It’s only March, but that doesn’t mean it’s too early to start thinking about summer. The chill in the air vanishes as June and July come around, bringing instead the warmth and brightness of the sun enveloping the days. It’s a time where nature feels at its most resplendent, with gardens in full bloom and wildlife thriving. But summer can also bring sweltering humidity and endless rain. It can bring a sense of stasis and restlessness as the long days stretch out. Nandi Rose loves summer, and the dueling aspects of that season and of human nature inform The Caretaker, her latest album under her musical moniker Half Waif, out March 27 on ANTI.
Rose grew up in Massachusetts and started writing music as a teenager, something she’d continue at Kenyon College in Ohio — singing in various a capella groups and studying classical music. It was also where she met Evan Stephens Hall in 2010, and began playing campus gigs as part of the band Pinegrove. Rose toured with the group for a number of years, before forming her own project, Half Waif. Now as she prepares to release her latest album, The Caretaker, following 2018’s Lavender, memories of making the record are fresh and vivid, because they took place in her home — tucked away into the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. Fittingly, Rose describes the songwriting process this time around as close to a self-imposed exile.
“This is the longest I’ve actually really focused on writing an album. In the past, I was touring a lot. So, I’d be writing in these little snippets of time when I was home,” she says. “There was just… a lot more focus, time and a lot more of a deliberate thought that went into making this album.”
From the vocal layers and billowing synths of opener “Clouds Rest” to the final pulsing piano chords of “Window Place,” The Caretaker feels like summer. “I really wanted to evoke this world of my home in the summertime. I was writing a lot in the summer, so there are sounds of the environment like the bugs in the yard and the train going by,” Rose explains. She also notes that she noticed some of her earlier music being described as “icy” or “cold and wintery.” “I hate winter,” she says, laughing. With that, it was time to make a change and move forward.
“Summer is so symbolic for me. I feel like I come alive in the summertime,” Rose says. “It’s when I am my best self. It’s the best part of me and I really wanted to celebrate that season.” However, as she notes in our conversation and on the track “My Best Self,” that best version of herself — and of anyone — isn’t a static point, but an ever-evolving goal.
Rose knew she wanted to focus on the personal journey instead of the ending, as a theme for The Caretaker. “I was coming off of my last record [Lavender] which tackled a lot of big themes like grief, personal apocalypses, endings and nighttime — grappling for the light through the night,” she recalls. Rose was also feeling pretty isolated. Her band left after the last album cycle to pursue their own interests and projects (a decision Rose carries no hard feelings over), leaving her to herself creatively, in the middle of the Hudson Valley.
“I took a lot of what I had learned in that more collaborative process and wanted to push myself further, going back to being a solo project. I think that search for home has always been a really big theme for me and now I sort of have that stability and home life I was always searching for,” she explains, alluding to her recent marriage to partner and Pinegrove bandmate Zack Levine. Still, The Caretaker often reflects on the isolation Rose felt in other relationships, friendships and creatively as well, on tracks like “In August.”
Throughout the summer, Rose worked mostly solo on the album. She was deep into it’s creation before producer David Tolomei came in to provide some assistance. Rose wanted The Caretaker to be a blend of the two worlds she and Tolomei inhabit musically. “I think it’s this cool hybrid of my bedroom world and the world of summer from this vantage point of looking out the window,” she explains. “And then bringing it into this lusher sonic world, which I think also shows the growth of this project.” Rose laughs as she says that she originally wanted it to be a minimalist record in terms of sound, but she’s proud of the singular focus and direction she found while writing.
It was also important to her that The Caretaker exists and functions as a full album and experience as opposed to just a collection of tracks. An avid reader, she compares it to a novel and the ways in which an author can slowly weave in themes and imagery into a narrative.
While The Caretaker isn’t a literal novel, it does have a central character. In recent weeks leading up to the album’s release, Rose has made mention of “The Caretaker” as not just the name of the album, but it’s heroine as well. As vivid a journey as this character and Rose herself make on this album, it’s surprising to learn The Caretaker did not exist until after it was finished. “When I was writing this album it was not intended to be a pseudo-concept album. There was no character while I was writing it per se,” Rose explains. But as those long summer nights dragged on, she began to come to a realization about herself and her new body of work.
“When I started it, I was the caretaker. I was in this position and writing in the summertime on the porch — watching the cars pass by, feeling very restless in this sense of solitude, feeling really disappointed in myself, feeling really dissatisfied with who I was, and recognizing that I had this totally broken down internal landscape and I couldn’t be a good partner or friend,” she recalls. Writing The Caretaker was a cathartic and healing experience for Rose, so much so that by the end of it, she wasn’t the same person anymore.
The Caretaker ends on “Window Place,” named after the place Nandi Rose sat restless and alone as she wrote the latest chapter of Half Waif. Still, it’s a track with a hint of warm hope in its piano chords and synths. The album is a reminder that people are not static, that they carry on with the good days of growth and bad days of isolation just as the hazy summer nights continue to hum their way ever forward. It can serve as a warning that growth is a journey, and it can go both directions.
“She’s still there. She’s still on that porch pacing and feeling this sense of restlessness and fear,” Rose says of The Caretaker, before pausing. “But I’m not [her] anymore.” Instead, she’s a new and wiser Nandi Rose, creating a new and evolving Half Waif, moving forward into the summer breeze.