Half Waif
See You At The Maypole
Singer, songwriter, and producer Nandi Rose, who records and performs internationally as Half Waif, develops the live arrangements, choreography, and visuals for seventeen songs that comprise her new record, See You At The Maypole, with her eight-piece ensemble at PS21. The residency culminates with the world premiere of the songs from the record — an album release performance as the closing event of the 2024 season (September 29–October 5).
With the ability to “turn her voice into a choir” (The New York Times), Rose leads an eight-piece ensemble—a chamber-music-style trio of harp, clarinet, and violin on top of a pop-style band of piano, guitar, bass, and drums—through this complex new work: seventeen original songs that take her classical piano and vocal training into a lush world of expansive arrangements and experimental electronic production, focusing on themes of motherhood, loss, and nature in “a recognition of personal sadness, and a call to ecstatic togetherness.”
For Chatham-based singer, songwriter, and producer Nandi Rose, writing a song is an act of transformation. As Half Waif, Rose pieces together the patchworks of our darkest and most vulnerable moments with a golden thread, crafting a majestic evocation of the human experience that permeates with a graceful strength. Over the past decade, Rose has built upon her classical training to create a bold and unique sound that melds pop and folk songwriting styles with experimental production and arrangements. It is a form of emotional storytelling that is radically vulnerable and deeply layered, probing what it means to be alive and our relationship with ourselves and the world.
Since joining the roster of renowned indie label ANTI- Records (Tom Waits, Fleet Foxes, Mavis Staples), Half Waif has released the critically acclaimed records The Caretaker (2020) and Mythopoetics (2021), which was described by the New York Times as a “chordal anthem” and featured on their Best Songs of the Year list. Half Waif has also appeared on NPR’s Tiny Desk series and toured internationally.
SEE PHOTOS FROM THE PERFORMANCE
