transcript

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
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Speaker 3:
[01:18] Welcome to Switched on Pop, I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. 10 years ago, Maggie Rogers was a senior at NYU, scrambling to finish a song for a music production class that she was close to failing. The guest critic that week happened to be Pharrell Williams. She played him Alaska. Pharrell told her, he'd never heard anything that sounded like it. Someone was filming, the clip went viral, and it launched Maggie into pop stardom. 10 years later, she's released three studio albums, earned a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, and gone back to school to pick up a masters from Harvard Divinity School, where she studied the spirituality of public gatherings. And in the last few months, she's been as visible offstage as on, advocating for free speech in DC, performing for 200,000 people at the No Kings protest in Minneapolis alongside Joan Baez, and delivering a haunting performance during the final run of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which CBS is ending in May. This week, I got to sit down with Maggie live at Chelsea Studios in front of a room of current NYU students, the same school 10 years later, now with me in the professor's chair and Maggie as the visiting artist. Here's my conversation with Maggie Rogers. Thank you all for being here. Thank you, Maggie, for being here.

Speaker 4:
[02:48] Yeah, of course. Hi, everybody.

Speaker 3:
[02:49] So 10 years ago, you graduated NYU.

Speaker 4:
[02:52] I did.

Speaker 3:
[02:52] It is the 10th anniversary of a moment exactly like this, where you're in front of an audience of your peers in conversation about music, except I'm not Pharrell. Definitely not. His live reaction to your song, Alaska, changes your entire musical journey.

Speaker 4:
[03:09] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[03:41] Zero, zero, zero notes for that. And I'll tell you why, it's because you're doing your own thing. It's singular.

Speaker 3:
[03:50] Since it is the 10th anniversary, and you've celebrated that song in a couple of ways, we'll talk about, I want to get a sense of what that song meant to you then, and what does it mean to you today?

Speaker 4:
[04:00] So there's a very long sort of behind the scenes of what writing that song was, but basically I was studying music production at Clive Davis, and I wasn't really making any music. Like my entire junior year, I really started focusing on an English major. I had spent my first two years in bands, and then I kind of just like needed some time, which I'm now, so many years later, I realized that I kind of do this every five or six years, I like need a beat. I hadn't made music in like two years. My professor, Nick Sansano, very gently brought me into his office and was like, my guy, you are going to fail. Like I was in an advanced music production class and I wasn't, I was making music to fulfill assignments, but I wasn't making things that was really like my artistry that they knew that I could make. They were sort of like, you're up, like you have to present in class next week, like we really need you to show up, like we had like two months left in school. So Alaska was the first song I'd written in two years and it was three days old.

Speaker 3:
[05:12] This is your senior year?

Speaker 4:
[05:14] Yeah. So that went well. I'd shown it to my college roommate, Mary, who I'm still friends with and write songs with. I'd shown it to her the night before and I had told her, I don't know if I like this because it felt too poppy to me. It was outside of my comfort zone. So I think what was interesting was that I got really famous for something that effectively was an experiment. Like it didn't feel like the truest version of myself. It was, at the time, it felt like something I knew that I was trying. It was sort of, yeah, I was playing around. I was excited about it and that EP that I ended up finishing was my senior project. But I think it was difficult at the time too because I cared so much about my classmates. These are really small programs. And I think I'd really seen my classmates work really hard in those years and they'd really seen me do other things and invest my time and energy elsewhere. So I think when that moment happened, it was also really complicated because it was a little awkward or I felt I had so much respect and love for my classmates who had really put in the work and it was just a really strange thing. The way it all happened.

Speaker 3:
[06:35] And so this is a song that quickly came to define your early career. You've probably performed it a thousand times.

Speaker 4:
[06:41] Many.

Speaker 3:
[06:43] Is there a lyrical or musical moment that speaks to you in some sort of way now?

