In the fall of 2021, the singer and songwriter Maggie Rogers entered the graduate program at Harvard Divinity School. For anyone unacquainted with the particulars of the degree Rogers was pursuing—a master’s in religion and public life—it might have sounded as though she were abandoning burgeoning pop stardom to reinvent herself as a priest. “It’s a peace-and-justice program, it’s not a seminary,” Rogers told me over dinner in Cambridge, in early February. “I’m not from any particular religious tradition. I was not trained in any particular religious tradition.” Rogers, who is twenty-nine, was trying to make her life feel more useful and less surreal. “I woke up one day and I was famous,” she said. “I was really burnt out. I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue. I thought I wanted to quit music. A lot of what I came here to do was to think about how to create a more sustainable structure around a creative practice.” This spring, Rogers will release her third album, “Don’t Forget Me,” a breezy collection of pop-rock songs that she wrote in consecutive order, during five kinetic, bountiful days last winter. It is, in many ways, the loosest and most elemental music she’s made.
In 2016, Rogers was “discovered”—though the word almost feels too intentional—by the polymath hitmaker Pharrell Williams, while she was attending New York University. Williams visited one of Rogers’s classes at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, a program within the Tisch School of the Arts; he was an artist-in-residence there, and she was a senior. The institute is the sort of place where, say, Questlove might teach a seven-week course on the Beastie Boys, and the Beastie Boys might show up on the final day. During Williams’s visit, Rogers played him an early version of “Alaska,” a song she’d written after going to Berlin and having “a really spiritual experience” with dance music. “Club culture, for an N.Y.U. freshman or sophomore, always meant tight dresses, a certain amount of money, the meatpacking district,” Rogers said. “I didn’t have clothes for that.” The scene in Berlin was different—less preening, more raw. “They said I had to wear sneakers or I wouldn’t get in,” Rogers recalled. Meanwhile, she was learning more about how to produce and manipulate rhythm, using both analog and electronic elements (drums, bass, synthesizers, outboard gear, programming software). “I had always thought that singing was the oldest and most primal way to connect,” she said. “When I discovered the connection people can have through rhythm, something really changed.”
“Alaska” is a brittle meditation on interpersonal dissonance. “You and I, there’s air in between,” Rogers sings on the chorus. That tension is deftly mirrored in the song’s sound. There’s something earthy about Rogers’s presence (she was brought up in rural Maryland, and played the harp and the banjo as a teen-ager), yet the song’s production is spectral, icy, electronic. Rogers told me that she wrote “Alaska” in five minutes, which is how she often works: urgently and with deep focus, as though she were channelling a faint signal.
Williams’s meeting with the class was filmed. Rogers was wearing jeans, a thrifted L. L. Bean shirt, and a necklace made from two elk vertebrae strung on cooking twine. She told Williams that she had previously made only folk music. Her professor, the producer and engineer Bob Power, interrupted: “But kind of postmodern stuff, too. It was not just boom-chicka-boom-chicka.” She clarified her intentions for the track. “All I want to do is kind of combine that folk imagery and harmony and natural samples that I’ve been picking up while hiking over the last couple years with the sort of backbone and energy of dance music,” she said. “We’ll see if I’m successful.” As the song started to play, Rogers seemed a little unsure of where to direct her gaze. The video is endearing: a young artist presenting her work and nervously awaiting judgment. It soon becomes clear that Williams is feeling it. When the track ends, he tells her that he has “zero, zero, zero notes,” and then compares her individuality to that of the Wu-Tang Clan. “I can hear the journey,” Williams tells her. “I’ve never heard anything that sounds like that. . . . That’s a drug for me.”
The full thirty-minute clip of the class, including Williams’s responses to other students, was uploaded to his label’s YouTube channel in March of that year; in June, a fan posted Rogers’s portion to Reddit. It didn’t take long for the clip to go viral. One of Rogers’s childhood friends, Nora Neil, remembered Rogers calling to say that she was trending on Reddit. “I was at my grandmother’s house,” Neil recalled. “And I said, ‘I unfortunately do not know what that means.’ That first day, those first few hours, it was, like, ‘Whoa, what is this?’ . . . Her life really did change overnight.”
