna get your period back. You’re gonna be able to try again, you’re going to move on. You’re going to move forward with your life.’ I was like, ‘Great, let’s just get back to where we were.’ I wanted so desperately to be pregnant again.”

When August 2021 came around, Rose was about to take her IUD out. It was a marker of a moment, a symbol of her taking a step toward something she’d always wanted to be: a mother. “I’d wanted it for years,” she admits. “At that point, I was 32 and a lot of my friends were having babies. I was like, ‘I’m ready,’ but we really had to find the right moment. It’s hard—you’re a touring musician, and then there is a pandemic.” Rose went alone to her husband Zach Levine’s family’s cabin in the Catskills, a place she’d never gone to by herself. There, she began writing her Mythopoetics follow-up and songs were pouring out of her—“I-90,” “King of Tides,” “Heartwood,” it felt like her next collection of work was going to be shimmering, hopeful record about taking a leap into the precipice of motherhood.

A month later, Rose and Levine found out about her first pregnancy in a green room bathroom at Mississippi Studios in Portland. It was an ascendant time of excitement and hope, as the couple were moving into the future they’d long wanted. But then, they were blindsided by a routine ultrasound that couldn’t pick up a heartbeat. “There was no life there,” Rose says. “I was literally carrying death in my body.” After the miscarriage and Levine’s mother receiving a pancreatic cancer diagnosis a month later, Rose found herself facing deep ideas of mortality and illness. She looked onward to the warmth of spring, and the Maypole—and its symbolism of fertility—became her balefire. “When my body was going through this,” she explains, “it was a very isolating experience. It’s really lonely having a body that doesn’t properly fulfill its functions. These songs came out of this very personal kind of sadness.”

She looks back on that version of herself with great tenderness, but she also cringes at what she didn’t know then, an unfounded feeling memorialized during “Big Dipper,” when she sings, “I miss myself before I knew I couldn’t keep the sound.” “There was a 10-day period where the life had stopped growing and I didn’t know it yet,” she says. “When I look back, in my mind’s eye, at that time, that’s what’s so hard. I see myself patting my belly and talking to it, and there was nothing there. It’s so gutting. There was a sense of innocence that I couldn’t get back after that first experience of being pregnant. My mom had two miscarriages before me, so I was really, really nervous about miscarriage. But I had a little mantra for myself. I would say, ‘My worry is the wind, my love is the sun.’ My worry is this thing that’s moving through, and my love is this big, vast constant and it will overpower everything.

Rose read Francis Weller’s book The Wild Edge of Sorrow and learned about rituals of grieving, where one person would go through trauma and everyone would come together and wail with them, enveloping each other in a cacophony of primal screams. “I don’t even know if I would say I lost a person—I didn’t, it was an early pregnancy loss—but the idea of this promise of a person I was going to meet and the promise of the person that I was going to become, that’s what I was grieving,” Rose continues. “I felt like I suddenly understood this deeper level of humanity. There was this song underneath the earth all the time that I had never heard before. This collective stamping of the ground, I hear it now. The Maypole became this symbol of a place where we all met after those leveling experiences of grief. We could all come together and be close and celebrate being alive and being on this journey together.”

A theme of See You at the Maypole is the act of collecting colors. There’s a song written about it, as there is a nod to the act of sunset hunting—which is something Rose was doing often during that winter three years ago. “I was like, ‘I have to get out of the house and go and find the sunset, because I couldn’t see it from my house,” she remembers. “I needed to drink in that color every night at 4 PM. I just had to bring color into my life however I could.” The Maypole itself is a colorful image, and those colors are braided. There’s strength in that, in how difficult it is to unravel a braid. While “Figurine” lays loss bare with a complex, emotive portrait of one life altered by the passing of another, a song like “The Museum” finds Rose interrogating forward-motion and its inability to cease. Drama and laughter are both habits, but it’s up to us to decide which one to kick. “Give it another year” becomes an affirmation that dissolves into change under the shadow of a passing, sentimental time. “I still go to the movies, and I think that it’s beautiful,” Rose sings. “Fake lights making everything look like glitter. And when I go to my high school, I see that the view has changed. All the apple trees they planted have finally grown up.”

