Like many artists during the early days of the pandemic, Maggie Rogers lived a secluded, lonely life. She’d retreated to the coast of Maine, trying to ease the burnout of touring for her 2019 major-label debut “Heard It In a Past Life,” with little plan to write. “I hid,” she said. “At a total loss for words.”
But Rogers, who had earned a Grammy nomination for best new artist with that album, which fuses her folky singer-songwriter roots with the momentum of the dance tent, didn’t stay locked up for long. Recalling that “making beats is fun,” she joined a virtual song-a-day accountability group that included the likes of Feist, Damien Rice and Mac DeMarco. “I would go for a walk and then listen to all my favorite artists making some” [expletive] in our kitchens,” she said. “It was so sick.” The demos she produced in her own home studio sounded cheerful, which surprised her.
She thought the turmoil and fury of the moment would lead her elsewhere. And then it happened.
“I talk so much about the artist’s feeling,” she said recently. “Feeling through the last few years – there is so much pain and so much suffering and so much injustice in the world. It raised many questions for me about what I believe, and how I want to organize my artistic practice or my company. Or my life.”
So Rogers, while making up sick beats in her kitchen, enrolled at Harvard Divinity School. “I wanted to build a framework for myself to keep art sacred,” she said.
She graduated in May with a master’s degree in religion and public life, a new program for mostly secular professionals “whose work is focused on having a positive social impact,” according to the university. In Rogers’ case, it included her confident performance at Coachella last spring. “I feel super religious, if music is a religion,” she said. “When I’m in the crowd of fans or on stage, I felt most connected to something bigger than myself.”
While in college, she also completed “Surrender,” her second album for Capitol, a hypnotic danceable ode to ecstatic surrender, leaping and worrying. Produced by Kid Harpoon (Harry Styles, Florence + the Machine) and embracing distortion – a new sound for her – is out Friday.
“Right now, the joy on record feels like the greatest form of rebellion,” said Rogers, 28. It’s a hard-won hope, which — politically, culturally, ecologically — is arguably the vibe of the moment. “Surrender” was also part of her dissertation, which explored cultural awareness, the spirituality of public gatherings, and the ethics of pop power. The album, she told me, is “joy with teeth.”
Terry Tempest Williams, an essayist, naturalist, and visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School, taught Rogers in a class called “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 a writer. Her words are lean, staccato, unadorned, visceral. She writes through the full range of emotions she inhabits. ”
Williams added that Rogers is “conscious of the responsibility that comes especially as a musician with a big stage.”
“The bridge between public life and private life is silence, having time to remember who you are and who you are not,” Williams wrote. “She dances between movement and stillness.”
On a drizzly June weekday, Rogers and I met at a corner restaurant on the Upper East Side, to wait out the rain before making a pilgrimage to one of her sacred sites in the city, the Bethesda Fountain in Central. Park. She wore a chopped white shirt, a cozy black thrift sweater (all hail the Portland, Maine, Goodwill) and her once-long, Laurel Canyon songwriter-esque hair shaved into an elf — a development covered by Teen Vogue, though she has worn that cut for most of her life. An angular Ferragamo mini purse and square metal-capped boots were the only hints of: big label star.
She had a warm, freckled face and was articulate about her musical choices, with undertones of baloney (like when she stuffed a tampon in her nose to staunch a nosebleed while dancing at Coachella — then used the music video to advertise for her set).
Rogers had just moved out of her college graduate apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts—“my best take on Boston: great food, poor lighting”—and was still figuring out where to set up her new artistic life. “I feel like I’m going to be a postgraduate or something like that next year,” she said. “I do field research.”
She grew up in rural Easton, Maryland; the Los Angeles apartment where she now stores her things has never really felt like home. While a student at New York University where she studied music production and engineering, her song “Alaska” received a viral admiration from Pharrell Williams, and she was drawn to the city as the place where she learned “what kind of artist I wanted to be.” “Surrender” seemed like a punky New York album to her; she missed what she called “the raw human energy and community – that claustrophobic, someone sweating on you on the subway” connection.
The video for the propulsive, synthy lead single “That’s Where I Am,” which features a bed of glitches and clapping hands beneath Rogers’s clarion call of desire, pays tribute to that as she walks through downtown Manhattan in a green boa, and piles up in a taxi with a New York counter-current – club kids and office workers. (The guitarist Hamilton Leithauser, the photographer Quil Lemons and David Byrne, whom she cold called to collaborate, also show up.)
Her musical process starts with making a mood board. “In production, I always think of records as building the world — when I understand that, what the world is, it’s much easier for me to understand how the bass should sound,” she said.
Kid Harpoon, the British producer with whom she co-wrote her 2018 single ‘Light On’, recalled that the images for ‘Surrender’ contained black and white graininess and ’70s New York – ‘Someone on their knees in a club’. with their tops off, they sweat all the way down. Teeth up close.” Rogers insisted on recording in the city as well, a choice he didn’t necessarily understand until they settled last summer at Electric Lady, the legendary West Village studio. “I’ve seen her just be completely uncompromising about some of her ideas — quite brutal at times,” he said. “It’s a real strength. She knows what she wants.”
They used the venue to bring in other musicians such as Florence Welch, who was upstairs recording with Jack Antonoff and playing tambourine on the whimsical power anthem “Shatter”, and Jon Batiste, who “just responded” with such pleasure, Kid Harpoon said they sometimes had to reset the take for his keyboards because the Grammy-winning bandleader was laughing.
And Rogers, after years of performing — she’d self-released two albums by the time she was 20 — found other shades in her own already powerful vocals. “I’ve learned how to use my lower register,” she said, “to just sing with my whole body.”
“Heard It in a Past Life” was infused with natural monsters; “Surrender” uses distortion, which Rogers had barely worked with before. But she found an audio plugin and flew it. “The world came crashing down and my life in Maine was incredibly quiet,” she said. “Noise felt so therapeutic.”
In a video introducing the album, she called it “chaos I could control.”
As the skies cleared, Rogers and I lurched toward the Bethesda Fountain. Along with St. Mark’s Church in the East Village—where Patti Smith had her first poetry and electric guitar performance—it’s a place she often goes to for inspiration. She was also drawn to history: ‘Angel of the Waters’, the 2-foot-tall bronze statue in the center of the fountain, was designed by Emma Stebbins, the first woman to be commissioned for a major public artwork in New York. York, and unveiled in 1873.
“This feels hopeful to me,” Rogers said, as tourists snapped photos by the fountain and dozens of turtles dozed and lapped in the lake beyond. “The angel represents peace and temperance. She is holding a lily. People still come here.”
Once she even saw Joan Didion, a hero, driven around for an afternoon by a servant. Rogers was too impressed to approach her, but noticed she had no socks. “I remember seeing her ankles,” she said, “and being like, wow, that’s so intimate.” Rogers has a fine radar for the vulnerabilities; Didion, the master modernist writer, died not long after. “I might cry if I talk about it,” she said.
She’s still figuring out how to apply what she’s learned over the past year to her creative life. But one way is to just pay close attention. “I always think of performance as an exercise of presence,” she said. “It’s just this moment when you slip through your fingers as it happens, and it can never be created again. And that’s what feels so sacred about it.”
It started to rain again, but she went without an umbrella – she loved the clatter of the summer drops. The album’s closing track is full of concerns about ‘the state of the world’ and Rogers sought an education to respond to that feeling. Her music takes her there too; the song ends with a wish – with banger percussion – about togetherness. “I think part of creating something is the hope that something else is possible,” she said. “I feel like I have no other choice.”