Like many early pandemic artists, Maggie Rogers lived an isolated and lonely life. She withdrew to the coast of Maine and tried to alleviate her burnout on her 2019 major debut “Heard It In a Past Life” tour, but she had little to write. “I was hiding,” she said. She said, “I have completely lost my words.”
But Rogers, who was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best New Artist on the album, combining the roots of her folk singer-songwriter with the momentum of dance tents, hasn’t remained closed for a long time. Recalling that “making beats is fun,” she joined a virtual one-day accountability group with Feist, Damien Rice, Mac DeMarco and more. She said, “I went for a walk and listened to my favorite artist making it. [expletive] In our kitchen, “she said. “I was very ill.” She was surprised when the demo she made in her home studio sounded happy.
She thought that the turmoil and anger at that moment would lead her elsewhere. And it did.
“I talk a lot about what the artist’s work feels,” she said recently. “Feelings of the last few years-there has been a lot of pain and suffering, and a lot of injustices in the world. It’s about what I believe in and how I want to build my artistic practices and businesses. Asked me many questions, or my life. “
So Rogers enrolled in Harvard Theological School while he was busy making sick beats in the kitchen. She said, “For a way to keep her art sacred, she wanted to build a framework for herself.”
she Graduated in May Obtained a master’s degree in religion and public life, New program According to the university, “the work is focused on having a positive impact on society,” mainly for secular professionals. In the case of Rogers, it included her confident performance at Coachella this spring. “If music is religion, I feel very religious,” she said. “When I’m in a crowd of fans, or on stage, that’s when I feel most connected to something bigger than myself.”
While she was studying, she also completed Capitol’s second album, “Surrender.” Produced by Kid Harpoon (Harry Styles, Florence and the Machine), with distortion (a new sound for her), it will be released on Friday.
“For now, the joy of records feels like the greatest form of rebellion,” said 28-year-old Rogers. It’s a hard-earned hope, politically, culturally, and environmentally, which may be the current atmosphere. “Surrender” was also part of her treatise, examining cultural awareness, the spirituality of the rally, and the ethics of pop power. The album she told me is “Tooth Joy”.
Terry Tempest WilliamsAn essayist, naturalist, and visiting professor at Harvard Theological School taught Rogers in the class “Finding Beauty in a Broken World.” Her fans may know her as a “rock star,” Williams wrote in an email. “But I know her as her writer. Her words are lean, staccato, undecorated and visceral. She writes through the full range of emotions she lives in. increase.”
Williams added that Rogers “has a responsibility as a musician with a particularly big stage.”
“The bridge between public and private life is tranquility, and we have time to remember who you are and who you are not,” Williams writes. “She dances between movement and tranquility.”
On a drizzle June weekday, Rogers and I met at a corner diner on the Upper East Side, waited for the rain, and then pilgrimaged to the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, one of her sanctuaries in the city. She wears a chopped white undershirt, her cozy black vintage sweater (all praising Goodwill, Portland, Maine), and her hair, once in the style of a Laurel Canyon songwriter, is a pixie. became. Covered with Teen VogueAlthough she sported that cut for most of her life.The only hint was the angular Ferragamo mini wallet and the square metal cap boots. Major label star.
Warm with freckles, she spoke eloquently about her musical choices at the bottom of the Goofball, like when she pressed a tampon against her nose to stop her nosebleed while dancing at Coachella. Then she used a video clip. Promote her set).
Rogers, who just left his graduate apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts a few weeks ago, is “My Hot Take in Boston: Great Food, Bad Lighting” and where she sets up her new artistic life. It was still decided. “I feel like after graduation for next year or something,” she said. “I am doing a field survey.”
She grew up in the countryside of Easton, Maryland. The Los Angeles apartment where she now stores her stuff never felt like her home.When she was studying music production and engineering at New York University, her track “Alaska” Virus compliments From Pharrell Williams, she felt drawn to the city as a place to learn “what kind of artist I want to be”. “Surrender” looked like a punk New York album to her. She missed what she calls “raw human energy, and the community-its claustrophobia, someone sweating you on the subway.”
In the video of the propulsive synthesizer’s first single, “That’s Where I Am,” there’s a glitch and handclap bed under Rogers’ Clarion vocals, a green bore catwalk through downtown Manhattan, and a crossstream in New York. Taxi — Club kids and salaried men. (Guitarist Hamilton Lee Souther, photographer Quill Lemon And David Byrne, who she cold-called for the collaboration, also appears. )
Her musical process begins with making a mood board. “In production, we always think of records as building the world. Understanding what the world is makes it much easier to understand how bass sounds,” she says. I did.
British producer Kid Harpoon, who co-authored the 2018 singleLight onReminded me that the “Surrender” image contained black and white graininess and New York in the 70’s. Please close your teeth. Rogers also insisted on recording in the city, but it was a choice he didn’t necessarily understand until last summer when he set up a shop at the famous West Village studio, Electric Lady. “I saw her not completely compromising on some of her ideas-sometimes very cruel,” he said. “That’s a real strength. She knows what she wants.”
They used the place to record upstairs with Jack Antonoff and play a tambourine on the jagged power anthem “Shatter” by Florence Welch and Jon Batiste, who was very happy to “just react”. Brought other musicians such as. The Grammy-winning bandleader was laughing, so they said they had to reset his keyboard take from time to time.
And after years of playing, Rogers had self-released two albums by the age of 20, but already found another shade in his eclectic vocals. “I learned how to use the bass. I just sing with my whole body,” she said.
“I heard it in my past life” was full of natural samples. “Surrender” uses distortion that Rogers has rarely used before. But she found an audio plug-in and flew with it. “The world has collapsed and my life in Maine has been incredibly quiet,” she said. “I felt the noise was very therapeutic.”
In the video Album introductionShe called it “chaos I can control”.
When the sky cleared, Rogers and I wandered into the Bethesda Fountain.With St. Mark’s Church in East Village — Where Patti Smith had her First poem and electric guitar gig — A place she often detours for inspiration.She was drawn into Its historyThe 8-foot-high bronze sculpture “Angel of the Waters” in the center of the fountain was designed by Emma Stebbins, the first woman to be commissioned for major public art in New York, in 1873. Was announced in.
“This is hopeful for me,” Rogers said. Tourists took pictures by the fountain, and dozens of turtles fell asleep and wrapped in the lake over there. “Angels represent peace and moderation. She has lilies. People are still here.”
She once saw hero Joan Didion being moved by a clerk for the afternoon constitution. Rogers couldn’t get close to her in her awe, but she realized she was her reckless. “I remember seeing her ankle,” she said. Rogers has a good radar for vulnerable points. Didion, the master of modernism, died shortly thereafter. “I might cry when I’m talking about it,” she said.
She is still thinking about how to apply what she learned last year to her creative life. But one way is to be very careful. “I always think of performance as a practice of presence,” she said. “It’s exactly this moment that you’re slipping through your finger when it’s happening, it’s never created again, and it feels so sacred about it.”
It began to rain again, but she went without an umbrella — she liked the pattern of summer drips. The album’s closing song was full of anxiety about “the current state of the world,” and Rogers sought education to respond to his feelings. Her music also takes her there. The song ends with a hopeful note about a sense of unity — with banger percussion. “I think part of making something is having the hope that there is something else possible,” she said. “I feel like I have no other choice.”
