Maggie Rogers
Margaret Debay Rogers (born April 25, 1994) is an American singer-songwriter and record producer from Easton, Maryland.[1] After her song "Alaska" was played to artist-in-residence Pharrell Williams during a master class at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts in 2016, she gained widespread recognition.[2] She has released two independent albums, The Echo (2012) and Blood Ballet (2014) and three studio albums, Heard It in a Past Life (2019), Surrender (2022) and Don't Forget Me (2024). She was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 2020.
For the White House maid, see Maggie Rogers (White House maid). For others with a similar name, see Margaret Rogers (disambiguation).
Maggie Rogers
Biography[edit]
Early life (1994–2012)[edit]
Maggie Rogers grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland along the banks of the Miles River in Easton, Maryland. Her father is a retired Ford Motor Company dealer and her mother, a former nurse, is an end-of-life doula.[3] She began playing harp at age seven and loved the music of Gustav Holst and Antonio Vivaldi. Her mother would play neo-soul artists such as Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill. By the time she was in middle school, Rogers had added piano and guitar to her repertoire and began songwriting in eighth grade.[4] For high school, she attended The Gunston School before attending and graduating from St. Andrew's School, a boarding school in Middletown, Delaware. At school, she played harp in the orchestra, sang in the choir, joined a jazz band, learned banjo and became interested in folk music, and taught herself how to program. She also spent many summers at a rural camp in Maine.[5]
The summer after her junior year in high school, Rogers attended a Berklee College of Music program and won the program's songwriting contest, which spurred her to focus on writing.[4] During her high school senior year, she made her television debut at DelmarvaLife and recorded what became her first album, The Echo (2012). Rogers included her demos as part of her application to the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, was accepted, and started in 2012.[3]
College years and discovery (2012–2016)[edit]
At NYU, Rogers considered a career in music journalism, and in her first year, Rogers interned for music journalist Lizzy Goodman for whom she transcribed and edited hundreds of hours of interviews with major musicians and journalists, which were compiled into Goodman's 2017 book Meet Me in the Bathroom.[6]
She formed a band called Del Water Gap with singer-songwriter S. Holden Jaffe.[7] The reason they split was because they both wanted to explore more of their solo work. Their song called "New Song" appears on Notes from the Archive: Recordings 2011–2016 (2020).
Rogers released another folk album, Blood Ballet (2014), during her second year at the school. Folk blog EarToTheGround Music explained that the album "...begs for listeners to confront deep personal emotions."[8] Buzzkill Magazine explains that Rogers "really starts to find her folksy feet" with "Little Joys" from Blood Ballet. [9]
Rogers studied abroad in France while at NYU and after friends convinced her to go clubbing while they were in Berlin, she discovered a love for dance music. When she returned home, Rogers started distilling elements of dance music into her work.[10][11]
In 2016, after two years of writer's block,[6] Rogers wrote "Alaska", a song she wrote in fifteen minutes about a National Outdoor Leadership School course. She played the song for Pharrell Williams, an artist-in-residence who visited her class to critique student work.[12][13][3] Williams said of the song: "I've never heard anything that sounds like that".[14] A video of a visibly moved Williams listening to the song went viral that June, resulting in millions of views as well as hundreds of thousands of plays of The Echo and Blood Ballet.[3][15]
Rogers graduated from New York University's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music in May 2016 with a degree in music engineering and production and English.[16][5][17]
Graduate school (2021–2022)[edit]
In September 2021, Rogers tweeted that she had started graduate school at Harvard Divinity School, where she was "studying the spirituality of public gatherings and the ethics of power in pop culture" and to learn "how to keep art sacred".[18][19][20] She graduated in May 2022 with a master's degree in religion and public life, writing a thesis which "examined cultural consciousness, the spirituality of public gathering and the ethics of pop power". Her 2022 studio album, Surrender, was a component of the thesis.[18][21] From December 1, 2023 through May 31, 2024, Rogers is a Religion and Public Life Fellow at Harvard Divinity School. She will spend this time expanding the writing and research of her MRPL degree, which explored the relationships of religion, spirituality, and pop culture from her vantage point as a performing artist. [22]
Influences[edit]
Rogers cites Carrie Brownstein, Patti Smith, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, and Björk as her musical inspirations,[2] while prominent singers Brandi Carlile and Sharon Van Etten — whom she calls her "musical big sisters" — have become mentors.[44][45]
