Maggie Rogers
For her third album – a collection of demos recorded over five consecutive days – Maggie Rogers has unlocked an honesty that only happens when you leave no time to overthink. “In writing a little bit of fiction, I was able to tell some of the greatest truths about my life,” she tells Marianne Eloise.
Maggie Rogers wasn’t intending to write another album. At least, not right now. Her second studio album, ‘Surrender’, was released in mid-2022, and she was planning to tour it more and take a break before taking any serious time to write. Then, in late 2023, she went into the studio with songwriter and producer Ian Fitchuk [Kacey Musgraves, Leon Bridges], who she calls “amazing”, just to play around. “It was the last couple of days before Christmas, and we thought we’d go in and see if we had any kind of creative chemistry. If we walked away with a verse we really liked, it would have been a full win,” she says when we meet at her hotel in London. We’re sitting in a loud lounge, with people bustling around us, but Rogers doesn’t seem affected by the chaos.
In not trying to do anything, they found themselves able to work freely and quickly. Working from the iconic Electric Lady studios in New York, which she says “feels like home” after five years working there, they wrote the record in five days and recorded it in another five. If that sounds like a crazy pace, it was – they wrote a song before and after lunch each day. What you hear on the record are raw tracks; they had planned to re-record with a band but decided to leave them as they were. “We thought that they were demos, but they just had so much life in them. Once we listened back, we were like, it’s sick,” she says. On many of the tracks, she only recorded one vocal take. “It allowed me to be really playful. I wasn’t worrying too much. It was like, let me just finish this, and if I don’t like it, I can always go back and change it. There was no pressure.”
Without that pressure, she and Fitchuk wrote and recorded a full body of work: ‘Don’t Forget Me’. The tracks are odes to Rogers at different times throughout her life, in particular the last decade. “I’ve always thought about records as a record of a period of time and by opening up the scope on this one, there’s so much of my life in there,” she says. It was important to Rogers that the record was released before she turned 30 (she’s 29 right now), and as a result, it functions as a kind of farewell to her 20s. “I feel like it’s a much broader woven tapestry that isn’t so much about time, but is about experience or feeling or the way that some experiences, especially with really powerful emotion at their core, can be in some ways timeless.” Rogers is thoughtful and precise with her answers as if every single word she says holds weight.
Rogers grew up in Maryland and started making and releasing music as a teenager. She started out with the harp as a child and moved on to the guitar and other instruments, also teaching herself how to programme. She dabbled in everything, releasing folk albums ‘The Echo’ and ‘Blood Ballet’ while studying at Tisch. She even considered a career in music journalism but after a video of artist-in-residence Pharrell Williams listening to her song ‘Alaska’ went viral, she was inundated with offers from labels. Her debut, ‘Heard It in a Past Life’ was released via her imprint Debay on Capitol in 2019, and Rogers has learned a lot from those hectic eight years. “I’ve become a lot more comfortable and a lot clearer about the things that matter to me and the things that I don’t. I really appreciate that clarity, and maybe that’s some sort of clarity that comes at the end of your 20s,” she says, adding that she’s excited to “wrap up the decade”.
For the first time on ‘Don’t Forget Me’, Rogers is playing around with a persona – someone she calls a “younger Thelma and Louise” character, leaving home for the first time and exploring America. The record feels, and sounds, American: like dust, blue jeans, cowboy boots. When we meet, Rogers is wearing the same steel-toe-capped boots she’s been wearing since 2018. She is a born all-American storyteller, and by weaving her own memories with those of a conjured-up character, she was able to be more honest. “I think it maybe helped to take some of the pressure off to write the most direct and honest thing about my own life. In writing a little bit of fiction, I was able to tell some of the greatest truths about my life,” she says.
Making and playing music has been Rogers’ full-time job for her entire adult life, but making ‘Don’t Forget Me’ didn’t feel like a hard day at work. Instead, it took her back to making music in her room and releasing it to a small audience on BandCamp and iTunes: “So much of my experience, grounding and art is just making it for the sake of it. It’s true to my artistic process.” The result is music that matches that youthful energy. “This sounds a lot like the music I made when I was growing up. It has quite a playful and unguarded spirit. I made a record because I wasn’t trying to make a record. I just thought we were playing, and in that way it allowed some of my most unguarded self to come out,” she says.