Rogers was one of the first pop stars to achieve fame by unintentionally captivating the Internet, and, strangely, she was also one of the last. These days, virality is not so much a lightning strike as a marketing scheme, reverse engineered by executives and masquerading as serendipity. A. & R. representatives often scout new talent by dissecting social-media numbers, as though music could be a “Moneyball”-style game of statistics. But in 2016 the online-to-IRL catapult was still unpredictable. It was exhilarating to watch the arc of its fling.
It helped that the distinctive sound of “Alaska”—a fusion of organic and synthesized—was beginning to take hold in independent music. For a brief moment, it seemed as though drum machine meets trail mix might be the next big vibe. A bidding war broke out among interested record labels. Rogers eventually signed with Capitol, where she was given her own imprint, Debay Sounds. In early 2017, she released an adventurous, genre-bending EP, “Now That the Light Is Fading,” which included an updated version of “Alaska.” She was invited to appear on the “Tonight Show” and “Saturday Night Live,” conspicuous bookings for an artist who had officially released only a handful of songs. Those early performances were magnetic. The first time I saw her live—in April, 2017, at Music Hall of Williamsburg, a six-hundred-and-fifty-person venue in Brooklyn—the room had the charged feel of a tent revival. Onstage, Rogers can be a little wild. Her movement is spontaneous, erratic; she can appear almost possessed. In the video for “Alaska,” she strides through a forest at dusk, wearing jeans and a baggy zippered sweatshirt, her hair down, no visible makeup, periodically twisting and jerking her body in a way that reminds me of both the best modern dancers and my toddler when she hears the Supremes.
Rogers told me that when she was in middle school she won an essay contest with a piece about watching other people have fun. “I fit in enough—I’ve always had amazing friends,” she said. “I don’t mean to self-aggrandize, like I’m some great weirdo. I think I’m a pretty normal dude.” She paused, and laughed. “But also, I’m pretty abnormal.” She described her favorite artists as “fearless freaks,” and said that she believes a little bit of estrangement can be a useful creative tool: “To make something real, sometimes it helps to know what it’s like to not be like everybody else.”
Rogers’s first full-length album, “Heard It in a Past Life,” came out in January, 2019, and débuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200. The following year, she was up for Best New Artist at the Grammys. Speaking about it now, Rogers tends to emphasize that her time line was measured, nearly quaint by some standards—almost three years passed between her viral moment and the release of her first LP—but it’s clear that the pace and the scale of her success were nonetheless unnerving. On “Light On,” a single from “Heard It in a Past Life,” Rogers sings of feeling alienated, panicked:
“I was so young, but I was also old compared with the age of people going through it now. I got to fully develop, go to college, fuck off, and think I was gonna be a journalist,” she told me. “I was in dumb bands playing in clubs and there’s no footage of it.” The experience of being thrust into celebrity meant, ironically, that she didn’t have time to make music. “I’d never been less of an artist than when I became a professional artist,” she said. “There was a really specific moment, in 2017 or 2018, where I was at camera blocking for what must have been my fourth or fifth or sixth late-night performance singing ‘Alaska.’ I had a massive panic attack. I was just, like, ‘What the fuck is my life?’ I felt like a show pony.”