Speaker 4:
[06:48] There's two. In the second verse, I say learn to talk and say whatever I wanted to. There's so much space to play with that. And then, also, when we were playing Colbert, doing an acoustic version, there's a moment always, when I say I thought it was a dream, where I get this really surreal, special connection to being a student and being an artist, not knowing what I was doing, and that still doesn't feel that different than now in many ways. But it all does feel like a dream, and that time really was dreamy.

Speaker 3:
[08:08] I feel like that moment in time, 2016, there was a whole meme this year about 2016 being a special year, a transformational year.

Speaker 4:
[08:18] I think part of it is that it just doesn't feel like it was actually 10 years ago. I think that the pandemic just really warped all of our sense of it. It could be six years ago. I'd believe that. Seven, maybe. But the non-linearity, I think, is the big joke.

Speaker 3:
[08:34] But it was also a different time in media, you know, that this thing happened to you. You became this, I think, what is even Stephen Colbert introduced the song when you performed it, is like 10 years of the anniversary of this viral song.

Speaker 4:
[08:47] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[08:48] And I'm just wondering is I remember when that happened and every musician I know is like, I want that to be me. I want that to happen to me. Is it still a teachable moment? Like, can that happen again?

Speaker 4:
[09:06] Always yes, because otherwise it's no and why not yes. That shit went viral on YouTube and then Facebook. I didn't put a record out till, talking September 2016, my first record came out January 2019. I went slow. And I think that that's actually the thing that I wonder if that could happen now. Like I really took my time. I toured the world, world, like Japan, Australia. I toured the world for a year and a half on five songs, on our EP. And this was after I had grown up playing in bands. Like I really invested early on in like a sustainable relationship with an audience over basically anything else. It's funny, cause when you asked, could it happen again? My thought was, would I wish it on anybody? Would you? I don't think so. No. I mean, I think that great art will always find its way to listeners and find its way to the top. I like really, really believe that. But that experience, I think as we've seen time and time again, there's something incredibly un-natural about the fast attention of the internet. There's a reason it shares a word viral with something that we all suffered from. It's really un-natural. And I feel so grateful to my friends and to my bandmates and to mental health caretakers and managers and the people that really supported me through that time. But more than anything, I was really, really scared. And I wouldn't go back and change it because it's not really how it works anyway. And I love who I've become and what my career has become. But part of why I feel that way now is honestly because of the pandemic. Because at the height of my career, I also got a second to stop.

Speaker 3:
[11:20] Part of me thinks that, I absolutely agree, yes, it will happen again because great songs will connect with people. But it was also a particular moment and it went viral on Facebook. This is like a text and image based internet. There was YouTube, but YouTube creator world was nowhere what it is today.

Speaker 4:
[11:37] I don't even know what that is.

Speaker 3:
[11:39] We now exist in a world where songs can reach hundreds of millions of people and go viral on TikTok, but then actually not connect with an audience and have an audience show up in the same sort of way.

Speaker 4:
[11:49] I mean, the thing that I've always felt is I would rather mean very little. What is it? I'd rather mean a lot to a few than a little to many. And even with Alaska, it was getting bigger than what I could handle, and we killed the radio campaign on that song. It was going to go to pop radio, and I was like, you cannot do this. Like, it was already, it was going to like alternative and like independent radio, and it was already more than what I could handle. And at that point, what it would take to support a pop radio campaign would be like going in and politicianing and shaking hands. And I, that was why I wanted to become an artist. I have always known that I am and was then an album artist. I mean, by the time Alaska happened, I had been in so many bands and had put out two independent records. And I knew that I liked thinking in long form. And if one song became bigger than me, then I would never get the chance to do that again.

Speaker 3:
[12:51] So lots of music students in the room right now.

Speaker 4:
[12:54] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[12:55] When one of their songs has this runaway success, what are the things that they should and should not do?

Speaker 4:
[13:01] I have no idea. No, genuinely, because I don't know what it's like to try and come up now. I'm not really on TikTok. I bop in every four times a year and say what up. But I can't imagine.

Speaker 3:
[13:23] What about on the inner work? It sounds like there was some sort of soul searching.

