Mythopoetics, the remarkable record Nandi Rose released as Half Waif in 2019, wove together stories from her life and family, contending with ideas of legacy and aging in grand, sweeping fashion. It’s so densely packed that listening to the album now feels almost like revisiting a greatest hits collection; I remember hearing many of its songs for the first time as if it were yesterday. But a single glance at material collected on Half Waif’s brand new LP, the 17-track See You at the Maypole, is a stark reminder of the violent and miraculous passage of time, just how much a few years contain. Rose made the record in the midst, or the edges, of immense personal turmoil: she found out she was pregnant in the summer of 2021, then endured a miscarriage that December, followed by months of medical complications. Working with co-producer Zubin Hensler, Rose hangs onto the music to capture the cosmic tide of anticipation, the magnitude of hurt and exhaustion, the hunger for a road ahead, the sounds of rejoicing in beauty and community, all swirling into one. It’s the kind of album we tend to call an emotional triumph, but it’s also a marvel of attention: to Rose’s immediate surroundings, to her stream of consciousness, to the particular cadence and melodic potential of words, to the textures and colour in music and beyond. It’s in this transformative wavelength Rose hopes we can all meet: feet firm on the ground, head up to taste the sky, moving on.
We caught up with Half Waif to talk about some of the inspirations behind See You at the Maypole, including driving, Sibylle Baier, mother figures, Sufjan Stevens’ The Age of Adz, and more.
Driving
Driving is referenced throughout the album, but the song that stands out most is ‘I-90’. It combines a lot of what driving signifies on the album – searching, loss, freedom, sunset hunting. Tell me what it brings up for you.
For a while, I lived in New York City, and I toured a lot in the 2010s, coming up as a band. At that point, I actually really didn’t like driving, so I had my bandmates drive. To this day, I still don’t drive in New York City. But driving where I live now, in upstate New York – I live less than an hour from where I grew up in Western Massachusetts, so these kinds of roads, this landscape, it’s so familiar to me. When I learned to drive, I was driving these kinds of roads – small county roads, county highways – which is so different from getting on a big open highway, which I’ll get to about I-90. I was doing a lot of driving that winter around country roads near my house, listening to music, but I also came up with this technique that I ended up using a lot on the record – not that this is an innovative technique, but it was new to me – which is to record voice memos. Sometimes I would sing, but sometimes I would just speak. A couple songs on the album, like ‘Shirtsleeves’, have voice memos in them. But ‘Sunset Hunting’ actually started as a completely spoken voice memo. I got in the car, turned on the voice memo on, and just started narrating. I later went back and added a melody and chords to that.
‘I-90’ also began as a voice memo. That whole end section – “driving into purple twilight” – was me improvising and them transcribing it to the chords of that song. You mentioned freedom – it’s funny, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but there’s a certain amount of freedom you have in the container of your car, to sing and try things out. And I never really thought to press record before and capture those moments. But it became a way to ground myself in the moment and describe my surroundings and what was happening. The end section of ‘I-90’ is just me singing about, yeah, driving into purple twilight, and there’s a truck, a sunset, white lines on the road, green trees – it was really just narrating as a way to put a stake in the ground at a time in my life where it felt like things were getting away from me.
My life had taken a detour. It looked so different than I thought it was going to look. I just had a miscarriage out of nowhere with no signs or symptoms. My body was not recovering, I was not moving on, I was very stuck in this physical vessel. And so, to get in the car and feel that sense of motion, and then be able to ground myself in a moment that felt so difficult to be in, but I was forcing myself to be there – to say, “Okay, this what’s happening, this is what I see,” and, “There is motion, even if I don’t feel it in my body,” because I was moving forward in the car. I think that was a way to give myself something that I was lacking. And it’s really cool that these songs were born out of this very specific way of writing.
More specifically, you mentioned sunset hunting, and that was almost a spiritual practice I developed during that time. I literally felt like I was hunting something – I was hungry for it. I needed to feed off this phenomenon that happened every night and that I couldn’t see at my house, there’s too many trees surrounding us. So I had to get in the car and physically go find them. It was a way of, first of all, bringing color into my life at a very colourless time. It was winter, not a lot of colour in the landscape, my life felt very bleak. I needed to see this glorious display in the sky. I needed a reminder that there was still motion, change, and transformation cycles, even when I felt like I wasn’t moving forward. And just wanting to find beauty. The winter is a brutal time – where I live, there’s not a lot of easily accessible beauty. You kind of have to go and find it, because I didn’t love my life. I didn’t like what it looked like. But I knew that I wanted to get back to the land of the living in a sort of sense – driving, getting in the car, fed into that idea.
