September 15, 2021 Maggie Rogers wowed fans with a surprising tweet. The indie pop darling, who shot to global fame in 2016 when a video of an amazed Pharrell Williams discovering her music went viral (8.2 million views on YouTube), has kept a low profile. “Where were you?” a fan asked on Twitter. “Hello, I’m in graduate school,” Rogers replied with a photo of his student ID; Margaret D Rogers enrolled at Harvard University. She has just started a master’s program, researching ethics in pop culture.
Ever since she was a senior in music production and Williams made a surprise visit to drop notes on her class at New York University, Rogers’ life has been a whirlwind. She toured with her album Heard It in a Past Life, held sold-out shows, appeared at awards shows (she was nominated for Best New Artist at the 2019 Grammys) and caused a sensation at Glastonbury and Coachella. It was exciting. “Everything happened, and more than I could have ever dreamed,” she recalls.
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It was also tiring. “After those four, five years of really intense touring, I was really burnt out. I was just working. I didn’t live life – she says. We are in the lounge of her hotel in central London. She is draped in gold jewelry, and her necklaces hang over a white button-up with frills, reminiscent of a glamorous vintage rocker. “I didn’t wear this”—a sweeping gesture toward her clothes—”to Harvard,” she laughs. Although as he speaks, he carries the quiet and brooding intensity of someone who appears in class after reading.
Going to graduate school was a way to get a little bit back to normal. She rode her bike to class, steamed broccoli in her tiny kitchen; one night, walking home, she heard a student party going on, knocked on the door, and walked in (it turned out to be a party for one of the university’s infamously exclusive finals clubs). In her graduation thesis entitled Surrender: Cultural Consciousness, Spirituality of Public Gatherings and Ethics of Power in Pop Culture, she dealt with the responsibilities of musicians as individuals who bring people together and their role in breaking down oppression.
Surrender is also the name of her new album. She started working on it in early 2020, while at her parents’ house in Maine during the pandemic. “I made bread and walked around and read a bunch,” says Rogers, “and then all of a sudden I thought, ‘Oh, there’s something I like to do to pass the time. That’s making music.” She built a studio above the garage and started working: “I wrote 100 songs for this record.”
Those 100 are reduced to 12 on an album that celebrates the act of disappearing into something bigger than yourself: into love, friendship or the sweaty ecstasy of a dancing crowd. An early single, Want Want, in which Rogers sings of longing against a howling synth reminiscent of Black Sabbath’s Iron Man, is about “sex — there’s no real other way to say it,” she bluntly wrote in an Instagram post. “It’s a song about really wanting to have sex with someone and doing it.”
Rogers called Surrender a “pandemic album”. He feels like one, in the sense that his songs ache for feelings of embodiment, exuberance, and community that have been so rare. “I wanted sensuality, I wanted touch,” Rogers says of the crafting.
He usually starts work on his albums by arranging pictures; the visual moodboard for this album included “really soaked, gooey red lipstick; a silver jacket, shiny as if it had been hit by a car light; a lot of teeth; jaw; collarbone.” She gasps for air as she narrates. Another inspiration for her was New York, the city where Rogers lived for six years and where she feels at home.
The album may seem like a departure from her previous work. Alaska, the song that left Williams speechless, was inspired by a formative hike Rogers took there as a student. In it, the singer pays tribute to the icy streams and glacial plains of the country, accompanied by the sounds of the cooing dove. On the cover of Heard It in a Past Life, an album created during a two-week whirlwind as she grappled with her sudden fame, the musician is draped in a red scarf, standing against a deep blue sky on an open plain.
Rogers expressed dismay at being perceived as a “nature girl,” as if she were a long-haired flower child dressed in a bell. Surrender’s cover is a close-up of her eyes, in stark black and white, covered by the fringes of her pixie haircut, and her songs are tributes to the hustle and bustle of New York. Is this how she said goodbye to the “girl of nature”?
“No, because none of these decisions for the record were made in relation to the press,” she says. “I think the nature girl was very funny. It’s a symptom of something bigger, which is the desire to make things simple.” He adds that he doesn’t think cities are “unnatural” and that “the desire to create that binary, city/state, doesn’t really work.”
She moved between the two, having grown up in rural Maryland, where she began playing the harp, piano, banjo and guitar. “I didn’t have a cell phone, wifi or TV until I was 18.” The first night she arrived in New York for university, “a woman came up and asked me if I had a cigarette, but I didn’t. And she turned around and pulled down her pants and showed me her ass.” Rogers has since grown to love the city, but it was difficult early on: before New York, she “never met anyone before who had alternative motives; I thought that anyone who was good to me wanted to be my friend”.
Rogers no longer thinks of herself as naïve – “because if you’re naïve and you live in the city, you get punched in the face” – but admits she’s “terribly serious”. Joy is an important component in her life, and in Surrender. “Despite the world, despite the systems of oppression, despite the darkness, to say that you’re alive and that you can claim that agency, that’s really important to me,” she says. “And really something that seems to me to be our only hope in the cynicism and destruction and death of it all: to find joy and find ways to reaffirm life.” She announced a tour in Europe – it’s called Feral Joy.
I ask her what she thinks about the experience of going viral, six years later. “I was devastated for so long,” she says. “It was a thing that required me to develop a sense of spirituality”—to accept that things would happen to her that she might never understand. There’s a sense that—after months of isolation and lonely cliff walks, writing songs in his parents’ garage, digging through books in college libraries—Rogers is emerging from under a long shadow. Her first album, which she still loves, “it’s like I’m trying to get to know the world. Now I feel like, ‘I’m here. Do you want to meet here?'”