Rogers’s second album, “Surrender,” from 2022—a hungry, carnal pop record about yearning for transcendence—shares a title with her master’s thesis; her appearance at Coachella in April of that year fulfilled the degree’s public-presentation component. Rogers is now in the midst of a postgraduate fellowship, which will end in May. She’s using the time to adapt her thesis into a book, a process she has found similar, in one way, to songwriting. “You have to be specific about experience,” she said. The manuscript focusses on the idea of creativity as a form of religion, and stardom as a kind of default modern pulpit. “Early in my career, people were using religious language to describe my shows,” she said. “Rolling Stone published a piece in 2019 with the headline ‘Maggie Rogers: Festival Healer.’ The BBC published one that said ‘Billie Eilish is my cult leader. . . . Maggie is my God.’ ”
Headlines are overblown by design, but her audience’s devotion—something akin to worship—was real. The tumult of the Trump Administration and the pandemic meant that Rogers’s fans, like everyone, were increasingly desperate for moral guidance. But Rogers was, too. “I was looking for answers, just the same as everybody else,” she said. “It was really jarring—people asking me for advice on suicide, or to perform marriages. I started to realize that there was this functional misalignment with the work that I had trained to do and the work that I was being asked to perform. I was put in this unconventional ministerial position without having undergone any of the training. Anyway, that’s how I made it to divinity school. What I ended up doing was developing a system for myself to hold these things. And then I went out and tested it.”
On a recent press tour in Britain, Rogers was reminded of how much more at ease she feels now. “I was being asked to do quippy promo stuff,” she said. “But that’s not who I am or what I do. The twenty-two-year-old version of me just wanted to be great at this thing. But I can’t improv with you—I can’t be the cool, funny girl.” She went on, “I wanted to have this life, and I was willing to do whatever I needed to do to support it. But then I learned that there had to be boundaries, because I’d walk away feeling like I’d betrayed myself.”
After our dinner, Rogers suggested that we visit the Emerson Chapel, a stately, wood-panelled room where she took a writing class with the author and conservationist Terry Tempest Williams. She zipped up a long parka, and we walked across Cambridge, propelled by a glacial wind. The campus was quiet. Rogers swiped us into the building. In 1838, the transcendentalist poet-philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his Divinity School Address to a group of six graduates and their theology professors in the room. Emerson had resigned from his position as a Unitarian minister after growing frustrated by the way that Church doctrine cloistered the sacred and the profane. In his address, he suggested that God is present in everything. “He was basically, like, ‘What if the light outside was God?’ ” Rogers said. The room smelled of lemon oil. “I only feel ready for this now,” she said, of her career. “I feel O.K. in the center of it. Finally.” We hung around, admiring the stained glass and the pipe organ, until a security guard appeared in the doorway and said that it was time to leave.
Rogers made “Don’t Forget Me” at Electric Lady, a recording studio on West Eighth Street, in Greenwich Village. One afternoon, she offered to give me a tour. The studio was built in 1970 for Jimi Hendrix, who died less than a month after it opened but remains its guiding spirit; in a portrait that hangs in a stairwell, he’s wearing some kind of exquisite jacket, four or five necklaces, a thin mustache. His eyes are cast downward. The air smells permanently of palo santo. On a coffee table were bowls of fresh fruit and jelly beans, and a copy of that morning’s Times. Rogers used to live on West Fourth Street. “I studied studios,” she said. “I would walk by every day and look at my reflection in the mirrored glass and be, like, ‘I wonder if I’ll ever get to record here.’ It was a place that I saw myself literally, physically reflected in, during a moment in my life where I was still really, really, really dreaming.”
Even though “Don’t Forget Me” wouldn’t be released for another month, Rogers was already working on songs for her next album. She speaks about songwriting as a full-body process. “When I’m writing, the first thing I do is take my shoes off. My hands get hot. It’s so fucking physical,” she said. The work also seems to require a kind of spiritual stillness. “It’s like a puzzle,” she said. “If you can keep your focus on it for long enough, it appears. It’s right there—but the second your brain moves it’s gone.” She often enters a kind of hyper-focussed state. “When I’m onstage, or when I’m making something, I’m not thinking about who I am or what I’m trying to do. Time gets really sinewy. It’s spidery and slow. There’s wonder. And it’s just special, and I’m in it, and my hands are up, and I’m figuring it out. And then I come out of it, and it doesn’t even ever feel like it was mine to begin with.”
