Maggie Rogers has been asked so many times to describe the encounter with Pharrell Williams that propelled her to fame that she has got an answer memorised. “I just looked at my feet,” she tells interviewers, “and tried not to throw up.” But that’s just a line. The truth is, she can’t remember anything about it.
For Rogers and her classmates at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University, it was supposed to be just another day at college. They were told they would have to prepare a song for a homework assignment and bring it to class, but not that Williams would be there, listening to and critiquing those songs. The video of the masterclass that followed is on YouTube“I would try stacking that lead vocal on the chorus,” he tells the first pair of starstruck students, “and do a vocal line.” To the next, he advises, “I would edit the second verse, and think about harmonies on the chorus.” Then comes Maggie Rogers – she appears at 18:15.
After insisting that it needs “a couple more hours mixing and mastering”, Rogers plays Williams the result of her homework assignment – Alaska. The song, even to ears not as expert as Pharrell’s, is immediately striking. Its expertly crafted layers – an elastic, melodic beat, syncopated taps and clicks, and the murmured sample of a spoken voice – sit for a moment before the melody announces itself. “I was walking through icy streams that took my breath away,” she sings, the folk beginnings she outlined to Williams a few moments earlier immediately evident, “… and I walked off you. And I walked off an old me.” Williams’s eyes widen, his mouth opens, and he glances over at her with an expression somewhere between confused and astounded. “I have zero, zero, zero notes for that,” he says finally. “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.
“I recognise all the freakishly weird details that aligned to make this sort of connect,” Rogers says now, sipping on a virgin mary in a restaurant in London. She is wearing the same chunky animal-bone necklace she wore in the video, but seems like a different person entirely – older, more animated and (understandably) infinitely more at ease. She knows she was nervous that day, but only from watching the video back, not from actual recollection.
“I was talking to [Mumford & Sons’] Ben Lovett last night,” she explains, “and I told him I don’t have any memory of this event, and he was like: ‘So you’re telling journalists what you think you were supposed to feel, right?’ And I was like: ‘Yeah!’ I haven’t been able to articulate that ever, but that’s exactly it. I sort of had this line when they ask me: ‘I just looked at my feet and tried not to throw up’, but, like … that’s not true. I don’t really know.”
When she met Williams, Rogers had only just emerged from two-and-a-half years of creative stagnation. During that period, she didn’t write a single song. “I just didn’t really know who I was,” she says, “so I didn’t really know what I sounded like. And so I did a lot of writing, and I studied abroad and I fell in love, and like … I got to be like any other college student. It was kind of nice to just not know for a little while.” It is lucky the creative drought ended when it did, a week before the masterclass, with Alaska tumbling out of her “in about 15 minutes”. If it hadn’t, the year that followed would have looked very different. In the past 10 months, Rogers has graduated from college, signed with a major label, released an EP, played her first festival, made her live TV debut on The Tonight Show, and toured the US and Europe. She’s been in London for a few days to play two sold-out club shows at Omeara, and when she is done with this interview, she will fly to Amsterdam. It’s been incredible, she says, but she’s had to learn pretty fast how to put her foot down.
“I actually did have a moment a couple of days ago,” she says, “because every moment of my day on this tour is scheduled for me, where I was like: ‘Er, two seconds. Can we check the schedule with me? Can we pretend like I have some control over my own life?’ I feel like I had more freedom when I was a freshman in high school than I do right now.” She understands it – “We’re all on the same team” – she’s just had to get better at saying no, “making sure I get alone time, and putting my mental health first. Because, at the end of the day, this is supposed to be fun. So I’m trying to keep it fun.”
Keeping it fun doesn’t always come naturally to Rogers. “I care really deeply about my work, [so] I think it’s really easy to take myself too seriously, but I’m trying really hard not to.” She is certainly an intensely earnest presence. Talking to her is both invigorating and draining; she speaks quickly, often segueing excitedly on to another topic mid-answer, before taking a sharp breath and reminding herself sternly, “Complete sentences.” Intent on giving every question its proper due, she stops abruptly midway through an answer when two people sit down at the table next to us. “Can we move?” she asks quietly. “I really care about this and I want to talk about it, and I just can’t think.”
Settled into a new, quieter corner of the restaurant, we resume. We had been talking about politics, and a song she wrote last year called #. “I can’t sigh another angry sigh for an insecure man that’s telling lies,” she sings on the demo, which she wrote, recorded and uploaded the day after Donald Trump was elected. “It’s really impossible for me, as a 22-year-old female in my country, to not think and feel things about what’s happening,” she says. “The chorus is that I’m sweating – I don’t know what do, and I feel, you know, sticky about it.”
It’s important to Rogers that she voices her concerns about the world through her music – especially since “musicians have been political literally since people were writing songs” – but she is passionate too about the sheer catharsis of a good old-fashioned pop song. “I love pop music, it’s just fun and it feels good and it’s easy. You need both. You need music that is compelling and intellectual, but you also need music that just feels good and you can laugh about and dance to, and I think I’m trying to marry the two in some way.”
Rogers’ favourite music, and the kind that it is her ultimate goal to make, is music you can dance and cry to at the same time. Robyn’s Dancing On My Own, she says, is the pinnacle of this. “That’s what I want to do. The release of the production is so joyful. It’s joyful and so independent and – ” she breaks off, holding her arms out for me to inspect. “I have goose bumps actually, thinking about it. Like all over my body, wow. I’ve had a lot of really awesome moments dancing to that song, where I’m like: ‘I’m OK! I am strong, and powerful and full-bodied.’”
Listen to the poignant, pulsing anthems that Rogers herself creates, and you might just feel the same. Nor, at this rate, will you be dancing on your own to them.
Now That the Light is Fading is out now.
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