Maggie Rogers

One Liner:  A strong voiced pop songwriter and one of my favorite songs

Wikipedia Genre: Pop, art pop, indie pop, folk-pop, folktronica

Home: Easton, Maryland

Poster Position: 2 (2) 
Both Weekends.
Friday.

Thoughts:  Right now, her most popular track on Spotify is a Zach Bryan track that she's hopped onto while he is the biggest thing around.  But just listening to it, I realized that I had been mistaking the words.  He is singing "give me my dawns back," where this whole time, including while belting it out loudly the last time I saw Bryan play, I thought it was "my dogs."  I thought he was imploring his ex-lover to give him his dogs back because he just needed a win in life and she was keeping his pups away from him.  Ha!

I really like Maggie Rogers.  Before we get deeply into that, I wanted to make sure that you saw this video, which has been circulating for a while online - every few weeks people rediscover it and Twitter people send it around like a special artifact.  This is Maggie Rogers, as a student at the Clive David Institute of Recorded Music at New York University.  The class was told to prepare a song and bring a recording of it to class as a homework assignment.  What they did not know was that Pharrell Williams (you know, Pharrell, The Neptunes, NERD, that damn "Happy" song - super-producer and music brain Pharrell Williams) was going to show up and critique their work.  If you go into the long video, you can see him giving people advice.  I also love this because she seems so nervous and real in it and like has a tiny lisp.  Beautiful.

I mean, you can just see it hit Pharrell.  He kinda feels it, glances over at her, he starts to shake his head in amazement, then he just keeps looking around the room like, uh, woah.  Like amazed and confounded.  And I love how confident she gets as it goes along.  “I have zero, zero, zero notes for that,” he says finally.  He fuckin' compares her singularity to Wu Tang!  “I’ve never heard anyone like you before, and I’ve never heard anyone that sounds like that.” The video went viral, and a record deal soon followed.  God, I wish I could do stuff like that.  So fuckin' cool.

That song there is called "Alaska," and it is her second-biggest streamer to date with 198 million spins.  It is from her debut album, which also boasts her top song and my absolute favorite.  To me, "Light On" shot right up into the pantheon of greatest tunes of all time.  That may be hyperbole, but I cannot deny that I wake up still singing that song and loving it for the lyrics and the powerful sense of feeling that it lays down every time I hear it again.  206.5 million streams.

More than once, that damn thing has brought me to tears.  Hell, just starting it over again with that YouTube video made goose bumps pop up all up and down my arms.  Yeah, here we go again - when she sings "you should be so happy now" and strains at the wheel of her car with tears running down her face, I'm done.  Damn.  The rest of the album is also good - has a HAIM vibe, that kind of dance-able indie pop music and strong vocals.  "Give a Little" is also a good tune, "Overnight" is solid, and I like "Burning" as well.  "Fallingwater" is nice.  But nothing on here lives up to the power of "Light On."  Good album.

She grew up on the eastern shore of Maryland, and her own telling makes it sound like she was making music by an early age with harp, banjo, and other more folky instruments.  It wasn't until her college experience that she started messing with electronics and the layering of her voice you hear now.  She also formed a band with another artist on this poster - Del Water Gap was with her at college and they made some good music together.  To add to her strange path, after college she went to Harvard School of Divinity and for a masters in religion and public life.

And after that she put out a really great single called "Love You For A Long Time," that I swear, when the chorus kicks in, she does a little syncopated thing with her voice on the first line that makes me groove every damn time.  I love it.  134 million streams.

You feel that?  Ooh it is delicious to dance at my desk to that line and the way it makes me feel.  In 2022 she released three "mixtapes," with new versions of lots of her tunes.  "James" from 2022's Mixtape 002: Dusk sounds very very very much like First Aid Kit.  And then 2022 saw the release of Surrender, her most recent album.  The lead single, "That's Where I Am," goes far into an electronic sound, which much of the rest of the album is more organic sounding guitar-driven folk pop.  26.8 million streams.

First few times of hearing this on the radio, I was not on board.  Didn't like the overly electronic sound.  But then I caught myself singing it later and the power pop balladry has stuck in my head.  I know it is trite, but "even boulders turn into sand" is good.  I also really like the bridge.

I got to see her at a SXSW showcase many years ago, and while I didn't quite understand what I was seeing, I enjoyed the show.  I'd absolutely go try it out again.