Half Waif – Ephemeral Being

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, today she announces the transformative ‘Ephemeral Being’ EP being released at the end of the month, on May 31.

Half Waif also shares the lead single “Big Dipper.”

“This is a song about looking for answers, and finding none, and looking again,” Rose explains of “Big Dipper.” “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.’”

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