When Half Waif’s Nandi Rose began writing See You at the Maypole, she had just experienced a missed miscarriage and learned that her mother-in-law had pancreatic cancer. To process her grief, she started chasing the sunset. Driving down country roads on “Sunset Hunting,” a track on the new album, she is struck by the image of winter sunlight bouncing off barren land. Rose is no stranger to expressing inner turmoil: Albums like 2021’s Mythopoetics and 2020’s The Caretaker document the struggle to be known, the weight of her desire, the fear of abandonment that deep love instills in her. On See You at the Maypole, those sentiments send her searching for a way out. The album’s poignancy lies in her ability to hold both pain and beauty together at once, to allow the intensity of one to heighten the experience of the other.
Rose’s sunset ritual underlines the solace that solitude offers. Throughout the album, her grief and indignation heighten when she has to articulate her loss to others. On the languid piano and violin ballad “The Museum,” she resents the positive outlook of a loved one who suggests that “we make our own future.” The synth and layered vocals on “Velvet Coil” settle like a sigh as Rose admits that she feels loneliest around someone who is “Holding a mirror/To the dark river that runs within me.” And on opener “Fog Winter Balsam Jade,” she generally feels abandoned and unprotected by the world: “And nobody made me promises/No one offered me protection.”
Alternately alienated by her peers’ limited ability to save her yet also disturbed by the moments in which they see her too clearly, Rose turns to the comforts of nature. She finds inspiration in the understated resilience of a morning glory growing through a fence and admires the intuition of fish knowing which direction to swim. Nature also teaches her about impermanence: “The history of the river/Just give it time to pass/It was never ours” she sings on “Mother Tongue,” her voice piercing like a bell over a soft piano line. The river’s endless flow teaches her that loss is inevitable, but it also helps her cultivate hope: Sadness itself is a fleeting state, and after the winter, the spring will always follow.
Fittingly, for an album that confronts the inadequacy of language when confronted with the complexities of grief, many of the most evocative passages are textural rather than lyrical. Rose often distorts her vocals or experiments with a choir, to captivating effect. The vocal modulations feel like an embodiment of her attempts to change, to reach for a new self, while laying bare all the ways she has been permanently reconfigured by her pain. “Violetlight,” in which she dreams of a peaceful future, is one of the loveliest moments on the record. Blips of synth shimmer over her reverberating vocals like sunlight traversing a lake’s surface. Conversely, on “I-90,” Rose reminisces on a forgotten love with building fervor and confusion. When the choir cuts in at the end, the brightness of their voices accentuates the vivid imagery of her storytelling to create an unsettling aura that haunts the air even after the recording ends.
See You at the Maypole is an album of solitary mourning, but the music falls in a lineage of other songwriters who have grappled with the experience of losing a child. The way Rose thanks her child for making her a mother on “Fog Winter Balsam Jade” reminds me of Raveena’s stunning coming-of-age ballad “Time Flies,” in which she recounts a lost pregnancy and marvels, “I can’t believe I was a mother/Even if it was for a moment.” Motherhood is often positioned as a service to others: From childhood, women are conditioned to nurture those around them in preparation for becoming the primary caretakers of their children. But in both songs, the singers understand their experiences of motherhood as an internal and deeply personal shift, one that transcends the loss they experience. Rose’s nature imagery also reminds me of the way Joanna Newsom summons the cosmic energy of the stars and the anguish of dark water to mourn the infinite potential of a child who will never be born on “Baby Birch,” one of the greatest songs in her discography. Both writers tap something larger than themselves, accessing a heartbreaking sense of divinity to express their loss.
Ultimately, the album functions as an offering, an effort to commune with the listener despite the limitations of language and the specificity of her pain. On See You at the Maypole, Rose dreams beyond her immediate feelings into the vast potential of who she can become and how she can relate to others. In the process, she cultivates her own reasons to feel hopeful.
