If Maggie Rogers were to make a checklist of her accomplishments as a working musician so far, it would read like a dream diary. Get signed to a major label on your own terms? Check. Perform at Madison Square Garden? Check. Perform on SNL? Check. Put out two records and one EP; tour around the country and the world with Mumford & Sons and Haim; find a supportive mentor in Brandi Carlile; play Glastonbury, Governors Ball, and Lollapalooza? Check, check, check, check.
There’s an alluring fairy tale to be told about Rogers’s success as a singer-songwriter and producer, one that Rogers calls a “press daydream” over lunch at the Smile, a cozy downtown café that sits adjacent to NYU, her alma mater. She herself has told the story so often, she reduces it to Cliffs Notes when her parents’ friends and strangers at dinner parties ask how she made it big before she turned 25: “I grew up writing songs and producing music, and I studied music production in college. One day, during my senior year of college, we had a special guest come to class, and it was my turn to play a song and the special guest was a really famous producer who I really admired. He really liked my song. A video of that went on the Internet, and then I had a career. Those are the bullet points.” The really famous producer was Pharrell Williams, and the video has now raked in 3.2 million views, no small feat for a then college student.
“I'm in the world of dreams you don't say out loud. There were dreams where it was like, ‘This is ambitious but realistic and I can accomplish it,’ ” she explained. “For me, all I wanted to do was play Bowery Ballroom.” She sold out the 600-capacity venue two whole years ago, and Rogers has been running laps on that goal ever since.
It’s not surprising that the press has presented her rise as a Cinderella story, but doing so has reduced Rogers’s role as the driving force behind her own narrative. “You can tie [my story] up with a bow, it has a perfect ending,” Rogers says. “People have had this perspective and image of who I am based off of these small soundbite blurbs.” Compared to what the public saw of her viral success, the reality was actually quite different. “It’s all true and it was all great and exhilarating and amazing,” she explains, “but it felt really overwhelming and kind of scary, too. It was a more complex human emotion.” The video was a hit on Reddit, but Rogers didn’t even know what Reddit was. When it went viral, she’d just graduated from college and was driving to Maryland to move back into her parents’ house. To deal with her new unexpected life in the spotlight, she left the country. Then, when she was ready, she came back and wrote an album.
Heard It in a Past Life, Rogers’s major-label debut on Capitol, is the detailed record of that time for her. It’s dancier and fuller than her previous self-released Bandcamp albums, but with some of that original folky spirit intact. (In her early school days, Rogers was known as the “banjo girl.”) With a richer sound, and her powerful singing voice given a starring role, Past Life feels like Rogers coming out the other side of a major, life-changing experience with more autonomy and power than she’d had before. It’s a mature extension of “Alaska,” the song Rogers played for Pharrell just a few years ago, but this time with Rogers driving the conversation.
The week after she opened (twice!) for Mumford & Sons at New York’s Madison Square Garden, Rogers met up with GQ to talk about being the master of her own destiny, the bygone days of rowdy rock stars, and why she’s reading up on reincarnation.
GQ: It felt like that viral moment told your story for you, and you didn’t really get a chance to do that yourself. Now that this record is coming out, does it feel like you’re taking charge?
Maggie Rogers: There's a level of agency now, where I get to introduce myself in my own words for the first time. The hard thing to navigate is that there have been all these expectations of who I am and who I was and who I would become. Now I actually get to speak and people get to really figure out if I'm for them or not. That's awesome.
I'm sure it will be different the next time I put a record out. People really get to understand my intention and voice in a different way. My only concern is that I'm making sure I'm accurately representing whoever I am in the present. I'm not really sure that I can say that yet. The cool thing about this record is that it feels really grounded in the center, but I think my pendulum will consistently swing.
Do you think that’s scary to record labels?
That's not my problem! Here's the thing about marketing in music: Maybe it's scary to record labels [for me to make different kinds of albums], but hopefully what it means is that I'm a career artist. I want to have a long career. But that's based on wanting people to buy into my voice and not into a fabricated image.
What was it like coming off of that video and deciding what to do next with your music?
I basically said to all these labels, "This is the contract I want to sign. Who wants to do the deal? You put your own dollar figure on it, I care about the terms.” I met with all these people, and I really wanted to work with like-minded individuals who would challenge me but ultimately give me control. The reality of the music industry is that I was a 22-year-old college graduate who was able to walk into boardrooms and be the one in charge. It's incredibly empowering. I wasn't ready—I definitely was not ready—but I was prepared as I possibly could have been because I had studied the music industry.
It seems like it was maybe the best-case scenario.
The music industry is so cool because it's constantly changing. Nobody has any idea what the fuck they’re doing. A good idea can change the world. The music industry, and specifically the Internet and the way music is made now, democratizes that process. Someone in their bedroom could have a hit single because the Internet votes on it. The barrier to entry isn't intense. You just need GarageBand.