Since “Heard It in a Past Life,” Rogers has mostly eschewed dance music for a fuller, more rock-and-roll-inflected sound. “Don’t Forget Me” reminds me of the mid-seventies output of Linda Ronstadt and Carole King—burly, coltish, tender, fun. Rogers is no longer reliant on confessional first-person writing. “I was picturing a girl in her twenties on a road trip,” she said. “In my brain, this record takes place within the span of twenty-four or forty-eight hours. It felt like writing a movie, scene by scene.” One track, “Never Going Home,” is a rollicking, propulsive recounting of a night out, part Shania Twain, part Sheryl Crow: “We get to talking, but those lips aren’t your lips / We lean together, those hips aren’t your hips,” Rogers sings. She told me, “I’ve never lived that story, but I can picture a version of my life where I was going through a breakup and a friend was, like, ‘Shut the fuck up, we’re going out,’ and took me dancing and made me make out with some guy.” Inhabiting different characters enabled Rogers to be goofier, friskier, more mischievous. “So Sick of Dreaming” contains a chatty spoken interlude about getting stood up at a steak house which ends with “I mean, what a loser!” I told Rogers that there was a giddiness to her delivery on this album that I hadn’t heard before. “My friends all said, ‘This is the side of you that we see,’ ” she said.
Rogers wrote most of the record with the producer Ian Fitchuk. They met in Los Angeles in 2019, when Fitchuk was there for the Grammy Awards. (He was a co-writer and co-producer on Kacey Musgraves’s “Golden Hour,” which won both Album of the Year and Best Country Album.) Rogers was having dinner with the writer Lizzy Goodman, who, years earlier, had hired Rogers as an intern and tasked her with transcribing many of the hundreds of hours of interviews that later made up “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” Goodman’s oral history of the post-9/11 downtown rock scene. After dinner, Rogers and Goodman were going to see the Strokes. “I scared her when I said hi and introduced myself,” Fitchuk recalled. In November, 2022, Rogers sent him a D.M. “We hopped on the phone, and he said, ‘You haven’t captured your live performance on a record yet.’ And I was, like, ‘Yeah, that’s completely true,’ ” she told me. “My record brain and my performance brain are binary. They’ve always felt like separate crafts to me, in a way. The spontaneity is the through line.”
She and Fitchuk booked studio time that December. “I didn’t have any songs written, there was no mood board, no color board, no feeling of ‘I need to document this thing in my life.’ Everything, everything, was a first take,” Rogers said. “I was playing instruments. Ian was playing instruments. I knew when something felt like me and when it didn’t. It was really instinctual.” She added, “We worked from ten to five. I went to dinner with my friends after.”
“Often, a song was fully formed in less than an hour, and then it was on to the next,” Fitchuk said. “I find that it’s easier to work with artists who have strong opinions,” he added. “It makes it easier to know when you’re on the right path.”
Despite the album’s effervescence, many of its tracks describe the protracted dissolution of a romantic relationship. “So much of this record is a breakup album,” Rogers said. “In the time since I made it, I actually have gone through a breakup.” That relationship, which Rogers said lasted five years, ended peacefully. “I’ve really grappled with that for the last couple months,” she said. “What does it mean? It wasn’t a premonition.” For now, Rogers described her heartache as falling in love backward. “You’re as on fire and awake to the world,” she said. “Music sounds better. Food sucks.” She added, “I’ve never been single, really. I’m in a grief season with it. But I also feel a sense of freedom.”
