In May 2022, Half Waif aka Nandi Rose was standing on the ridgeline in northeastern Wyoming. The landscape was a layer cake of strata, the colors of compressed geologic time. Rose was at an artist residency, where she found herself grappling with loss and looking for answers in the sagebrush. The previous winter, back home in the frosted farmland of upstate New York, her life had been riddled with blows as she faced losing a family member to illness and moved through a medical recovery of her own. Now, gazing out at the wide plains, she felt the beneficence of the passing of time. I’m not a failure, she thought. I’m an ephemeral being.
Already known for writing songs that provide strength alongside openhearted vulnerability for troublesome and daunting times, Half Waif has announced her next release, the transformative ‘Ephemeral Being’ EP out on May 31. Recorded over the course of thewinter of 2021 and into the following spring, the EP looks at the transience of life while celebrating the continuation of nature and its cycles. Across these five songs—the first offering in a larger body of work coming later this year from Half Waif—Rose finds comfort and hope in the natural world. On “Heartwood,” she casts herself as an ancient oak tree, while on “Dreaming of Bears,” she imagines a loved one’s smile enduring after death as the curve of a river bend.
Of lead single "Big Dipper," Rose explains, “This is a song about looking for answers, and finding none, and looking again. It was written at a time when I was feeling very stuck in my body and overwhelmed by compounding griefs. I was inspired by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who had just passed away, and his idea of continuation--how we are not bound by our forms. We continue on. ‘This body is not me,’ he said. ‘So laugh with me, hold my hand, let us say good-bye, say good-bye to meet again soon.’"
At turns fierce and delicate, awash in arrangements that boldly blend contemporary classical with indie rock and synth pop, the songs on ‘Ephemeral Being’serve as a reminder of scale: that we are all ephemeral in the face of sandstone, sparrow, and ocean. That in times of feeling paralyzed by life’s disruptions—when our faith is shaken, and we are at our most desperate—nature offers us perspective. Life persists, Rose finds. Sometimes we just need a wider view.
REPRESENTATION FOR HALF WAIF
AGENT: Chris West