Maggie Rogers on her long-form music: "I've always loved art that takes time"

In a nondescript building in a tiny Pennsylvania town, Maggie Rogers was getting ready for her big moment. Lititz, Pa., is where arena acts come to rehearse their shows before heading out on national tour, and every detail matters. “Sunday Morning” caught up with Rogers there, just weeks away from her concerts at Madison Square Garden.

In a career-defining event, she sold out the New York City venue. “Twice!” she laughed. “I don’t know how to, like, compute that in my brain. I don’t understand it fundamentally!”

To be clear, it wasn’t Rogers’ first time on a big stage; she’d already shared them with the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, and a stint opening for Coldplay. She was also a 2020 Grammy-nominee for best new artist.

But for Rogers, who studied music at New York University, playing Madison Square Garden was a homecoming of sorts. Walking through Washington Square Park, not far from her former dorm room, she pointed out the benches where she used to write songs. It was at NYU where Rogers got what you might call her big break – or at least a big break, when superstar producer and musician Pharrell Williams visited her class. Rogers played him a song she’d been working on called “Alaska.” “What I remember is really just staring at my shoes and, like, holding on tight,” she said.

Williams’ response: “Wow! Wow! I have zero, zero, zero notes for that, and I’ll tell you why: you’re doing your own thing. It’s singular.”

The video clip of Williams’ master class went viral, but Rogers – who actually started out studying music engineering – still needed to learn the craft of writing and performing, which is just what she did. “I’ve played, like, every bar and club on the Lower East Side, and every DIY venue in Brooklyn that existed in my time here,” she said.

Now, at the age of 30, Rogers has built a close relationship with her fans, many of whom watched her go from small clubs to being an artist that record labels were fighting over.

Remember that demo she played for Pharrell Williams as a college student? So far, the music video of the finished version of “Alaska” has been viewed more than 23 million times.

It’s all been an incredible journey, considering Rogers says she didn’t actually play music publicly all that much as she was growing up on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Her interest was more personal, private and quirky: “Basically, as soon as I could ask for music lessons, all I wanted to do was play the harp,” she said. “My first CD purchase was a double-purchase of the orchestral score to ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,’ and Britney’s ‘Baby One More Time.’ Which, like, maybe is all you need to know about me!”

And you hear it in her songs – a pop sensibility with a tremendous intellect behind it. Rogers says the whole arena thing is fun, but what she’s really hoping to do is form a deep, long-term connection with her listeners along the themes of love and heartbreak and the weird wondrous thing that it is just to be alive. “I really prefer to work in long form,” Rogers said. “And I really feel a lot of gratitude for listeners that want to have an active listening practice, and who also have the patience to want to spend an hour of their time listening to the way that I, you know, sequence the record, or who has appreciation for those things. I’ve always loved art that takes time.

Something else that separates Rogers from your typical pop star: Back in 2021, she took time away from her music to enroll in a graduate program at Harvard University focusing on religion and public life. “I really needed a second,” she said. “I needed to sort of reorient my life, and I needed to be new at something. I had been living in a world where everything was about me and my career for, like, five years, and then applying that to music, and to concerts, and to these really large public gatherings.”

Large public gatherings that have become, for both Rogers and her fans, something almost spiritual: “This couldn’t have happened in any different way,” she said. “Like, I’m reaching Madison Square Garden and stepping on that stage, and being like, ‘I’m really ready for this.’ And that, in itself, is such a gift that I’ve sort of tried to keep from contextualizing this for myself. Because as soon as you figure out what it is, it changes, you know? I’m always at the eye of the storm! It’s really calm where I sit. And I’ll never, ever be able to know what it looks like from the outside. But what I can know is when I’ve really dedicated myself to my art, and when I think I’m at my best. And I like to think that I’m doing both of those things as much as possible.”

You can stream Maggie Rogers’ 2024 album “Don’t Forget Me” by clicking on the embed below (Free Spotify registration required to hear the tracks in full):

     
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Story produced by Julie Kracov. Editor: Remington Korper.