Maggie Rogers wrote and recorded her new album, “Don’t Forget Me,” over 5 days final winter. The songs got here shortly and chronologically, as if she was writing “different scenes in a movie.”
“I’ve been writing songs now for 15 years, and so I think I’ve just come into this place where I really trust my process and my craft. I think because of that, I was in a place where I was willing to just play,” Rogers mentioned in a Zoom interview forward of the album’s launch.
The result’s a report that Rogers calls “relaxed,” one which finds her “unguarded and current.”
The temper is lighter than Rogers’ electrical 2022 album “Surrender,” which was in some ways a launch of pent-up pandemic power — a group of songs that begged to be skilled stay and with a crowd. And it leans extra closely on acoustic sounds than 2019’s “Heard it in a Past Life,” the primary album Rogers launched after a video of Pharrell Williams reacting to her tune, “Alaska,” in a New York University class went viral.
As Rogers explains it: If “Heard it in a Past Life” is air and “Surrender” is hearth, “Don’t Forget Me” is earth.
Like her previous initiatives — and her research at Harvard’s Divinity School — neighborhood is a through-line of “Don’t Forget Me.” Rogers name-drops buddies and tells their tales alongside hers. She has welcomed the best way the brand new songs have united crowds, and appears ahead to persevering with to foster that joyous, current, atmosphere on tour.
“I’m excited to be able to meet people in it,” she mentioned, referencing the album’s Friday launch.
That community-first high quality of her music is one thing that followers, too, embrace: New York’s Gaia Music Collective, for instance, organized a “one-day choir” of Rogers’ tune “Light On.” Four hundred folks gathered to be taught and carry out an association of the tune, a cappella.
“She also is thinking about music as a connective force, as a thing that can bring us and our stories together,” said Matt Goldstein, the group’s founder and co-director. “It’s no accident that her music feels good to sing together.”
This interview has been edited for readability and brevity.
AP: “Surrender” felt like an album that needed to be moved by and skilled with a crowd. How do you see this album being embodied?
Rogers: This report was at all times made for the automotive. I actually wished to make a report that felt like a Sunday driving report, as a result of to me, these are a number of the most intimate moments that I’ve had with music or with an album — after I’m singing alongside to a tune within the automotive and it appears like that artist or that tune is sort of a good friend in my passenger seat. Those are a few of my favourite data, they usually’re the data I flip to for consolation time and again. And , on this huge, loopy, fully insane, existential, world, if that’s one thing that I may provide to the world by my music, I feel that that’s actually particular.
AP: Could you say extra about the way you see your three studio albums in relation to one another? I preferred the way you described every of them as components — air, hearth, earth.
Rogers: I feel categorizing them in that approach is only a approach to assist in giving context to them. To me, they’re all actually necessary reflections on totally different intervals in my life. And my songwriting is fairly constant on the middle of all this stuff. It’s principally the best way that like my producer mind has chosen to decorate up the songs at their core, and that has extra to do with inventive expression or curiosity greater than something.
In every report, I’m simply attempting to be as current and genuine as I can. “Don’t Forget Me,” what I really like about it, is that it’s this actually, like form of woven tapestry. Like in so some ways I created a personality that form of led me by this album, somewhat than attempting to make a snapshot of my life within the precise second. But there are actual truths woven into that character and into these tales.
And , it comes out two weeks earlier than I flip 30 and in a approach it appears like this huge ode to my 20s and every thing I’ve skilled. Even if the narrative plot line isn’t precisely 1:1 with my life, the essence of all the emotions inside all the songs feels actually, actually truthful.
AP: Looking forward, what do you assume you realized after placing what you had studied at Harvard into apply whereas touring final 12 months?
Rogers: It’s humorous as a result of I spend all this time excited about stay music and the best way folks come collectively round it, and I had this thought that after I bought on stage that it will be like, , that meme of the lady with the mathematics downside above her head? I used to be like, that’s going to be me. And then I bought on stage. And what I really like about being on stage is that I’m not considering, I’m simply transferring. I’m simply feeling. It’s like deeply instinctual.
When I take into consideration the tour that I’ll be on for the subsequent 12 months, I feel I’m principally simply actually excited to have enjoyable. Like, I’ve labored for thus a few years and been in so many bands, whether or not it was like at some underground membership in New York City or being 18 and enjoying in bars or being on the street in a van at first of my profession, that now I really feel actually comfy on stage and I really like enjoying stay. I’m so glad that stay music is again on this approach.
AP: You posted a video across the holidays a few journal entry you discovered from the top of your time at NYU.
Rogers: So trippy.
AP: How does that form of reflective writing match into your each day apply and songwriting now?
Rogers: It’s such an enormous a part of my life. I imply, I write every single day. I form of can’t sleep with out it. It’s often the very last thing I do on the finish of the day. And it, like, actually is a meditation.
I wrote a ton by grad college and have continued engaged on essays and I’m turning my grasp’s thesis right into a guide. My lengthy kind writing apply feels as a lot part of my life as my brief kind songwriting apply, and it helps me to remain actually current in my life as a result of I’m taking note of element on a regular basis.
AP: You mentioned that scripting this album felt like writing scenes from a film. Do you look to movies for inspiration if you’re growing a storyline and character like this?
Rogers: No, I imply, the films that I really like usually have a robust feminine lead — like, “10 Things I Hate About You” was a extremely huge, huge a part of “Surrender.” And “Thelma and Louise” was a giant a part of this report. I don’t know — perhaps it makes me a fundamental b—, however, like, I’m a lover of a Meg Ryan rom-com, or a Julia Roberts film. But that’s simply what I like. That to me has the identical sense of consolation because the album that’s the passenger within the passenger seat that you just’re singing alongside to in your automotive — they maintain the identical house for me.
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