Last month Half Waif aka Nandi Rose announced her new studio album, ‘See You At The Maypole’. Coming out in less than a month on October 4, this collection of music came to fruition after a newly pregnant Rose experienced a heartbreaking miscarriage in December of 2021, followed by months of medical complications. “I was literally carrying death inside me,” she explains, “and then my body was frozen.” In that same time, Rose’s beloved mother-in-law was diagnosed with aggressive pancreatic cancer; it felt like the universe was playing an endless, cruel joke. And so, Rose wrote to save herself. Before the sunrise, she wrote in the quiet corner of the would-be nursery while her husband slept across the hall. These were lullabies for no one, whispers dissipating into the fog.
In The Wild Edge of Sorrow: The Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller, the author highlights the importance of ritual spaces, and how many communities tend to gather in these spaces when someone has lost a loved one. Though the stem of many of these songs were written in isolation, Rose’s lullabies would soon bloom into a collective calling for anyone experiencing their own personal winter. ‘See You At The Maypole’ is a room for wailing, not just for catharsis but for connection. Like lung-bursting sing-a-longs alone in the car, notes leaving the open window to be caught by another.
Today she is sharing a new excerpt from that journey, the album track ‘The Museum’. Listen to it below.
Half Waif – ‘The Museum’
“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 described when discussing the song’s meaning. “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 then continued, adding: “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.”
Pre-Order ‘See You At The Maypole’
1. Fog Winter Balsam Jade
2. Collect Color
3. I-90
4. Figurine
5. Heartwood
6. Big Dipper
7. Shirtsleeves
8. Sunset Hunting
9. Dust
10. Slow Music
11. Ephemeral Being
12. Violetlight
13. Velvet Coil
14. The Museum
15. King of Tides
16. Mother Tongue
17. March Grass