I love this idea of motion as being grounding – at the same time, I’m thinking of another line from ‘Sunset Hunting’, about how getting in the car can also be a reminder that the world just goes on without us. Maybe you go out and find beauty, but you may also get the sense that the world is spinning at a rate that you can’t keep up with.
Absolutely. At that moment, I just felt like I had dropped out of the world. I think when we go through times of personal turmoil or crisis or catastrophe, you just feel you’ve been chucked out of orbit. And you’re like, “Wait a minute, everyone is going about their lives, and it’s all happening, and I’m not a part of it anymore.” That’s what that line is about: “I’m going sunset hunting, I can’t stand the thought that the world is going on without me.” And again, that was a narration. I don’t know if you’ve ever done morning pages from The Artist’s Way, but it sort of felt like that process of: you can just say anything, and you don’t have to use it, but it was interesting, the things that came up when I just allowed myself to talk to myself and recorded that.
I did want to briefly mention ‘I-90’, because I think that’s an interesting one where, I was driving on this major highway – I don’t love driving on the highway, and there’s something sort of terrifying about it where you’re facing your own mortality. That song is a lot about aging and facing what’s ahead for us – the “explosion on the road ahead” that we’re all sort of moving towards. So I think that song has this ominous undercurrent. I actually hadn’t put it together before, but it’s interesting that that’s the one that’s the highway song, and the other driving songs were these barren country roads. I think that feeling got transmuted into that song as well.
Sufjan Stevens’ The Age of Adz
Musically, the density and scope of the album seems to be a reference pointon See You at the Maypole.
Spot on. [laughs] I’m definitely a Sufjan fan, but I hadn’t heard Age of Adz. I don’t know how I missed that era. During one of my recording sessions in Brooklyn with Zubin Hensler, my dear friend and co-producer, who was very much at the heart of this entire album, he brought that album up. I believe it was in reference to – I actually think it might have been ‘I-90’, but specifically talking about how to bring sounds forward in moments of density. You said the word “density,” and that’s exactly what it was. He was like, “Well, you should hear this Sufjan record.” I’m relating it to us getting on a Revel, one of those mopeds you can rent around the city – I don’t live in the city anymore, so I don’t know, but I think it’s called Revel. [laughs] Zubin and I got on one, driving through the night streets, and I think he had just told me about this record.
In any case, it was a big light bulb moment for both of us, to build a reference of music that was built around songs — I mean, he’s a songwriter, very clearly and very brilliantly, but he’s also so interested in textural arrangements. I think I’ve felt a little self-conscious in the past about how drawn I am to density, and maybe in the past didn’t have as much skill to carve around it. In general, with this, Zubin and I were trying to pare down the arrangements, but in moments where we wanted a mix of synths and chamber instruments, Age of Adz provided a really helpful reference. It’s hard to find exact references for what you’re working on, but when you do, it’s like such a beacon to be like, “Ah, someone has done this!” Because so often when you’re in the studio, you’re fumbling around in the dark and trying to put words to ideas and trying to put words to ideas about sound – it needs new language. I think Zubin and I have come up with a really good working language where we get each other, but in those moments when we’re struggling to find a way forward, pulling in a reference like that is so helpful. That was a big turning point specifically in the production for both of us.
I’m also thinking about it from a lyrical standpoint, in the sense that that album saw him leaning more heavily toward personal themes. I don’t know if you thought about this in relation to See You at the Maypole, but there is a different level of exposure and intensity that you allow for, too.
That’s another thing that I really admire Sufjan Stevens for, is that he has historically – and I love Javelin, his new record, too – mined these intense personal moments and infused them with a shot of joy and celebration. There are moments that feel ecstatic on all of his records, particularly the newer ones, where you just feel your body want to abandon, surrender – almost religious in the way that it feels ecstatic. Certainly spiritual.
For me, with this experience of miscarriage, and then my mother-in-law was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a month later, it was just like thunderheads of intensity. Experiencing this kind of grief was – [laughs] I was going to say it was almost joyful, but I don’t think that’s the right word. There’s a feeling of moving through grief – when you go so deep into that place of soul annihilation, you connect more deeply with the world. When I went through this experience, I felt like I understood this vibration of humanity in a way that I was not attuned to before. I think that’s where the celebratory piece comes from, this is just part of the human experience, and I see you. I see you in that. I understand you more deeply, and we can connect in this place. That’s the idea of See You at the Maypole: I’ll see you there, my friend. We’re all going to be there, dancing out our demons and calling in springtime after this really intense winter. We’ll all be there together.