I told Rogers that I’d noticed a theme in her lyrics: the possibility of loving someone without possessiveness or panic. “Oh,” she said. “That’s cool. That’s how I feel about love.” She paused. “I think, in choosing someone, I want to be chosen back. You know? So much of this record is about mutual culpability.” She continued, “The art that means the most to me has some friction. To me, living a beautiful life is so much about devotion, and devotion to art is about telling the truth. That’s not always an easy story to tell, especially when it points back to ‘I’m fucked up, too.’ ”
In late February, Rogers performed at Carnegie Hall, as part of a benefit concert for Tibet House, a nonprofit created at the behest of the Dalai Lama, to protect Tibetan culture under Chinese occupation. The composer Philip Glass, a co-founder of the U.S. iteration of the organization, had sent Rogers a handwritten letter inviting her to participate. “I think you would enjoy it,” he had said.
Rogers told me that she was thinking about dressing “like Beethoven” for the event, and pulled up a selfie in which she was wearing black suit trousers paired with a white ruffled shirt, not unlike the infamous frilly blouse featured in the “Seinfeld” episode “The Puffy Shirt.” “I love clothes,” she told me later. “I love the world-building. That’s the childlike part of me. It’s also an environmental factor that helps me switch between my different brains. Putting the uniform on.” When she performed on the “Today” show shortly after “Heard It in a Past Life” came out, she wore a vintage T-shirt with a picture of Eleanor Roosevelt on it, tucked into high-waisted silk pants. “I was so terrified of being sexualized in any way that I kind of crushed my own sexuality in an effort to protect myself,” she said. Now her look alternates between vaguely professorial and something more glamorous. She has adopted a different hair style for each record, including long, surfer-girl waves for “Heard It in a Past Life” and a dramatic pixie cut for “Surrender.” These days, she wears her hair golden and shoulder-length. “It’s not, like, a pop-star thing,” she said, of the changes. “Anyone who’s known me for ten-plus years is, like, ‘Oh, we’re doing this again?’ I had a pixie cut in the sixth grade, in the eleventh grade, and my sophomore year of college.” I brought up a line from “Alaska.” (“Cut my hair so I could rock back and forth / Without thinking of you.”) “Thank you!” she said, laughing. “I have receipts! To me, it’s about the externalization of an internal transition. It’s sort of the same way I’m not good at hiding the way I feel. I’ll tell you. Or you can just check out my haircut.”
At rehearsals the day before the Carnegie Hall show, Rogers met Joan Baez, who was also scheduled to perform. Rogers told me that she had long admired Baez and her “writer-bohemian” contemporaries, such as Patti Smith and Joni Mitchell. “That’s the lineage that I want to write into,” Rogers said. While the rock band Gogol Bordello ran through its set, Rogers, Baez, and the avant-garde musician Laurie Anderson danced wildly on the side of the stage. Baez was doing a kind of euphoric jig; Anderson launched into a “Saturday Night Fever”-style arm roll. Rogers moved freely, lightly up and down, a blissful bounce that looked more like levitation.
Later that afternoon, Rogers and Baez decided to sing Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” together onstage. Dylan wrote the song in 1962. It’s the most treacherous kind of breakup tune, a little bitter, a little devastated: “I’m a-thinking and a-wonderin’ walking down the road / I once loved a woman, a child, I’m told / I give her my heart but she wanted my soul / But don’t think twice, it’s all right.” Rogers called her parents and encouraged them to come up from Maryland for the concert.
The next evening began with a chanted prayer by Tibetan monks, followed by Anderson performing a version of her song “Walk the Dog,” infused with spoken koans: “We don’t know where we come from,” she intoned. “We don’t know what we are.” What followed was appealingly loose. There were some sound problems—at one point, Michael Riesman, of the Philip Glass Ensemble, performing a section of “Music in Twelve Parts,” abruptly stood up from his keyboard and strode toward the sound board, looking pissed—but the energy was pure. “I am here to read an Allen Ginsberg poem while wearing Fenty Beauty concealer,” the comedian Bowen Yang announced, before reciting “Who Be Kind To,” a lusty and ecstatic piece from 1965. (“Desire given with meat hand and cock, desire taken with / mouth and ass, desire returned.”)
