For the past decade Maggie Rogers has been haunted by the spectre of Pharrell Williams. The video of his surprise visit to her undergraduate music production class at NYU still goes viral every few months.
Pharrell, one of the most influential music producers of the 21st century, sits visibly dumbstruck as he listens to 21-year-old Rogers’ student track, ‘Alaska’. Awe, reverence and delight flash across his face. ‘Wow, wow — I have zero notes for that.’ The five-minute clip catapulted her into a kind of fame she neither sought nor was prepared for. ‘It was really scary and terrifying. I was so raw and unguarded — if I knew that was going to happen I would have brushed my hair and put some mascara on — I was a studio rat,’ she laughs.
‘We had no idea he was coming. I went to class and walked out famous. It’s such a crazy Cinderella story that I feel like there was a big picture of who people wanted me to be and it took some space and time to get to just be who I actually am.’
It’s only now, as she prepares to turn 30 in a few weeks, that Rogers feels in control enough to get in touch with the man responsible for her accidental stardom. ‘I’ve actually only become friends with Pharrell in the last couple of months and it’s been really awesome to reconnect as an adult. He’s kind of as freaked out about the whole thing as I am. It’s really strange to have this long, intimate, intense relationship with someone you don’t know at all. My life is permanently linked to this person I really don’t know and it’s just really weird.’
I’ve only become friends with Pharrell in the last two months. He’s as freaked out as I am
Millions of views and a hotly contested record label bidding war later, Rogers released her debut album, Heard It in a Past Life, in 2019 — a charming, raw, folk-pop masterpiece — and received a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist in 2020 (she lost out to Billie Eilish). Then burnout and the pandemic hit. She pressed pause on music and headed off to Harvard to study for her master’s in Religion and Public Life. ‘I felt like I had found myself in this unconventional ministerial position where I was on stage with a microphone and people were asking me for advice on death and marriage and life, and I was like, “I’m not f***ing qualified for this.” But it turns out no one is. I went to Harvard looking for answers and found out that nobody has one. Everyone is just doing the best they can.’ Reinvigorated, she cut off all her hair, built a studio on top of her parents’ garage in Maine and released her second critically acclaimed album, the more rocky Surrender, in 2022, inspired by her time at Harvard Divinity School.
Fast-forward to 2024 and her mojo is well and truly back. We’re in the lobby of a London hotel and, as she kicks off her boots, curls her legs beneath her and takes a sip of her whole milk flat white, Rogers tells me how she wrote her new album, Don’t Forget Me, in just five days, with most of the tracks being first takes.
‘I think it happened because I wasn’t trying to make a record, I was just playing. There was no pressure. There was this childlike joy. It felt in a lot of ways like coming back to making music when I was 16, 17, 18, and even stylistically it really sounds like coming home. This one was just real easy.’ The result is a beautiful blend of nostalgic folk-pop and a damn near perfect album.
With a new record comes a tour and Rogers is painfully aware that her American leg (she’ll be coming to the Hackney Empire this summer, dates to be announced soon) will coincide with the lead-up to the divisive US election. ‘I feel f***ing terrified like everybody else. I feel really scared and nervous. I will be one of the people with a microphone and I feel conscious and aware of that and I take that really seriously. I don’t know what I’m going to say yet.’
Does she feel she has a responsibility to speak out? ‘I always have and I will because I think it’s about being authentic and it will certainly be on my mind and everyone else’s mind, but I also view music as a place where people can come together and realise they have more in common than they might think. The injustice that’s happening in the world is so glaring and obvious it’s not like anyone’s missing it. So I’m also aware of having a balance of letting people have a moment to heal, meditate, breathe, connect.’
A supporter of the Planned Parenthood organisation for the past eight years, she finds the ever-evolving anti-abortion laws in her home country ‘dehumanising and demoralising’. She says: ‘A lot of people are in danger because of it and I find it horrific. These things are not political issues, they’re human issues: whether it’s gun violence or abortion access or trans healthcare or any of these things, they’re really basic human rights issues. It doesn’t feel so charged or polarised to me, it just feels really humane.’
Conversation turns to Raye — a friend of Rogers and another woman at the top of her game — who has been extremely vocal about the deep-rooted sexism within the music industry. Rogers, who savvily negotiated a record deal by writing her own contract and retaining ownership of her master recordings, doesn’t seem to have struggled like some of her peers. ‘But you only know the things I’ve talked about publicly. You don’t know,’ she argues. ‘So much of me studying engineering and production was because knowledge is power. If I know exactly what I need and want then I can protect my art. So much of it was about protecting it and protecting myself. But at the same time I don’t really remember asking anyone for permission, it didn’t really seem like it was anyone’s business whether or not I made art. Plenty of things were super hard and f***ed up and weird, and it’s not that I didn’t let them get to me, I’m completely f***ing human, but I was just like, “F*** this, I’m just going to write songs.”’
She is livid that this summer’s festival line-ups are once again dominated by men (Glastonbury aside). ‘It’s bleak. I think it’s really frustrating and stupid. It has to do with the fact women didn’t get a shot at this for a long time. There were a bunch of women who were right at that level and then the pandemic happened and festival owners got really f***ing scared and just wanted to book “sure things”. So that’s why you have The Strokes headlining for the f***ing millionth time even though they haven’t put a record out, whereas Lizzo, or Billie Eilish, or Haim should be there but it’s people trying to make profit in this way where they’re not willing to bet on women, which I think is crazy. It’s misogyny, it’s shitty and stupid. I actually just got an offer for a festival to headline next year and I said no because I’ve seen them have only male headliners for the last five years and I was just like, “F*** you guys, no.” The other thing is, I don’t want to be an equity play. I wanna be there because I f***ing deserve to be there, because I’ve worked really hard to put on an amazing show. I don’t want to fill your quota.’
I got an offer for a festival to headline and I said no because they’ve only had male headliners for the last five years. I was just like, “F*** you guys
Rogers puts much of her success down to the fact she was never attempting to be famous. ‘I was never trying to be a top-40 pop star. I was focused on who I wanted to be and the kind of art I wanted to make, so I let the rest be out of my hands because it just was from the beginning.’ So, the level of fame Taylor Swift has must be her worst nightmare? ‘It feels out of my hands. It doesn’t feel like it’s for me to decide. It never has been.’
Maggie Rogers’ new album, ‘Don’t Forget Me’, is out on 12 April (Polydor Records)