I think that specifically was something I wanted to do with this record. I always try to inject a feeling of hope into the music, but I really felt it in this experience. I felt both devastating grief and isolation, and then on the other side of it, total connection and resilience within community. There’s a Glennon Doyle quote that I keep coming back to in regards to this, and it’s something like, “I entered this ache alone, and on the other side, I found everybody else.” That was how I felt and how I wanted the music to feel. So, we had a lot of players come in, a lot of different sounds, and much more live instrumentation. Getting back to Sufjan, I think that is a real hallmark of his music. You hear Carrie & Lowell – talk about the most gutting material, and there’s a lot of shimmering beauty and uplifting feeling even in that most devastating moment. I love that about his music.
Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
This was a book that I was reading when I first went away to really consciously start crafting a new body of work, which became See You at the Maypole. At the end of August 2021, I went to a cabin that my husband’s family owns in the Catskills. So I went on my own little writing retreat, and I had never been there alone before. It was a really amazing experience. It was a little scary; it’s like out in the woods, and I would hear all these animals calling at night, just waiting for the morning. [laughs] But my days were just overflowing with ideas. It’s where I wrote ‘King of Tides’, ‘I-90’, and ‘Heartwood’, all within that three-day writing session. I’d take breaks from writing, and I would go and read Alexander Chee, so I feel like the essence of his writing and some of his themes wove their way in, whether consciously or not.
Specifically, I remember there’s an essay about Tarot and his experience of coming to Tarot, and it was something I was thinking about a lot at the time. I was really looking for signs. I was very open-hearted, like, “Bring my universe closer,” the line from ‘King of Tides’. I was right at the precipice of my journey to motherhood. I knew when I got back from the cabin, I was taking out my IUD, and that was the beginning of this journey. A month later, I was pregnant. It just felt like this time of reading the world for these clues and signs. I really had my ear to the ground – my future calling to me, I felt it. I felt the future calling. I think he was talking about king tides, which are like these extremely high tides. And then I was working on this song, and I called it ‘King of Tides’ because it sounded like a Tarot card. And right before my trip, I had gotten this Vedic astrology reading from a friend of mine, and he told me my moon was in my ninth house, and I didn’t even know what that meant. But I was like, “In the time of the Tarot, the ninth house moon,” which is how the beginning of ‘King of Tides’ goes.
So that was directly related to that song, but more generally, this idea of peering into the future and it’s all swirling with mist, but you’re looking so intently ahead, just wanting to know what’s going to happen. And of course, I had no idea. We can’t know. I had no idea that that record, which I thought was going to be this… I mean, that song, “Bring my universe closer,” I felt like I was at the threshold of something so sweet and magnanimous and magnificent. I was about to be a mother, and then it was totally taken away in this very brutal and visceral way, and I went on such a journey throughout the next year until I conceived again. So we can’t know what’s ahead, but that was a time in my life where I felt hopeful about the future, perhaps naively so. But anything that would tell my future, I was eating up.
Harmonizing speech videos on YouTube
Quite different from everything else we’ve been talking about.
[laughs] Yes.
But seeing that listed, I can hear the influence on songs like ‘Shirtsleeves’ and ‘Heartwood’. What took you down that rabbit hole?
I’m happy to talk about this, also because obviously, there’s a certain amount of seriousness and gravity to a lot of my work and a lot of what I write about, and certainly the material that inspired this album. It’s heavy. But there’s also a lot of play and experimentation in writing music and creating albums. I just absolutely adore the process, and I think I will do it for the rest of my life, no matter if anyone will hear it or not. Writing those songs is so integral to my being and the way I process the world, but it’s also crucial that there’s this lightness to it as well. I need that in the process, so it’s not just like ringing my heart out at the piano, you know? There is a lot of levity and joy in the process of writing, and this was part of it, this technique that I was exploring on a few songs.
I think ‘Shirtsleeves’ was the first one that I did it on, but it very much came from – I hadn’t watched these in a while, but I was remembering that as a category of YouTube videos that people would do with these memes like, “Oh, my God! A double rainbow!” And you go, [harmonizing] “Oh, my God! A double rainbow!” Following the cadence with melody is such a fascinating technique, and as a vocalist and someone who thinks of voice as my primary instrument, it really unlocked this new way of thinking about creating rhythm. I actually made a video for Ableton’s series One Thing, where I talked about this exact process of taking spoken word and creating a melody over it. It’s slightly different, because that’s how you create a melody from spoken word – this is actually just harmonizing the spoken word, keeping the spoken word, but the same seeds of the idea. But I think it sounds really cool. I think it’s fascinating to hear the voice in a really familiar way of talking and the familiar speech patterns, but then refracting it through melody and harmony feels like a prism on the words.
