Maggie Rogers on her Sunday album Forget Me Not

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NEW YORK – Maggie Rogers spent five days last winter writing and recording her new album, Forget Me Not. The songs came quickly and chronologically, as if he were recording “different scenes from a movie.”

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“I've been writing songs for 15 years now, so I think I've just gotten to a place where I really believe in my process and my craft. I think that's why I was in a place where I was just ready to play,” Rogers said in a Zoom interview ahead of the album's release.

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The result is a record that Rogers calls “restful,” which he considers “unguarded and contemporary.”

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The mood is lighter than Rogers' 2022 electric album Surrender, which in many ways was a release of pandemonium–a collection of songs that begged to be experienced live and with the crowd. It leans more acoustically than 2019's Heard in a Past Life, Rogers' first album after a video of him reacting to Pharrell Williams' “Alaska” in an NYU class went viral.

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As Rogers explains, “Heard in a Past Life” is air and “Drowning” is fire, while “Forget Me Not” is earth.

As with his previous projects — and his studies at Harvard Divinity School — the community is the complete line of Forget Me Not. Rogers names his friends and shares their stories with him. He applauded the way the new songs brought the crowd together and looks forward to continuing this joyful, contemporary environment on tour.

“I'm excited to be able to meet the people there,” he said, referring to the album's release on Friday.

The community-first quality of his music is something fans embrace too: New York's music collective Gaia, for example, organized a “chorus for a day” of Rogers' “Light On.” Four hundred people gathered to learn and perform the arrangement of the song, a cappella.

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“He also thinks of music as a force that connects us and our history together,” said Matt Goldstein, the band's co-founder and co-director. “It's no coincidence that his music feels good to sing along to.”

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

AP: “Flood” was like an album that had to be moved and seen with the crowd. How do you see this album being portrayed?

Rogers: This record was always made for the car. I wanted to make a record that felt like a Sunday Driver record, because those are the closest moments I have with music or an album, when I'm singing along to the song. car and it feels like that artist or that song is my friend in the passenger seat. These are some of my favorite posts and they are the ones I turn to again and again for comfort. You know, in this big, crazy, totally crazy, existential world, if that's something I can offer the world through my music, I think that's really special.

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AP: Can you tell us more about how you feel about your three studio albums? I liked how you described each of them as air, fire, earth.

Rogers: I think classifying them like that is a way to help give them context. For me, they are all very important thoughts about different stages of my life. My songwriting is very coherent in the middle of these things. It's basically the way I choose to dress up the songs at the core, much like my producer, and it's more about creative expression or interest than anything else.

In every post I try to be as honest and genuine as possible. What I love about Forget Me Not is that it really is like a woven tapestry. Like most tracks, I created a character that guided me through this album rather than trying to paint a snapshot of my life at that moment. But there are real truths in that character and those events.

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You know, it comes out two weeks before I turn 30, and it feels like a big ode to my 20s and everything I've been through. Even though the story line isn't exactly 1:1 with my life, the essence of all the feelings in all the songs feels really, really real.

AP: Looking ahead, what do you think you've learned by putting into practice what you studied at Harvard last year on tour?

Rogers: It's funny because I spend all this time thinking about live music and how people gather around it, and when I get on stage, I think it's going to be like a meme of a woman. math problem above his head? I thought it would be me. Then I went on stage. And what I like when I go on stage is that I don't think, I just move. I just feel it. It's like a deep instinct.

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When I think about next year's tour, I mostly think I'm excited to have fun. I've been in a lot of bands over the years, like in an underground club in New York or playing bars when I was 18 or on the road in a van early in my career. , now I feel comfortable on stage and love to play live. So glad live music is back like this.

AP: You posted a video over the holidays about a journal entry you found at the end of your time at NYU.

Rogers: So angry.

AP: How does this kind of reflective writing fit into your daily practice and songwriting?

Rogers: It's a big part of my life. I mean, I write every day. I can't sleep without it. It's usually the last thing I do at the end of the day. And it's really like meditation.

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I wrote a lot after I graduated school and continued to work on essays and I'm turning my master's thesis into a book. My long-form writing practice is as much a part of my life as my short-form songwriting practice, and it helps me be really present in my life because I pay attention to detail all the time.

AP: You've said that writing this album was like writing scenes from a movie. Do you look to movies for inspiration when developing a story line and character like this?

Rogers: No, I mean, movies that I love usually have a female lead, like 10 Things I Hate About You was a really big, big part of Surrender. “Thelma and Louise” was a big part of that record. I don't know, maybe it makes me a normal person, but I love a Meg Ryan rom-com or a Julia Roberts movie. But that's what I like. To me, it has the same comforting feel as an album where you're the passenger in the passenger seat singing along in your car – they occupy the same place for me.

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