“It Feels Like A Real Gift” Maggie Rogers Interviewed
Maggie Rogers embraces control. After all, wouldn’t you? She kinda became famous by accident, that viral clip of Pharrell Williams falling heads-over-heels for her song ‘Alaska’ catapulting the songwriter into a never-ending series of major label corridors. Yet she’s been able to construct her own machinery for dealing with fame – the deal she eventually signed, for example, gives her an incredible amount of freedom, while also absorbing the muscle of an international label. It’s something that enables her to communicate to a global audience, say, while also taking time out.
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Clash first met Maggie Rogers a few years back, in East London’s Ace Hotel. By her own admission she was “interview’d out” after a prolonged press cycle for her excellent debut album ‘Heard It In A Past Life’. Fast forward three years and we’re in the same building, but with a different name; Maggie Rogers has a new album – the immaculate, maximalist pop of ‘Surrender’ – a freshly awarded college degree, and a pretty-damn-cool haircut.
As the conversation opens, she is appropriately sanguine for someone who’s pushed herself through some life-changing alterations. “In 10 days everything I set out to do in the last three years sort of comes to an end – a closure, and an opening.”
Long story short: Maggie Rogers came off the road following her debut album and enrolled in Harvard Divinity School. Immersing herself in the history and nature of spirituality, the experience naturally shifted the way she approached art, and herself. “That’s why studying religion is so fun,” she smiles. “There’s no answer.”
“I learn a lot about myself when I get to be new at something. It’s really humbling. I’ve been saying, like, the real thing I learned in grad school is how little I know.”
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The degree formed a wider aspect of re-centring in her life. Discussing her rise, she’s almost in disbelief at the abrupt and colossal shifts in her daily routine. “I mean, I hadn’t been to a grocery store in four years!” she gasps. “My life was so insane.”
Studying brought relocation, and a fresh start. “It made me feel alive,” she reflects. “I moved to the city and made new friends. And that’s – I think – a really intense and exciting thing, no matter who you are. It was just so fun. I miss it every day. I wish I had another year. I felt charged. It was challenging, exciting, and safe.”
While Maggie carefully removes herself from much of the specifics – religion and spirituality are, as she rightly observes, innately personal topics – it’s clear that the experience of studying drastically re-arranged the architecture of her life. “It’s really helpful for me to have other shit going on,” she says. “Because then I come back to music and it feels really fresh.”
“Studying made me feel, well, what do I want in life? I think what I really want is to live a beautiful life. And I think that can be simple… it reminded me that it’s okay for me to have ambitions outside of music.”
Early in 2020 she took herself away to Maine, a place Maggie Rogers’ family often visited in her youth. At once familiar and new, it’s her that the first seeds of ‘Surrender’ were sown. “It’s so special,” she grins. “When I think of Maine, I think of cold, icy water, and craggy rocks and cliffs and a real sense of isolation and openness. It smells like pine. And there’s real community there.”
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Riding out the doubt of the first lockdown amid the serenity of the East Coast, she found ideas tumbling out of her – though perhaps not in the manner the press have suggested. “I love the Bon Iver narrative but… the world was shutting down!”
“It was the first time I’ve had my own studio in a really long time. Maybe since high school. It’s also probably the longest amount of time I’ve spent in one place since college. I talk a lot about intention, and it’s nice to wake up and go the same place, make something, and have it be great or shit and then come back the next day. I made basically like an entire second record that’ll never come out. Like 100 songs.”
Making music purely for its own sake became a re-charging exercise for Maggie Rogers – it’s tempting to envisage her as some poet on the Maine coast, sketching poems in the sand then letting the surf take them. “It was simple. And it was fun. And it was… unguarded. I was just making shit because I got bored and remembered that I like to make beats. It’s one of my favourite ways to pass the time.”
With a huge bedrock of material forming underneath her, work on the new album began to accelerate. Linking with Kid Harpoon – an English producer riding the crest of a commercial wave following his work with Harry Styles, amongst others – she travelled to Real World Studios in Bath to write something fresh. “He’s such a brilliant songwriter and always makes me feel the most me… which is a strange alchemy. Bringing out the most of someone like that is a pretty incredible gift.”