I saw that Ableton clip, and it got me thinking about how you conceptualize the relationship between poetry and melody. Like you said, in the video, it’s more about turning words into melody, but with this technique and the album more generally, it seems like you’re drawn to the malleability of spoken word itself; you’re playing with that middle space between spoken word and melody.
Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. I like that idea of there being this middle space that neither one can quite get at, so when you bring them together, you kind of get both. And that is something in general I was doing more on this record, writing from poems and from pre-existing words. My process with writing lyrics historically has been a lot of stream of consciousness, things just kind of come out, and I’ll edit some of it. But sometimes it’s really impossible to edit whatever came out, and you just end up leaving it, but maybe it’s not quite what you want to say. So I liked having a bit more control over the messaging and just how I wanted to convey it. ‘Velvet Coil’ and ‘Heartwood’ were complete poems that then became songs, and I feel like I was able to explore language in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to if I was singing as I said the words. So, I think you’re right that these ways of using the voice get at different things, and thus, there’s something even exponential that occurs when you bring the two together.
Mother Figures
I thought I was going to be a mother in a very specific way at the start of this record. That year of writing, until I did get pregnant again, was in part a journey to open myself up to other ways of mothering and broaden the definition of mother, because I was denied access to the very specific familiar notion of motherhood. I felt like I was denied. It was like, “Nope. This is not for you.” And then I couldn’t get pregnant again for a while, and it was maddening and heartbreaking. There are so many people who are living in the land of denied access to motherhood, to parenthood, and it can be a deeply painful space to be in.
Part of what I wanted to talk about is broadening the definition of mothering and coming to find how I could exist as a mother even when I wasn’t, physically, a mother yet. I think part of that was a conversation that I had with a good friend of mine where we were talking about the idea that creative collaboration is sort of inherently a mothering space, because when you become a mother, you decentralize yourself as the main figure. You’re subsumed by this other being, and you of open yourself up. You dismantle the ego, and you open yourself up to new energy. And that’s what the creative process is like, also. When you open the doors onto your work and you bring other people in, that’s a form of mothering. In creating this record with Zubin and with all of these players, it felt like a really mothering space. In that way, I felt like I was a mother. I was decentralized as the person who wrote a lot of these songs and my story, and it became less about that and more about what we were creating together. But then I also felt very mothered by the process. It was very nurturing, especially working with Zubin in that little room. It was this very dark, warm, small space. It was really womb-like, honestly.
And then, of course, Mother Earth and Mother Nature became sort of my ultimate mother, and where I came back home and found a lot of guidance and solace and inspiration in nature. I would go for walks almost every day all through the winter. I hate the cold; I absolutely hate the cold, and I forced myself to get outside and walk just to – again, I didn’t want the world to be going on without me. But nature and this land became such a mother to me in that time. Watching my beloved mother-in-law go through this really intense illness, and not know if she was going to survive the year. She’s still with us today, which is incredible. She’s beaten the odds. She still has stage 4 pancreatic cancer, but she is just showing such incredible resilience.
That was another piece that I wanted to touch on – looking at these mother figures in my life. My own mother had just finished a year of chemo for breast cancer. She had a mastectomy, so I’ve got my mother and my mother-in-law going through these illnesses, and then me going through this miscarriage, and then the land going through its own devastation with climate change. Looking at the flora and fauna where I live, and not knowing if it was going to be here when I did become a mother, and would my child know this land? Just looking at these mother figures that were all very wounded and yet so resilient through it all – that was an underpinning of spiritual inspiration. How do I get through this? They were modeling it for me.
And you become a part of it, that lineage. The “I” becomes “we.”
Yes. And thinking about generations and legacy – there was a feeling of history in this album, too. I don’t know whether that’s palpable or not, but I just remember when I wrote that song, ‘Mother Tongue’, I was in Wyoming. The geology out there is so rich, and you feel just surrounded by time; you can see it in all the layers of the rocks. They’re so ancient. I felt just like such a part of this lineage; even if I wasn’t a mother yet, you feel held by what’s come before. And I felt held by all the mothers before me.
Sibylle Baier
She’s one of my favorite artists, but I realize I’ve never actually said her name out loud.
It’s pronounced “Sibylla,” which, I’ll tell you why I know that.
YouTube betrayed me, then, because I looked up the pronunciation – it was one of those “How to pronounce…” videos.
