this is a commentary for another time but i really appreciate how half waif’s musical oeuvre over the years has consistently explored and commented upon very salient emotional-existential concerns: the intertwined threads of stoicism, emotional isolation, ambivalence over dependency on others, struggles over having your self-hood/identity being defined by others for you, etc. etc.
the thought i keep coming back to while listening to kotekan (2014) and lavender (2018), and the caretaker (2020) is that nandi’s lyrical persona frequently seems to echo, on initial listening, the typical figure of a stoic, emotionally repressed man set-against-the-world. but that is not quite true, if you pay deeper attention. it’s more adjacent to that archetype, and a subtle reversal of it. for nandi’s persona is not emotionally repressed, not in the usual sense that arises from smothering and suppressing your emotions by depriving them of a voice or understanding. nandi’s persona differs because she is exceptionally emotionally literate and articulate: she voices what she’s feeling, the cause for it, and the broader relational entanglements that have her feeling this way. the stoicism in her songs comes not from the supposed masculinised position of evacuating yourself of the burdensome weight of emotion; it comes from the weariness of having to care for and manage all the extended relationships you are tethered to as a result of being embedded in a particular place and social sphere. it comes from frustration with not knowing what to do about particular attachments that are necessary to your life even as they, in the same breath, are bringing you down.
in other words: half waif’s music tends to embody a kind of stoicism that is an underreflected brand of stoicism and also one that seems to more accurately resonates with the kind felt often by many people-- it is a kind of emotional jadening that doesn’t come about from divesting yourself of emotions or seeing them as irrelevant, but from being acutely attuned to emotions/your obligations towards the world, and acknowledging your ambivalences towards them