“All my like best friends and family – my oldest friends – have heard this record and what they all say is that it sounds like me.”
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‘Surrender’ is a dazzling experience, a fusion of the folk-hewn sounds that encapsulated her early work, the enchanting pop of her debut, and something more, something extra. Extending outwards, it swallows both the countrified songwriting of ‘Horses’, the alt-pop physicality of ‘Shatter’ and the 90s production techniques of ‘That’s Where I Am’. There’s a lot going on here, and it makes demands both of its creator and the listener – but those are demands that are worth meeting for one of the year’s most absorbing, addictive, and illuminating pop full lengths.
Perhaps appropriately for a record that maintains such a connection to the UK, much of her reference points are dominated by British and European rock and pop. Peak era New Order are mentioned, alongside Oasis – “well I’ve got this fucking haircut!” – and The Cardigans’ mighty late 90s full length ‘Gran Turismo’. Glastonbury, meanwhile, is “the best festival in the world… I really believe that!”
“Specifically, the first trip to Real World was some of the some of the most important days of creativity I’ve ever had in my life,” she says. “I was just ready. I’d had enough rest and time off and time to really think about what I wanted. I was really clear about where I was. I was just really focussed.”
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While we hesitate to use the ‘meditative’, there is clearly something extraordinarily special about the moment of creative illumination in Maggie Rogers’ life. “I think it’s honestly about not being precious,” she says. “There’s a real quality of being relaxed. And trusting… in a way, it’s faith. Faith in the creative process, based on your own ability.”
“I wanted to make something that I loved,” she adds. “And I wasn’t worried or thinking about, like, how are people going to react? I think that’s why I’ve had a little difficulty in talking about this record, because I feel like I was so vulnerable in songwriting.”
While she’s an engrossing, intelligent, often hilarious conversationalist, Maggie Rogers can be a testing interviewee. In the past, she’s re-worded journalist’s questions and presented them back to them – one of her first phrases to Clash as a greeting is “I’ve been told I can be kinda intimidating.”
As she freely admits, she isn’t a fan of interviews. “Honestly? Because I’m asked to get language to stuff that I would rather not.”
So, why do it? She’s better qualified – literally – than Clash, and is undoubtedly closer to the record. Why take time out of her day to put herself through it?
“What the interview process feels like to me is being in service to the record,” she explains, in an almost teacherly fashion. “I love with my full being what I’ve made, and I feel a real responsibility to the work. And when it comes out, I want to feel like I did everything I could to take care of it before it is in the hands of my community – the fans – and then it’s not mine anymore.”
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Ultimately, if we need to ask questions of ‘Surrender’ then the answers are there on record. It’s the sound of someone throwing themselves into situations, offering feelings both blunt and multi-faceted, and somehow emerging unscathed. “I feel like we as a global population have a real trouble embracing nuance. And I think also, especially when you have a life as a public figure, then there’s a tendency to make them one-dimensional, so you can understand them as a product. It’s a part of what happens. But it’s not how I choose to live my life.”
What Maggie Rogers is surrendering herself to is the art, and the instinctual urge to create. Even now, with the world opening back up, she isn’t 100% on what she has created. “Music is meant to be shared,” she points out. “Experiencing things with other people. The repetition – or mantra – of the songs continually unveil so much new meaning.”
On a personal level, though, ‘Surrender’ represents a purge of emotion. At times, it feels like a soul’s exhalation running away with itself. “I always think about music as a record of a period of time,” she says. “And those songs were all made finding different alleys to process the same thing… and I feel like I got to clean the house.
“Maybe there is a version of this craft where it doesn’t have to be so present and I can enjoy a song for just a song but at least for now, it’s still like my literal skin,” she grimaces. “It has to be really close to the surface or it doesn’t resonate in the same way.”
“I feel like I’ve got to purge whatever it was in my body,” she says. “Like I did a cleanse. It feels like a real gift.”
‘Surrender’ is out now. Catch Maggie Rogers at London’s Alexandra Palace on November 10th.
Words: Robin Murray