Yup. [laughs] I thought it was “Sibylle” too, but that’s the traditional pronunciation, I think.
What drew you to her music and her story?
That fall when I was writing in 2021, a friend of mine came to visit to take some photos and hang out, and he was the one who played me that record, Colour Green. I think he just played me ‘Forget About’, and then I went and listened to the whole album. But I was just immediately stunned. It’s one of those songs that you hear and you remember exactly where you were. I remember exactly where we were. We were actually driving down my road, and there’s tons of goldenrod everywhere – it’s that time of year, early September. And I was just so struck by the rawness of her singing and the recording. It’s just so of a moment – you put a microphone in a room and forget about it. It felt very bold to record music that way, to release music that way and not dress it up. Here I am making this very produced music, and I was bowled over by how much was conveyed with how few tools.
It was something Zubin and I came back to a lot through recording, the idea of really recording performances as much as possible – not comping and editing together a bunch of takes, but letting things be a performance, letting things have little moments of imperfection. ‘Sunset Hunting’ was a full take of me singing and playing piano. We tracked ‘The Museum’ live with the band, though I did record the vocal after. A lot of the vocals on the record are scratch tracks or demos that never got re-recorded. I talked about this with driving and doing voice memos – capturing the moment – and that got translated to the recording process. I can trace it back to the moment of hearing that first Sibylle Baier song and being like, “This is it. This is everything.”
And then learning about her story, which is, I believe it was her son who found these recordings of hers years and years later and released it. So there was just no ego at all, and that was also just such a beautiful part of the story. How much those songs nurtured me, and how giving she was, ultimately, of herself without even trying. And I know a lot of people feel that way.
In a really magical twist of fate, after my miscarriage – I had this really bad recovery, which we don’t have to go into because it’s a long story. But I just didn’t really get proper care and had a lot of medical complications and sought out other kinds of healers because Western medicine failed me in that experience. One of the people I went to was a friend of my mom’s, who’s a sound healer. She does something called acutonics, which is like moving the body’s energy and vibrating the water in your cells through gongs, chimes, and tuning forks. I had a really amazing session with her that felt really transformative. And it turns out she was married to Sibylle Baier’s son. They’re no longer together, but Sibylle Baier was her mother-in-law.
No way.
I actually just saw this woman the other day because she’s a really good friend of my mom’s, and I told her that I was going to be doing this interview and talking about Sibylle, and she’s like, “Oh, we should go see her! She lives nearby, we should go, and you should tell her how much that record meant to you.” So we’re going to set up a meeting, which is going to be so incredible. I’m talking about going into this time of my life looking for signs and trying to bring the universe closer to me, and… this happened. That felt like a big wink from the universe.
Thich Nhat Hahn
My dad actually studied with Thich Nhat Hahn at Plum Village, his monastery in France. But he’s been this figure in my life. We had a quote of his up on the wall growing up: “You have arrived. You are home.” So his presence sort of seeped down into me as a child and growing up. He passed away the day after my mother-in-law got her cancer diagnosis at the end of January 2022. I remember sitting in this parking lot reading that; the rain was hitting the windshield as I was reading about his passing, and remembering this story my dad had told me about one of his experiences with Thich Nhat Hanh at Plum Village, when he came upon him talking to this group of schoolchildren. He was teaching them these ideas of continuation: there is no birth, there is no death, things just continue on. He’s like, “I’m gonna burn this piece of paper, what happens to it?” And it becomes smoke. The kids are like, “Oh, it became smoke.” And then he’s like, “Yeah, and then the smoke is going to go up into the sky. So if it rains later and the rain falls on you, you could say like, ‘Hello, little piece of paper,’ because you know that that paper became the smoke that became the clouds that became the rain.”
I love that story. It’s such a simple idea, it’s told to school kids, but it contains so many seeds of wisdom. So in that moment when I was reckoning with, “Oh my gosh, this person who I love so deeply is maybe going to leave us in a matter of months,” it was almost like Thich Nhat Hanh’s passing within 24 hours was like… I don’t believe that this was a message for me, but I did take a message from it. The timing of it was pretty remarkable, and it raining in that moment, I was like, even in his passing, he’s giving me his teaching. At that point, I was reading a lot of quotes of his while I was writing, so his words are actually woven into a number of songs on the record. We’re talking about forms becoming interwoven into other things; I can see this direct line of a tiny, tiny piece of his magnificent spirit becoming part of this music.
This interview hs been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Half Waif’s See You at the Maypole is out now via ANTI-.