This sounds a lot like the music I made when I was growing up. It has quite a playful and unguarded spirit
Maggie Rogers
‘Don’t Forget Me’ feels at once like a step forward and familiar ground for Rogers. “It felt so back to basics in a way and really loose and easy,” she says. While there is a youthful, optimistic thread running through the tracks, she’s resistant to the idea that it could be considered naïve: “Naïve feels like something that people call young women, but I think that young women are some of the most sensitive and knowing,” she says. She’s been working on sorting out the difference between optimism and naivety, and she concedes that she isn’t sure where the boundary is. “I understand that there’s something open and hopeful about optimism. I don’t think that open-heartedness needs to be naïve. That’s what I hope for in my life and my work, that you can be openhearted and still grounded and real.”
That hope remains central to Rogers’ work, and the ‘Don’t Forget Me’ single ‘So Sick of Dreaming’ is a kind of nod to her eternal optimism. “Dreaming is such an important part of my life. At the same time, I think there’s something really important to loving the life that you’re in, trying to be present with it. Not always believing in what something could become, but believing that something just is.” She understands, though, why optimism might be in short supply for most of us: “Everyone’s kind of doing their best to take it day by day, especially right now. The world is fucking crazy. You’ve just got to do your best and try and have some fun in the centre.”
Not long after Rogers released her debut album, the pandemic forced her to take some time out. She decided to go back to school, studying for her Master’s degree in religion and public life at Harvard Divinity School. Her thesis was on the spirituality of public gatherings and the ethics of power in pop culture, and when I ask about it, she seems surprised, telling me it doesn’t often come up in interviews. Still, she is eloquent in her response. “In touring, I was constantly finding myself in an unconventional ministerial position, and I had never trained for that. I trained to be an engineer, a producer and a writer. I was suddenly like, oh shit, what am I doing?” she says. “I had a microphone in this time of crazy political change, and people wanted my advice on love and death and marriage and suicide and all this crazy shit.”
I had a microphone in this time of crazy political change, and people wanted my advice on love and death and marriage and suicide and all this crazy shit.
Maggie Rogers
“I was like, I’m 25 and I have not been trained to talk to you about that. People were coming to me as if I was a therapist because I wrote songs about my life. I was like: I don’t know the right answer and I don’t know how to handle it. There was a lot of emotional heaviness to it.” Her instinct was to spend some time thinking about what she believes and to lay the foundations for a life as an artist. “I love making art more than anything. In order to do that, it’s a career you really define for yourself. I needed to spend some time thinking about what that meant to me.”
She spent that time thinking: about the ethics of what it means to have power in pop culture, about cultural consciousness, and about the ways that people come together. Ultimately, she came to the conclusion that creativity can be considered a form of religion: “People are hungry for something to believe in.” She says she hasn’t spoken about it a ton, but it’s clear she has thought about it a great deal. I point out that it’s unusual to find a musician who has spent as much time formally studying it as she has, but while she disagrees, she admits that she will never stop learning: “I have a lot of reverence and devotion for music, and I really love it. So I spend a lot of time thinking about it. I’m a curious person and I really love learning, and there’s always something to learn about.” Right now, she’s a Religion and Public Life Fellow at Harvard Divinity School.
‘Don’t Forget Me’ was the first record that Rogers made after all this time spent thinking about what she believes in, and it laid the foundation for her going forward. As for how she feels about touring – the road is still her favourite place to be. She has spent more of her life on the road than off, and she says that it feels like home. “There’s such a nice structure and community. I love my band so much, the day has a certain flow to it, there’s a sense of purpose,” she says. “Home is something I have such a funny relationship with because I don’t feel like I’ve ever grounded. In my adult life, I’ve never been grounded anywhere.”
Even when we speak, she’s in the midst of shows, including smaller spots at Brighton’s Chalk and Kingston’s Pryzm. After sorting out what it means to have that unofficial ministerial position, she’s enjoying touring in a new way. “I’m going to play all of these massive shows to 20,000 people, so it’s so nice to get to just sit with a group of people and have a really intimate moment. It’s really special. I feel so lucky and I feel like I’ve got the best people around my music. It’s nice to talk to people. There’s such a lovely community. You don’t get to choose who shows up, and I feel so lucky, because the people who show up are so rad. The shows have been great,” she says. She adds that touring ‘Surrender’ post-COVID was “visceral and intense”, but it feels like things are starting to settle: “There’s a sense of momentum and flow even though things are changing all the time.”
Rogers might not think she has studied music more than any other musician, but her approach to her work feels somewhere between intellectual and spiritual. “For me, singing is so emotional. Sending vibrational frequencies through your whole body for an hour at a time, I get to let go of some things and work through some things. It’s cleaning the house. It’s really physical, and making music feels really physical. It’s totally integrated,” she says. “I’m interested in the spaces where the physical and the mental meet and you’re acting off of instinct. Where the physical and the mental align. That, to me, is a deep meditation space. I’m always trying to find head and heart.”
On ‘Don’t Forget Me’, it seems like she has.