Rogers had nixed the Beethoven ensemble and was wearing a less aggressively collared shirt. She ran through an acoustic version of “Alaska,” backed by the Scorchio Quartet. It was followed by “Don’t Forget Me,” accompanied by the Patti Smith Band. Rogers’s voice gets a little raw on the chorus:
Soon after that, it was time for the duet. Dylan likely didn’t write “Don’t Think Twice” about Baez, though they were involved in the early sixties, breaking up for good in 1965, as Dylan’s career was taking off. “I think about her and Bob Dylan—it just makes me want to fucking wreck that dude,” Rogers told me. “That song—the more I play it, the more I’m, like, ‘This shit’s fucking sad.’ ‘Don’t Forget Me,’ too. Both are sad as shit. The idea that the baseline is just someone to be nice to me—fuck, man.” Baez’s voice is lower, heavier, and grittier these days; when Rogers joined in for harmonies, it felt like a butterfly landing on a tree branch. They swapped the song’s pronouns (“I once loved a boy, a child, I’m told,” they bellowed), which gave it a pleasantly vengeful feel. The crowd went nuts. Later on, offstage, Baez told Rogers, “You sang all the notes I would have sung.”
Beginning when she was nine, Rogers spent her summers at Wohelo, an all-girls camp founded in 1907, on Sebago Lake, in Maine. There is no electricity or running water in the cabins. One morning, she texted me some old, sepia-toned photos of the place: girls in modest bathing costumes, rowing canoes. “I learned to write letters,” she said. “There were limits on technology in my life growing up that kept my inner kid safe for a long time.” For high school, she attended St. Andrew’s, a boarding school situated on more than two thousand bucolic, wooded acres in Middletown, Delaware. These traditional institutions—including, more recently, Harvard—are steeped in a sense of stoicism, seriousness, and erudition. They have had an undeniable aesthetic and spiritual influence on her. “It wasn’t until I saw ‘The Holdovers’ that I was, like, ‘I am deeply the product of this environment,’ ” Rogers told me. “I’m so obsessed with creating something that feels timeless but modern.”
Rogers, by her own admission, can be intense. “I’m so fucking headstrong,” she told me one morning. We were eating fried eggs at Washington Square Diner, an old-school breakfast joint near N.Y.U. “I’m not wishy-washy in any way. People get scared of me. But the right people aren’t scared.” In conversation, Rogers is open, generous, and cerebral. But she is not prone to abiding inanity. (Once, when I was pestering her to describe her childhood, she stopped me, suggested that I could probably find most of the information I was looking for online, and then said, “This is a little bit like fact-check-y speed dating,” which did not feel like a celebration of my reportorial prowess.) “I’m fundamentally in the business of selling my own emotions,” she said. “There has to be some real humanity kept sacred.”
It’s easy to be skeptical of artists who suggest that no, really, they can take it or leave it—celebrity requires constant and effortful maintenance, after all—but I came to believe Rogers when she said that she was more interested in the process of making things than in whatever happens afterward. For years, I heard the single “Light On” as about love doomed by bad timing—a person asking, earnestly, What if there was a way for us to hold and care for one another, beyond the sometimes impossible confines of a traditional relationship? The chorus presents a kind of compromise:
During my time with Rogers, I started to hear the song as a rejoinder to fame. The sort of attention that she commanded at the start of her career has been supplanted by a quieter, steadier sort of stardom, and she is now focussed, she said, on recognizing “that the cup is full, and not overflowing, and how nice that is.” Buttering a triangle of toast, she continued, “That’s even better—there’s no mess. I’m trying to have a good time, and make shit that I love with people I love. If that works, if it communicates or connects, awesome. If it doesn’t, eighty thousand other records came out that day. It’s O.K.!” She went on, “On ‘Heard It in a Past Life,’ I was very commercially ambitious. On ‘Surrender,’ I was very artistically ambitious. Now I’m in this era where it feels very personally ambitious, in the sense that I’m just trying to have the best time while I’m here.”
