Maggie Rogers, a 29-year-old singer-songwriter from Maryland, is creating in the alternative music space. From a young age, she was involved in music, playing in jazz bands and singing in the school choir. She recorded her first album, The Echo, in 2012, during her senior year of high school. Two years later, while in college, she recorded a second album, Blood Ballet. She attended New York University to receive a degree in musical engineering and production, as well as English. Rogers’ two albums were released independently and went mostly unnoticed. Finally, in 2016, she was noticed by Pharell Williams, a music producer, who was visiting one of her classes to critique student work. She had been working on a song called Alaska. According to her, the song was about her time hiking in Alaska, which she visited because she had lost her passion for creating music. Ultimately, a video of him listening to and appreciating the song went viral on the internet, and she began to get recognition for her past work. Three years later, in 2019, she released her first studio album, Heard It In a Past Life, which featured the song Alaska.
I first started to listen to Maggie Rogers in 2019. Her music was unlike anything I had heard before. It always put me in a good mood, as her voice and background instruments were always uplifting. It was the kind of music you want to roll the windows down and drive around on a warm summer day, and that is exactly what I did. While I loved her first album, she became one of my favorite musicians after the release of her second studio album, “Surrender,” in 2022. Her sophomore album had a completely different feel than her first. There was more depth in the types of songs she produced.
Her second album's production is unique, as it started during the pandemic. In addition to the influence of the pandemic, Maggie Rogers was also greatly influenced by grad school. She describes music as something very sacred and personal to her. She struggled to keep these realities true and still create music for public consumption. In 2021, she enrolled in Harvard Divinity School to get a master's degree in Religion and Public Life. While there, she worked on a thesis titled Surrender: Cultural Consciousness, the Spirituality of Public Gatherings & the Ethics of Power in Pop Culture. Her thesis directly inspired the album's creation, doing more than giving it its name, Surrender. She wanted to break out of the domain of music production and understand the importance and spirituality of public gatherings. She used the geneplore process to solve the problem of keeping her music sacred. She used divergent thinking by attending grad school to consider spirituality in her music. Then, she used convergent thinking by producing her album using the skills she learned at school. She challenged her previous creative process by introducing new forms of knowledge that would help her create music that would enhance feelings when played live.
I have noticed that Maggie Rogers is intuition and feeling focused in her creative process. When making her music, she considers how it makes her feel and how it will make her audience feel. Rogers reveals her desire to create art that feels like the artist cared about; therefore, she makes decisions based on her emotions. She also describes an innate sense when she is working on her lyrics. Specifically, during the creation of Surrender, she understood them as coming from within her, mainly about the people she loves. This suggests her perception of the world is internal.
Roger’s creative experience making her second studio album involved many areas of creativity Rick Rubin outlined in his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being. During an interview discussing her album Surrender, Maggie Rogers discussed how making music and being creative makes her feel most like her and defines what it means to be alive. Rubin shared a similar sentiment, as he believes that being alive is an act of being creative and is a fundamental quality of being human. Maggie Rogers internalized this sentiment, as her motivation to continue to create music is because it brings her closer to her humanity. In the same interview, Rogers also discusses her value in collaboration. She described how Florence Welch and Jon Batiste played roles in several of her songs on the album. She also participated in a lyric writing group with other musicians during the pandemic, which she credits with the creation of two of her songs on the album. Rubin discusses the role of cooperation in creativity. He believes allowing yourself to cooperate with others and new ideas can only enhance your art. It should not be viewed as competition or something to be ashamed of. Maggie Rogers opened herself up to cooperation and collaboration with others. She herself describes this experience as inspiring and encourages other creatives not to be ashamed to admit they received help and cooperated. Lastly, Rogers explains how past experiences and the people around her largely influenced the album's creation. Rubin would describe this as a vessel. A vessel is a place where someone creates relationships with material collected and stores them in the form of stories and beliefs. Maggie Rogers collected her experiences, stored them in a vessel, and accessed them to create her album.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/24/arts/music/maggie-rogers-surrender.html
I love Maggie Rogers! I discovered "Alaska" a couple years ago when I saw that viral video with Pharell Williams, and I've been obsessed with it ever since. As an environmental science major, I love that she draws inspiration from nature. I almost wrote my blog post about Noah Kahan because his creative process is very similar, and his songs definitely reflect his time in the northeast. I also really like how Rogers continued her education even after becoming noticed and successful in the music industry. I didn't know that Surrender was originally her grad school thesis or that she drew from her studies when making the album. It's really cool how, for her, education and creativity are intertwined because I've always seen them as opposing things.
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