When you were in college, you got to see some of that firsthand while transcribing all the interviews for Lizzy Goodman’s book Meet Me in the Bathroom. As an aspiring musician at the time, what was that experience like for you?
I got an e-mail that Lizzy Goodman was looking for interns. “Oh, so I get to listen to all my favorite musicians talk about why they made music, how they made music, and all of it took place in the neighborhood where I'm living?” It was fucking awesome. I learned a lot. It was just really interesting to see how music has changed, too.
I've been thinking so much about the book recently, in doing this album cycle and going through all the press, and thinking about the things I'm sweating or not sweating. We're in a weird place with music right now. Instagram does this thing where my photo that I worked really hard on that I took on my film camera of this really intimate moment goes up next to a photo of Kim Kardashian. Musicians and celebrities are all on the same platform—it's one fluid stream. Before, musicians lived in record stores or on MTV. They had their own platform. There are a lot of expectations for perfection in appearance. You can't say the wrong thing. You have to behave. I miss people not giving a fuck and getting covered because their music is great. I miss rock stars. I don't know why it was so hard for me to say that. I just miss a culture of musicians being written about for their music and not for their personality.
I would argue that a band like the Strokes had a story, though.
The Strokes had a great story. Kings of Leon had a great story. But it was about the music. We value different things in society now. We do have an incredible amount of women in rock now, which is fucking awesome, but maybe we're just starting to see the real divide between Spotify and the radio and what that's doing culturally. People don't need to be rowdy, exactly. I think it's about being honest. I think I’m missing friction.
Do you think you could create some friction of your own?
Some of the songs on the record are pretty fucking mad. There's a lot of emotion or I was in a lot of pain. That was important for me. When all of this stuff happened, I became a cocktail-party version of myself. It made me feel one-dimensional. I felt like I had to smile and be grateful. I remember feeling that I was hosting journalists, wanting people to like me, wanting people to feel comfortable, wanting to be pleasing. I totally realized that, first of all, it was exhausting. I started to have this realization that if a fan met me in real life versus the way I was portraying myself, they might be surprised.
I think my default when I'm scared is to play the “good girl.” Maybe it's a societal female thing. I wanted to be pleasing and not take up too much space and not be too loud and to behave. I wanted to do it right. I care so much about the music that I wanted to do it right. The reality is that I'm a 24-year-old normal-ish person, I wanted to make sure that I was representing all the different facets of my personality and who I am in interviews and in music. I’m giving myself permission now to change and grow.
What do you feel is the through line on this record? Or did you want it to oscillate and morph from song to song?
I've always thought about albums as a record of a period of time. It's a very straightforward document of that year and a half after I graduated from college. The EP was the last three months of college, and I picked up where I left off, but I wanted to tell that story in full. It looks and sounds different because it felt that way to me. I'd spent my whole life making classical music and folk music in high school and then playing in punk bands and DJ-ing and discovering dance music and discovering pop music. I feel like the record kind of comes back somewhere in the center, and it's me finding my center after experimenting with all of these genres.
My songwriting is pretty consistent, but production for me is the real exciting thing, because arranging songs and visualizing them is where I have the space to challenge myself and explore. This record has all those elements of synth and dance, but it also has acoustic guitar and piano. It feels really solidly who I am now, or at least who I was six months ago. I know myself, and I know the way that I make music. I don't feel a certain preciousness with it. This is the music I made then. I make music every day. Tomorrow I'm going to make something else. If you like it, that's awesome. If you don't, that's totally cool.
That’s a really healthy perspective.
It's about the work. It's not about the reception. I realize that comes from a position of privilege, too. I skipped a couple steps. I'm in a position in my career right now where If I wanted to check the box off of “music career”—played SNL, put a record out, was in Vogue—and call it a day, I could do that. It leaves me in a position of freedom where this is already bigger than any of my wildest dreams. So, cool, I'm just gonna make weird music.
What would you do if you did call it a day?
Right now I'm working on having a hobby. I thought it was going to be motorcycles, but it's really not practical on the road or in different climates. I read a lot, but it's not so much of a hobby. I want to be new and bad at something. I want to be obsessed with something in the same way that I was when I learned how to play guitar. I want to learn. I want to figure it out.
Are you reading anything that you’re really into right now?
A friend gave me The English Patient, so I’m reading that. I just finished this book called Many Lives, Many Masters, which is about reincarnation. A bunch of people started asking me about reincarnation because the album title is Heard It in a Past Life, so I was like, “Fuck, I better do my homework. I better have some good answers.” And that title is very much on purpose. My life changed unexpectedly—and I’m starting to feel like it's all for a reason.