Musically, a focus on pleasure seems to suit her. The songs on “Don’t Forget Me” aren’t quite as tonally striking as “Alaska,” but they have an intoxicating ease: Rogers sounds unhurried, languid, free. I hear the single “So Sick of Dreaming” as a kind of modern companion piece to Linda Ronstadt’s “When Will I Be Loved,” a No. 1 country hit in 1975, written by the Everly Brothers. Both are refutations of selfish lovers, though “So Sick of Dreaming” contains a bolder declaration of independence. “I’m so sick of dreaming,” Rogers sings. “Oh, I’m all that I’m needing.”
I asked Rogers if she ever wished that her rise to fame had come about differently. She thought for a moment. “I wish that I had uploaded ‘Alaska’ myself,” she said. “But, because of the way it happened, this deeply unguarded version of myself as a student is the version people first saw. My authenticity was full and center. I didn’t have the chance to put on the mask.” She has also had to contend with another very famous person being an inextricable piece of her origin story. “I was being asked about him every single day, and had to be, like, ‘I don’t know him. You’ve seen everything,’ ” she said. More recently, she and Williams have reconnected. “Pharrell and I are friends now. He’s so cool—duh.”
The experience of performing “Alaska” at Carnegie Hall, in front of people culled from various corners of her life—her parents, classmates from Harvard, old professors, her musical peers, Joan Baez—felt like an apotheosis. “I’m gonna get emotional talking about it,” Rogers said, her eyes slowly filling with tears. “It’s been almost ten years since I wrote that song. I was thinking about the person who I was when I wrote it, and thinking about where I am now. I think the girl who wrote that song would be really proud.” She has been experiencing a lot of moments like this lately. In late March, she performed with Bruce Springsteen and the country singer Zach Bryan at the Barclays Center. “Craziest shit in the entire world,” she said the next morning. “My hand is purple. I overenthusiastically tambourined and gave myself a bruise.”
Rogers recently bought an apartment in New York. It was on a list of three things (find an apartment, release a new album, finish the book) that she wants to do before she turns thirty, at the end of April. One afternoon, she and I decided to visit the Dream House, a site-specific “sound and light environment” conceived in the nineteen-sixties by the minimalist composer La Monte Young and his wife, the multimedia artist Marian Zazeela. The Dream House has been situated in a two-room, third-floor space in Tribeca since 1993. (Young, who is eighty-eight, lives downstairs; Zazeela died last month.) Inside, two atonal compositions (one by Young and one by the artist Jung Hee Choi) play on large speakers. Neither of the pieces gestures toward melody or rhythm, and, because of the way that the speakers are arranged, every movement, however slight—a breath, a blink—changes the shape of the sound. Zazeela’s lights give the room a cool, pinkish-purplish glow. If you’ve ever walked by a buzzing neon sign late at night and wondered what it would be like if you could squeeze your entire body inside and slowly dissociate from time and space—welcome to the Dream House.
Shoes are not allowed, and, given the volume, talking isn’t possible. If you arrive with a companion, you will have to figure out a subtle little gesture to indicate to each other that your insides have been rearranged and you are ready to depart. The space features thick white carpeting. A stick of incense is perpetually crumbling to ash. After a while, Rogers and I sort of loonily nodded at each other, and stumbled back onto the street. She asked me if I knew how long we’d been inside. Time felt elastic. I guessed that it had been fifteen minutes—thirty, tops—though it had actually been an hour. “Dude,” Rogers said.
Outside, it was bracingly cold. We wandered around until we found a tiny champagne bar, which felt like an appropriate coda. Inside, we toasted to the Dream House, to dreams, to dreaming. Rogers said she’s trying to inch further away from the isolation of what she refers to as “first name, last name” pop stardom. It has been helpful to focus on music as an inherently communal practice, shared with her collaborators and her fans. “I had all these moments in the early years where I felt really alone,” she said. “I was putting so much of it onto one leg. Now it’s a tripod, and it’s so much more sturdy.” ♦
