Maggie Rogers is an American singer-songwriter and record producer from Easton, Maryland. She began playing harp at the age of seven and loved the music of Holst and Vivaldi. Her mother would play neo-soul artists such as Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill. By the time she was in middle school, Rogers had added piano and guitar to her repertoire and began songwriting in the eighth grade. She attended a Berklee College of Music program and won the songwriting contest, which spurred her to focus on writing. During her high school senior year, she recorded what became her first album, The Echo (2012). Rogers included her demos as part of her application to the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music in New York, was accepted, and started in 2012.
She formed a band called Del Water Gap with a singer-songwriter S. Holden Jaffe. The reason they split was because they both wanted to explore more of their solo work. Rogers released another folk album, Blood Ballet (2014), during her second year at the school. Folk blog ‘EarToTheGround Music’ explained that the album “…begs for listeners to confront deep personal emotions. In 2016, after two years of writer’s block, Rogers wrote “Alaska”, a song she wrote in fifteen minutes about a National Outdoor Leadership Course. She played the song for Pharrell Wiliams, 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.
After the Pharrell video went viral in 2016, several record labels tried to sign Rogers. She signed a contract with Capitol Records where “she licenses her music to them through her own imprint, Debay Sounds.” As a result, she has more control over her sound and image than many artists at a similar place in their music careers. Rogers’ EP, Now That the Light is Fading, was released in February 2017. She released her major-label debut studio album, Heard it in a Past Life, in January 2019. The album debuted at No. 2 on the US Billboard.
In December 2020, Rogers released Notes from the Archives: Recordings 2011-2016 via her label Debay Sounds. The album is a compilation of songs she wrote and recorded in the previous ten years of her recording career. Some of the songs are from her first two independently released albums: The Echo (2012) and Blood Ballet (2014). Other songs are from her previously unreleased 2016 rock EP and a band she was previously in with Holden Jaffe, Del Water Gap. The album was released along with a deluxe version in which Rogers provides an auditory commentary talking through each stage of her music career that the songs in that section reflect.
Her second studio album, Surrender, was released in July 2022. It includes the singles “That’s Where I Am”, “Want Want”, and “Horses”. The track “Shatter” features Florence Welch providing additional vocals and playing tambourine, and “I’ve Got a Friend” features Clairo and Claud speaking. In June 2023, Rogers played at the Glastonbury Festival.
