玛姬·罗杰斯

Margaret Debay Rogers (born April 25, 1994) is an American singer-songwriter and record producer from Easton, Maryland. She received widespread recognition after her song "Alaska" was played to artist-in-residence Pharrell Williams during a master class at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts in Manhattan in 2016. She has released two independent albums, The Echo (2012) and Blood Ballet (2014), and three studio albums, Heard It in a Past Life (2019), Surrender (2022), and Don't Forget Me (2024). She was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 2020.

Biography

Early life (1994–2012)

Maggie Rogers grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland along the banks of the Miles River in Easton, Maryland. Her father is a retired Ford Motor Company dealership owner and her mother, a former nurse, is an end-of-life doula. Neither of her parents are musical. She began playing harp at age seven and loved the music of Gustav Holst and Antonio Vivaldi. Her mother often played music by neo-soul artists including Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill. By the time she was in middle school, she had added piano and guitar to her repertoire and began writing songs in eighth grade. She attended Worcester Preparatory School, followed by The Gunston School, a high school in Centreville, Maryland before going to St. Andrew's School, a boarding school in Middletown, Delaware, from which she graduated. At school, she played harp in the orchestra, sang in the choir, joined a jazz band, learned banjo, and became interested in folk music. She also taught herself how to program and create music. Many of the first concerts she went to were at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, including Mumford & Sons and the Black Eyed Peas. She went to a rural camp which had no electricity in Maine for many summers.

The summer after her junior year in high school, Rogers attended a Berklee College of Music program and won the program's songwriting contest, which spurred her to focus on songwriting. During her high school senior year, she made her television debut at DelmarvaLife and recorded music for what became her first album, The Echo (2012). She included her demos as part of her application to the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, was accepted there and enrolled in 2012. She and her friend often dj'ed at her favorite bar, Enid's in Greenpoint.

College years and discovery (2012–2016)

At NYU, Rogers considered a career in music journalism, and in her first year, Rogers interned for music journalist Lizzy Goodman for whom she transcribed and edited hundreds of hours of interviews with major musicians and journalists. They were compiled into Goodman's 2017 book Meet Me in the Bathroom. Rogers formed a band called Del Water Gap with singer-songwriter S. Holden Jaffe. They later split so that each could explore more solo work. Their song "New Song" appears on Notes from the Archive: Recordings 2011–2016 (2020).

Rogers released another folk album, Blood Ballet (2014) during her second year at the school. Folk blog EarToTheGround Music said that the album "begs for listeners to confront deep personal emotions." Buzzkill Magazine felt that Rogers "really starts to find her folksy feet" with "Little Joys" from Blood Ballet. She studied abroad in France while at NYU and after friends convinced her to go clubbing while they were in Berlin, she discovered an affinity for dance music. When she returned home, she began distilling elements of dance music into her work.

In 2016, after experiencing two years of writer's block, Rogers wrote "Alaska", a song she wrote in fifteen minutes about a National Outdoor Leadership School course. She played the song for Pharrell Williams, an artist-in-residence who visited her class to critique student work. Williams said of the song: "I've never heard anything that sounds like that." A video of a visibly moved Williams listening to the song went viral that June, resulting in millions of views as well as hundreds of thousands of plays of The Echo and Blood Ballet. Rogers graduated from New York University's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music in May 2016 with a degree in music engineering and production and English.