In 2022, Half Waif aka Nandi 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 the multi-artist announces her Ephemeral Being EP will drop on May 31 via ANTI- (Waxahatchee, Andy Shauf), listen to “Big Dipper” ahead of the album’s arrival.

“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.’”

Recorded over the course of the winter of 2021 and into the following spring, the Ephemeral Being 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,” inspired again by Hanh’s teachings, she imagines a loved one’s smile enduring after death as the curve of a river bend.

Half Waif
Ephemeral Being
ANTI-
Tracklisting

1. Service
2. Big Dipper
3. Heartwood
4. Ephemeral Being
5. Dreaming of Bears

Pre-order Ephemeral Being by Half Waif HERE