There’s Some Things Maggie Rogers Would Like You To Know

“First of all: I grew up as a banjo player.” Maggie Rogers lays her hands flat on the table between us. The information she is about to give me will have gravity. “It’s important to note that I was a banjo player at the height of dubstep,” she begins, “So I always thought that electronic music meant dubstep, and I was like ‘Okay, I don’t want that!’”

Rogers is trying to outline the factors that led her from being Maggie Rogers, NYU student and folk singer, to Maggie Rogers, viral sensation and actual-real-life-pop-star. She sits across from me in the lobby of her Melbourne hotel, dressed neatly and casually, a vintage Michael Jackson t-shirt on and her hair in plaits. Her eyeliner is bright blue. Rogers loves coloured makeup, and often wears bright pink eyeshadow onstage. It feels like an invitation to look her in the eyes, to connect on an emotional level.

Meeting Rogers is exactly how I expected it to be, in a strange way; the warmth and candor of her music is present in the way she speaks and moves, often loudly but always considered. She is very, very smart, and a good conversationalist, with a keen sense of her own narrative — not in a PR sense, but in a storytelling sense. She is, after all, a folk musician, and the folk tradition has always been about storytelling.

Having grown up playing folk, Rogers wasn’t well versed in electronic music until a trip to Berlin introduced her to a new type of clubbing — not the “high-class, downtown New York, heels and expensive drinks” kind of club like she was used to, but something more simple, and richer, a club where rhythm and community and liberation were paramount.

“I realised that rhythm is one of the most primal ways that we as humans can feel music. I was looking around the room and looking at everybody dancing, and everybody was moving in a very similar way, but there was this incredible release happening,” she tells me. Awe is present in her voice. She is clearly still reverential of the experience. “There was so much joy, and it felt like this incredible form of mental health.”

This occasion was a lightbulb moment for Rogers, who at that time had been struggling with understanding herself as an artist. During her time in Berlin, the aspects of herself that she was having trouble reconciling began to come together.

“I grew up in a really rural area of Maryland, and that represented folk music for me, and then I moved to New York City and I realised that I actually love dance music and I love pop music”

“I grew up in a really rural area of Maryland, and that represented folk music for me, and then I moved to New York City and I realised that I actually love dance music and I love pop music,” she explains, which led to her questioning herself on a base level: “What does that mean, and who am I?”

Understanding that dance music’s communal liberation is not far removed from folk music’s sense of community led Rogers down the middle of the two paths she had been given. “I thought, ‘If I can make [dance music] for people and do it with intelligent, emotional lyrics and bring in some of folk music’s DIY nature, maybe that would feel like me.’” In the end, she realized the Maryland/New York City, folk music/pop music problem wasn’t really a problem at all: “I just decided to be both.”

Rogers, 23-years-old and a Taurus (“I’m stubborn, which is why I think I picked an impossible goal and never gave up,”) tends to describe her music in this way, more about looking for herself than a particular sound. It’s about whether it sounds like Maggie, a broad and uniquely specific end goal that transcends looking for the correct drum sounds or pitching her voice just right.

‘Alaska’, the lead single from her most recent EP Now That The Light Is Fading and the song that pulled her from an NYU dorm onto stages at Splendour and Lollapalooza, is about this active process of Rogers discovering what she really Sounds Like.

I initially coded ‘Alaska’ as a break-up song, but that’s wrong. It’s more complicated than that. “It’s less of a break-up song and more of a song about finding your footing,” she tells me. “I sound like how I feel. My sound has always been my sense of identity, and my way of realizing where I am. And I guess for a while, I was just transitioning, from the time I was nineteen to when I was twenty-one, which I think is pretty normal for most people.”

‘Alaska’ was written at the end of a two-and-a-half year period in college when Rogers stopped writing music altogether. She was still playing in other bands, but her own projects were stalling. (The weight of this songwriting drought becomes clear later in our conversation, when Rogers is talking about her passion for her craft: “Nothing makes me feel more like myself than making music.”)

‘Alaska’s lyrics convey this sense of wealth after a period of frugality. “I walked off you,” Rogers sings quietly, “And I walked off an old me.” The song trades in simple acts of liberation: locks of hair are chopped off and bad memories are forgotten; cold water washes away the past.

The song begins with a quiet patter, but it slowly builds into something both ecstatic and hymnal. It channels that kinetic sense of joy Rogers felt in Berlin, and sits in a lineage of deeply cathartic pop songs like Robyn’s ‘Dancing On My Own’ and Arcade Fire’s ‘Sprawl II’, big songs about pain and emotions that find comfort on the dancefloor.

“Hair is literally dead pieces of you. It’s old protein. I just think energetically, things get stuck in it. This dense forest of life.”

That line about cutting hair — “Cut my hair so I could rock back and forth without thinking of you” — is significant for Rogers. She’s always had very short hair, because of the spiritual significance of what hair actually is. “Hair is literally dead pieces of you,” she says, “It’s old protein. I just think energetically, things get stuck in it. This dense forest of life.”

Rogers often talks about things in this way — ‘energetically’, or ‘spiritually’, sometimes — and sees herself as a very spiritual person. “I don’t really know what religion I would say that I prescribe to, but I definitely believe in the universe and believe in some sort of higher power, especially after the year I’ve had, with everything aligning so perfectly,” she says, splaying her fingers and lining them up so they touch.

“Obviously I’ve been working very hard to do this for a long time, and I’ve been making music since I was thirteen, but the way in this was all delivered to me was also without my consent. So it’s very strange.” She puts her fingers down and looks at me. “You have to believe in a god of some sort.”

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Shaad D’Souza is a freelance writer from Melbourne. Follow him on Twitter here.

Article image by Katia Temkin