Speaker 4:
[13:27] On the inner world? Keep making music. I don't know. It's funny because the advice that everybody, I think, always gives you is like, don't get too big for your britches or don't let it change you. But that is so ridiculous. Of course, it's going to change you.

Speaker 3:
[13:47] You just bought a new pair of britches with that.

Speaker 4:
[13:48] Amen. But it's going to change you and it's okay, I think is what I would tell someone going through that. And just hang out with your friends and I think don't be afraid of people because it can make you feel a little like the idea of being perceived all the time is really scary.

Speaker 3:
[14:09] You had taken a big break from writing music. This thing happens. How did that change your relationship to writing music? Because then you said you eventually put together EP.

Speaker 4:
[14:18] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[14:19] The album comes out a couple of years later.

Speaker 4:
[14:20] I mean, the day the Pharrell video happened, I walked out of class. I didn't really know what to do and I remember I turned the phone off and I walked to Chinatown, to my friend's apartment and we made a song called Better that ended up on the EP. I remember showing up and I said to him, I was like, this thing just happened. He was like, cool. I was like, probably liked my song and he was like, oh, that's cool. Anyway, so like it just was, his response was so like, weird. That's awesome. Like, what should we make now? That it really was like, yeah, there is really nothing to say about this other than this weird thing just happened. Let's make music. And that's kind of always been my reaction. It's just like, keep making things that you love. But the other thing I'll say is that every single person, makes choices based on what they want out of a career. And every single person wants something different from a career. And that's like completely okay. And I always set the bar. Like to me, when I was playing in bands in New York City, being able to play Bowery Ballroom was like the craziest thing. I couldn't figure out even how you'd get that many people to come to your show. Like, we could figure out like pianos and Mercury Lounge. And I was like, how do you... I could not put it into my head how you would... I was like, if you were playing Bowery Ballroom, you are famous, like totally successful artist. And so that's always been the bar. Like, I always want to make things that I'm engaged in and that like my creativity is fed. And as long as I can do that, still play Bowery Ballroom. Like, I'm good.

Speaker 3:
[16:06] Another amazing stage you played recently was the Ed Sullivan stage for the Stephen Colbert show, late night with Stephen Colbert. In addition to doing a complete new arrangement of Alaska, strings and horns from his band, you also performed Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer's One for My Baby and One for the Road.

Speaker 4:
[17:01] Thanks.

Speaker 3:
[17:05] So, it's an interesting choice for a song in 2026.

Speaker 4:
[17:09] So, these are Stephen Colbert's final performances, and that song was originally sung by Fred Astaire in a film, and then many people have many famous versions of the song like Sinatra, etc. That Midler performed that song, and specifically that version, she rewrote a couple of the lyrics for the final episode of Johnny Carson, which if you haven't seen that performance, it's so beautiful. It's such a lesson in like, I love that performance because she's so grounded. And she's so in her body and she's so personable, and she's not really performing as much as she is talking. And even when we were choosing the key, I can sing that song higher, but it's not really meant to be higher. It's meant to be sort of spoken. Anyway, it was really fun. And Brynn Bliska is playing piano and did such a beautiful arrangement.

Speaker 3:
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Speaker 3:
[21:22] Most of us probably know this, but The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was going off the air forever in May. It was canceled by its parent, CBS. Back last summer, it was announced. Colbert had criticized CBS's parent, Paramount, who set a lawsuit with Donald Trump over a 60-minute editorial decision. They made a $16 million settlement to Trump's future presidential library. CBS said it was purely a financial decision when they announced it last July. But it was also at a moment when Paramount was pursuing a merger with Skydance and needed approval for the FCC. The merger was approved a week later. Donald Trump posted Truth Social that Jimmy Kimmel is next. He eventually is taken off the air momentarily. I'm not asking you to comment specifically on, we don't have to get deep into presidential politics, but we live in a moment where free speech has been under assault. And a few weeks ago, you went to DC to perform at a protest in front of the Kennedy Center, now Trump Kennedy Center, for the committee for the First Amendment.