“I was literally carrying death in my body” is a sentence that has stuck with me since hearing Rose say it for the first time. It’s a gnarly truth that she and so many others have lived in, and it’s the kind of harsh poetry that the plague of existence pulls out of you. Rose cites the writing of Samantha Hunt often, particularly that of The Unwritten Book. “She talks about having children and how she looks at her daughters and thinks, ‘Oh, I made another death,’ because, in giving birth to life, you are inherently giving birth to death,” Rose says. “That blew my mind when I read that line, just the inextricableness. Birth is such a joyful time, but it’s also inherent in that process of birthing. Something is creating death, so it was a chilling experience to be carrying that death. I hadn’t even birthed it yet; it already had its full life cycle within my body. In that way, I was almost like a tomb.”

On songs like “The Museum” and “Heartwood,” Rose reckons with the idea of becoming a parent, using motherhood as a, like she puts it, “promise” rather than a tangible, ongoing reality. When the “I felt it growing in me, and now everything’s gone” lyric in “Figurine” turns into “Anointed by loss, it was an almost impossible hurt,” you begin to better understand that, even though 10 to 20-percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage and one in four women miscarry, there is such rapturous, life-altering and life-taking suffering even when it’s a commonality. See You at the Maypole is an album that resonates because Nandi Rose’s lens through which she views the world is one so many of us have looked through, or know someone else who has.

My parents spent years trying to have a second child after me, but couldn’t after my mom was diagnosed with a polycystic ovarian syndrome-induced secondary fertility. Two decades later, a doctor told me that I would never be a parent naturally—that, to have kin, it would require surrogacy or IVF, or something of that un-nature. I’ve spent a lot of time in that world, and I get overwhelmed sometimes with how much grief all of us endure and how each day can be such a small but gutting vessel of loss. Your cells remember. Your body certainly keeps the score. It took Rose nine months to get pregnant again, the exact amount of time it took See You at the Maypole to gestate. In the vacancy between her pregnancies, something else was created, carried and birthed.

During her second pregnancy, Rose had her first-ever full-blown panic attack. “I had no idea what was happening,” she admits. “I was on the floor, in a sweat, and I couldn’t breathe.” She takes a pause to pull up a statistic on her computer that she wants to recite correctly. “One in three women develop PTSD after early pregnancy loss, and some still exihibit symptoms a full nine months later,” she continues. “In those nine months, something else gestates, which is a trigger that happens in that time. That’s why I find this period of my life to be so potent.” Not only did she make See You at the Maypole, but Rose is also writing a book about her experience, and that statistic she read is a part of the chapter she’s currently working on. But that portal, for anyone who’s approaching it, varies for everyone, as we are all calibrated by hope, loss, grief, failure and unmet expectations differently. A lesson, and a message, told across See You at the Maypole taps into what acceptance looks like when all of those variables are acknowledged—how you might begin to surrender to a force greater than yourself.

Last year, Pitchfork ran an Allison Hussey-penned article entitled “The Invisible Work of Mothers in Music,” where she spoke with many musicians—like Sharon Van Etten, Meg Remy and Corin Tucker—who have balanced their work life with parenthood. It’s a terrific deep-dive into the conversations around healthcare and parenting in the music industry, but it also got me thinking about the inverse—about the musicians who have either lost children or aren’t able to be parents. As writers, part of what we do is we immortalize lives in our work, whether it’s our own or that of others. But I’m not a mother, and I don’t know what it’s like to be one—nor do I know what it’s like to stop being one—but I’ve been around people who have lost children at various stages of life. And in those stories I find necessary truths that are elemental in my lexicon of living. And in Half Waif’s chiaroscuro, there is both a dance and a sense of togetherness draped in survival.

When Nandi Rose was working on See You at the Maypole, she was looking forward to doing press around it. “I was like, ‘I actually really want to talk about it,’ because I went looking, immediately, for other stories and forms of art that talked about [miscarriage],” she says. On the night she took the pills that would expel the dead cells from her body, Levine’s younger sibling Nick sent Rose an article written by Lindsay Turner for The Atlantic. “This woman was talking about how poetry saved her life after a miscarriage,” she continues. “Sharon Olds had written a couple of poems about miscarriage that I found just incredibly beautiful and comforting in that moment. I looked to art as a salve, but music has always been my place to go when I need healing. I remember there being a period immediately after the miscarriage, where I was like, ‘I wonder what I’m gonna write from this.’ For two weeks, it was static.”