Speaker 4:
[22:22] Yeah. So that was the DC event was actually just a press event, but in Minneapolis, we were in front of 200,000 people.

Speaker 3:
[22:28] You performed The Times Are Changing with Joan Baez. You also performed your song, Different Kind of World.

Speaker 4:
[22:38] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[22:57] What has motivated you to participate in these events and sing these songs?

Speaker 4:
[23:00] I'm motivated by being an artist, which means feeling in general. Participating in any form of activism is inherently a creative practice because you have to be able to dream of a future that is different than the one you're currently living in to be there. And so it feels like a really natural space for artists because it doesn't happen without creative thought. And it's really just inherent to who I am and how I feel through the world. And I think it's really complicated being in these spaces because it's so clear that the system doesn't work. So then to show up at the protest for the system or against the system is like hard to rectify. Like I was speaking with friends last week and they told me this quote from this like 1900s statistician who's also a composer who basically said any system is set up to produce the result that it's currently producing. So then everything's broken. So to show up at the protest even though you know things are broken to like hope you can change a tiny bit or just be with other people that are feeling is kind of like a complicated and interesting thing. But I think about it in the same way as I think about changing a small detail of an arrangement. Like it makes everything better. Even if you can't change it all inherently.

Speaker 3:
[24:41] You said that activism is fundamentally a creative act because you have to imagine another world. And when you did the event in DC, you said this.

Speaker 4:
[24:52] More than anything these days I feel scared and I feel afraid and when I feel that way I make music. So I'm so happy to be here today.

Speaker 3:
[24:59] It was a quick moment, but there's a lot there. You know, typically when we are fearful, we run or hide.

Speaker 4:
[25:07] Those are like the natural good reactions.

Speaker 3:
[25:09] And and instead you're saying, I'm making music.

Speaker 4:
[25:13] Well, I've learned that singing makes me feel better about everything, especially singing with other people. It makes me feel better. And and also like at the end of our performances in Minneapolis, we were joined on stage by the Resistance Choir and it was it was like the whole point. It was so joyful and so present. And after like many long, very smart, very wonderfully eloquated, like spoken speeches, people really just needs to dance together. Like, and that's the thing, you know, I'm not dancing right. Like I don't really know where to go to dance right now. And that is like stressing me out a little bit because that to me is like medicine in the same way that making music or singing is. And I think it's that same like mind, body, spirit thing. Like the spirit, I think is the first thing that starts to suffer when like mass oppression happens. And art's always going to be the thing to me that saves it.

Speaker 3:
[26:27] So we're hearing a bit of like, especially in that Minneapolis event, like song and dance literally are an act of making that world that you want to be true present in that moment.

Speaker 4:
[26:36] I mean, it's joy is resistance. The most powerful moment from that was that there was like a Who Streets Our Streets chant happening while the resistance choir came on stage. And there was one woman I watched yell Our Streets with. It was like the most bone chilling power and pain and ferocity and community. And like her voice and her presence in that moment is the thing that like shook me and took me like day, like I can still picture it so presently, but it leaving that protest. I mean, playing for 200,000 people is like not something your body normally does. So I knew it would like take me a second to come down, but like leaving the energy in that place, like really took me a couple of days to shake down.

Speaker 3:
[27:30] I feel like we could stay here for a while, but maybe bridging the conversation is if we need song to unite us in those moments, are there certain qualities that you think make a good song for protest activism?

Speaker 4:
[27:43] I think you have to be able to sing it about something else.

Speaker 3:
[27:47] Can you say more about that?

Speaker 4:
[27:48] I think protest songs that are too on the nose, which I would say Different Kind of World is like on the line, but that was actually written for a group of friends of mine. We were all doing like a song a day writing group in the pandemic. So it wasn't written as a protest song. It was written as like a love song for my friends. I think great protest songs are about, you can listen in a bar. You can, like I always think about like, what's going on Marvin Gaye? Like that to me is like one of the best ones. Or Times They Are a-Changin, you can just like put on on a drive and like, it could be, it needs to, it needs to work for the global and the personal. And I think where protest songs don't work for me. Like we were talking about We Are the World. You know, Mega Smash hit great documentary.

Speaker 3:
[28:52] And very impactful moment of activism, raised a lot of money.

Speaker 4:
[28:54] Not putting it on at a bar. Actually, like kind of a jam though. I'm like, now I'm gonna do that, but like, that's funny, but.

Speaker 3:
[29:02] For a sort of camp-like quality, perhaps.

Speaker 4:
[29:04] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[29:05] I think, when I think about it today, it's through the lens of, it's hard to figure out what, if this song is about celebrity or not, because so much of it is a, right.

Speaker 4:
[29:17] I mean, if that happened in 2026, people would call bullshit real fast.

Speaker 3:
[29:21] Well, they tried to in the pandemic, and it went really poorly with the redo of Imagine.

Speaker 6:
[29:26] Imagine there's no heaven.

Speaker 4:
[29:30] It's easy if you try.

Speaker 6:
[29:35] No hell below us. Above us, only sky.

Speaker 4:
[29:42] Oh, yeah. I mean, the system is broken. It just produces more broken systems.

Speaker 3:
[29:55] One thing you're doing in trying to maybe participate in building a different system is you've launched the Maggie Rogers Foundation.

Speaker 4:
[30:01] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[30:01] How come and what do you happen to do with it?

Speaker 4:
[30:04] How come? Because I wanted a place to organize all the things that I care about. The things I care about are like everyone's health care, and women's bodies, and everyone being able to have access to health care, and music education. I'm not totally sure what it's going to become, but I'm excited that it's happening and that I now have a place for all these efforts. And I'm really excited that the first effort is a music scholarship at NYU.

Speaker 3:
[30:36] Very cool.

Speaker 4:
[30:37] But in an ideal world, you don't need a scholarship because music education shouldn't be that expensive. It's also the like, that's the like, the system's broken, but like, here we are.

Speaker 5:
[30:48] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[30:49] So when we last spoke, it was 2022, and you had put out the album Surrender, and you were on the podcast, and what you said was?

Speaker 4:
[30:58] I don't know if I'm going to make another record.

Speaker 3:
[31:03] And I will be honest, the journalist in me was like, yes, I got the good quote. Right? And I was like, obviously, it's not true. You later went on to put out Don't Forget Me in 2024. You kept making music, but it sort of ties back to the beginning of the conversation with Alaska. You had taken a break. You needed a break again.

Speaker 4:
[31:22] I take breaks.

Speaker 3:
[31:23] You take breaks. What do breaks do for you?

Speaker 4:
[31:25] They help me renew my artistic vows. Because I think what it means for me to be an artist is always changing. Because what it means to be a human in whatever stage of my life is changing. And what I'm willing to share, what I'm willing to negotiate, what I'm willing to compromise on, where I want to explore, what my goals are for myself, and my exploration are always changing. I think why I fell in love with the music industry in the first place is because it's always changing. And I love that. I find that it's really innovative. And it means that like a girl in her bedroom in Ohio, in high school can change the way that everyone does everything forever. And that's really inspiring to me. But yeah, I think I also just naturally go through periods of internal winter or quiet. I think that my introvert really needs a sick to process sometimes. And I find that if I let myself have that time, the writing of the record will actually be very quick. Because oftentimes, the record making process is just measured as the number of days you were in the studio, not as all the living that happened before that. So like Alaska, I'm like, okay, I made it in 10 minutes, three days before the thing. But it really took two years to make. Or, you know, the last time I took a year off, I went to grad school and then I made, Don't Forget Me in five days. In track list order, two songs a day. And those were like basically the final masters. So it's like measuring productivity in time, to me, doesn't really work for creativity because it's not linear.

Speaker 3:
[33:17] Are you currently in a resting time or are you making time?

Speaker 4:
[33:19] I'm coming out of resting time and I am in like big making time and it's really fun. But also, resting time is making time.