Abnormally, See You at the Maypole began with Rose singing around her house, which is not how she typically writes music. Her preference of origin is usually her piano, or even a prompt of some kind, but she began humming a melody that would become the album’s opening track, “Fog Winter Balsam Jade.” It was haunting, in a way, but it’s also an honoring of how music crept back into her life on its—and her—own terms. See You at the Maypole began with a voice, which is the thing Nandi Rose so often comes back to. “I lost so much faith in my body, and it makes me really sad when I say that,” she says. “I did not trust my body at all anymore. How did it not know that this thing wasn’t alive? Why didn’t it recover for four months before I knew what was going on? I felt so betrayed. But, first and foremost, I think of myself as a singer. My body is my instrument. Through all those months, when I was railing against myself, I was also singing. So, my body wasn’t betraying me. It was doing exactly what I needed it to do, to process and heal.”

Nandi Rose’s voice, too, is an expression I return to often. When she sings through the bridge of “Dust,” you are hearing scratch vocals she siphoned from a demo tape—a replica of her hushing into a microphone at dawn while her husband slept in their bedroom across the hall. When The Caretaker and Mythopoetics arrived in back-to-back years, it was her singing on “Take Away the Ache,” “Ordinary Talk” and “Sourdough” that lingered but never vanished. “I would share my own blood if it’d help the ones I love” felt resound then, but in the context of See You at the Maypole’s sprawling tumult, it is resolute in its impossibleness. Control is a fickle, confusing and disorienting thing: We want so badly to have all of it, but we so often can have none of it. On See You at the Maypole, Rose wanted to relinquish the role of being her own backup singer. In turn, the NYC-based Khorikos choir sings on “Big Dipper,” “Dreaming of Bears” and “Fog Winter Balsam Jade,” and she tracked the vocals with them early in her second pregnancy. “It was an amazing moment when they were singing these signs that I had written in this other time, the winter before,” she says. “To be on the other side of it and to get to say that I’m actually pregnant again, it was a full-circle moment and, just hearing all those voices, transcendent.”

Rose made See You at the Maypole in Chathan, Kingston, Manhattan and England with her longtime and deeply-trusted collaborator Zubin Hensler, along with Levine, Josh Marre, Andrew Sarlo, Hannah Epperson, Spencer Zahn and Jason Burger, among others. There is something to be said about collecting 17 songs as difficult as these and asking others to not just step into your vision and into this grief and into this catharsis, but to help make all of those circumstances something that the rest of us can step into as well. “There’s a Glennon Doyle quote that I love,” Rose says. “It’s something like, ‘I entered this ache alone, and on the other side I found everybody else.’ I feel like that perfectly captures what this time was for me and then, sonically, we did that—by having it start with me, and then bringing in Zubin, and then busting the doors open and being like, ‘I want you, and I love you, and I want your presence here, and I want you to make this joyful braid with me.’ I needed the support of everybody else to get through it. It feels really right to have all these other players adding their colorful sonic squiggles over mine.”

Nearly three years have passed since Rose’s miscarriage. Her son, River, is a year old, and the loss that defines and shapes See You at the Maypole eventually became a life. How special that is cannot be understated, now that Rose has become the very thing she once grieved. “I’m looking at a photo of River when he was a newborn, and it’s such a huge moment in life, to inhabit these new roles,” she says. “Someone asked me if I felt like the chapter was closed on what happened, and I don’t think so. I’ve healed in a lot of ways. I can talk about this stuff without immediately crying or breaking down, but it is an integration. I think about that first life, and I imagine that they came and they left. They were meant to come to mulch the soil and enrich my body and my life by making way for the mighty River to come into my life. It feels like a continuation.”

Birth, death, cycles, seasons and stories—they all compound and layer our histories that we build out of our ancestry. They were bound up in Rose’s life until they became the song of her humanity, and she carries that forward with her. “Something that I was thinking about during that time was this fear that I had, like, ‘What if this time doesn’t make me stronger, it just makes me sadder?’” she recalls. “We always think that, when we’re going through something hard, ‘At least I’ll be strong on the other end.’ But what if I’m not stronger? What if I’m just a sadder person because I went through this? Now, I’m a couple years removed, and I’m sadder. But I’m happier, too.” True to her word, See You at the Maypole ends in faith. “I’m gonna love my life,” Nandi Rose sings, as her piano falls away and gusts of ambience fade to black. “You got it in you, too.” The story carries on, as a strange depth to life reveals itself. There’s a spring that awaits us, where the world becomes a new color, and there’s another sunset to go collect.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.