Speaker 3:
[33:30] Without having to get into your like deep, you know, private personal life, what are the things that are, that they're nurturing during rest time that other artists can learn from?

Speaker 4:
[33:39] The specific thing is just like because I'm on tour all the time, that's a specific existence. So a year off the road every four years, it makes sure that I continue to move forward in my like practical adulthood. Like, like you're laughing, but like otherwise you'll never like go to the doctor or like learn how to deal with health insurance or like any of that stuff like doesn't really happen when you're on the road. So there is like an emotional human development piece that like is really important for me to make sure that that doesn't get left behind. Or just like work on other things that like challenge me or ask for creativity in a different form. So like I worked on that meditation record with the Dalai Lama or like I did a bunch of writing. I like got really into like I learned a lot of random things. Like I'll sort of like pick a topic and go really deep.

Speaker 3:
[34:42] What was one example?

Speaker 4:
[34:44] I read a lot of like random things about mythology. And then I got really-

Speaker 3:
[34:49] You got into the Roman Empire?

Speaker 4:
[34:51] Like kind of. I got into the Roman Empire for a while. I got really into like Japanese films on Criterion. I got really into like going to the Whitney every month. I learned how to surf. I went to Antarctica. Like I did some traveling.

Speaker 3:
[35:13] If this is rest time, there's kind of like an implicit trust that maybe one of these things will provide meaningful input into creativity or does it not matter?

Speaker 4:
[35:21] Well, I think it's again, it kind of comes back to the thing of like what's the goal? And to me, the goal is really like to live a beautiful life. And so then it's about how that's defined. And this idea that there's just like work time and rest time. Like when I'm making music or I'm on tour doing this, this never feels like work because I love it so much. And so it's really just making sure that I stay full as a person.

Speaker 3:
[35:51] So you keep an ongoing, talking about like other mediums, you keep an ongoing dialogue with your audience. You have a newsletter.

Speaker 4:
[35:57] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[35:58] You have spoken about adapting your thesis, you went to Divinity School, into a book.

Speaker 4:
[36:04] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[36:05] And you make music obviously. How do you think about these different mediums as being good at communicating certain kinds of things? Or why do you use each medium for different kinds of, like different kinds of communication?

Speaker 4:
[36:16] This has changed over time, but it's really grounding for me in this creative cycle right now, that like essay writing or like me typing at my laptop alone is a really, really special and nourishing like solo creative process that is completely unfiltered by anyone else. And writing to me really works for both my structure brain and my creative brain, and that's a good place for me to be. Music, I think is really meant to be collaborative. Like I am such a Prince devotee, but people are going to come for me for this, but like I kind of think he fucked it all up for everybody in a way, because he was doing so much by himself. And I think, well then like I want to be like Prince and like do everything like that. But I really, I have found that like now that I've let go of that, thank God, because it was never going to be Prince. I just really love making music with my friends. And I really think that music is something that's meant to be shared. And I think when all the pressure happens for it to just be on you to do it, it like isn't as good as it could be if somebody else helped. And it's just to me not as fun. And so now that I have this real, those are the two practices I'm in most actively. And they really, really balance and feed each other.

Speaker 3:
[37:49] Thank you, Maggie. Thank you, all of you.

Speaker 4:
[37:51] Thanks, y'all.

Speaker 3:
[37:52] Thank you to Chelsea Studios. Thank you to NYU. All right, we'll go out with where we started. I'm just giving this a walk off song.

Speaker 4:
[38:00] I'm so curious about what it's going to be.

Speaker 3:
[38:03] It's the song we didn't listen to at the very beginning. Oh, hey. Switched on Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz, edited by Lyssa Sowop, engineered by Brandon McFarlane, illustrations by RS. Gottlieb, video by Nick Ripps, music by Jossie Adams, and Zach Tenorio of Arc Iris. Remember, the Vox Media Podcast Network and New York Magazine's Vulture. You can subscribe to amymag.com/pod. We'll be back again on Tuesday with another episode, and until then, thanks for listening.

Speaker 7:
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Speaker 6:
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