In her new album ‘Surrender’, Maggie Rogers has quite possibly provided one of 2022’s defining pop masterpieces.

Words: Jessica Goodman. Photos: Sarah Louise Bennett.

Maggie Rogers is living her best life. Five months ago, she was styling her way around New York City with David Byrne, The Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser, and photographer Quil Lemons, filming the music video for one of her new singles. Three months ago, she was heading to the Colorado Desert to perform on the main stage at one of the world’s most popular music festivals. Now, with the release of her second album imminent, she’s taking the world by storm.

In the six years since she was first propelled into the spotlight via viral video, she’s become a force to be reckoned with. Search her name on YouTube now, and the results are in the thousands. There are music videos and concert clips, TV performances and red carpet interviews, fan covers and song tutorials, and compilation videos with titles like ‘maggie rogers being the purest person on the internet for 15 minutes straight’ – an impressive accolade and - as this particular videos 8000+ views seem to agree - it’s not wrong.

Talking over lunch in the restaurant garden of a central London hotel, Maggie is entirely in her element. She beams as she chats about how much she appreciates being able to travel to promote her new record, and practically glows as she enthuses about an album listening party she held for fans earlier in the week. Conversing about making music and about the connection it brings, there’s the very real sense that this is what Maggie Rogers has always been meant for – and she’s making the most of every moment.

“I got everything I’d ever dreamed of, and so much more, on that first album,” she reflects of ‘Heard It In A Past Life’. She recognises her sentiment as one that might seem cliché, but as she goes on to describe the experiences that record brought her – touring the world, playing in front of audiences everywhere from Saturday Night Live to Sydney Opera House – her sense of appreciation and wonder is so tangible it practically speaks for itself.

Having spent so long on the road even before she released that first album, touring to promote her 2017 EP ‘Now That The Light Is Fading’, if she ever felt the weight of any expectations around creating a follow-up, it wasn’t while making her new record, but while making her debut. As such, going into making album two she describes herself as having felt blessedly pressure-free.

“I felt like there was a real sense of freedom with this second record,” she expresses. “Now that I’ve achieved everything I could ever possibly dream of, I was like, ‘I’m going to make something I really fucking love.’” Retreating to her parents’ house in Maine – where she spent the majority of lockdown – Maggie found herself not only removed from the pressures of her work, but returning to making music the way she did when she first started writing songs.

Surrounded by jagged coastline and unforgiving ocean, it was there that she laid the foundations for the album we now know as ‘Surrender’. “All the time in lockdown gave me the space to make a record as if no one was watching,” she conveys. It should come as no surprise, then, to hear that with her second album Maggie has created some of her most intimate songs yet. “I was making music and writing songs just to explore my internal world and pass the time,” she describes. “I think, in that way, this record is super personal, really vulnerable, and really raw. I am really writing about my personal life, which I usually feel is really private.”

Opening up can be a daunting thing even without an audience, never mind an audience that spans across the globe. That said, when it comes to her songwriting, honesty is something Maggie can’t create without. “To write it all down and then be here, and you’ve heard a bunch about my personal life?” she asks, grinning as she describes the interview we’re currently in the middle of. “It’s super personal and really weird,” she laughs, “but I don’t know how to do it any other way.”

It’s this instinct for honesty – coupled with her ability to take characters and emotions and paint them into life through her melodies and words – that makes Maggie’s music so relatable. “There’s a real power in that connection,” she conveys. “I feel like, if I share my vulnerability, and it resonates with you, it means that I wasn’t alone in feeling what I felt.”

The need for affirmation is a deep-seated one. Love, loss, confusion, comfort, anger, amazement, whatever emotions you might be feeling, the sense that you’re not alone in feeling that way can be transformative. It can sustain you through highs, lows, and everything in between. It’s what draws us to art, to music, to songs, and when we connect with them, it provides a sense of catharsis, of fulfilment, that keeps us going through the chaos.

This need for connection, to make sense out of the turbulence we live through, is one Maggie was innately aware of while making ‘Surrender’. “I feel like so much of the record I was trying to create or dream up the world I wanted to live in,” she details. “Making a world for myself, making a world to escape to, a place to go live outside of where I was... I needed that. I needed to believe things were going to be okay.”

One place she found that feeling was in films. After watching 10 Things I Hate About You on a transatlantic flight, she was inspired to write a song that channelled all the hope and optimism she was searching for. “I had this thought that it would be nice to write a song that sounded like the end credits to a movie,” she describes. “End credits, they’re when everything’s worked out. I think I needed to believe that there was going to be a happy ending.”

Said song arrives in the form of lead album single ‘That’s Where I Am’, a gleefully freewheeling ode to love and the belief that (as she sings in the chorus) “it all works out in the end”. In true teen flick anthem fashion – like Lindsay Lohan’s ‘Drama Queen (That Girl)’ before it, and Myra’s ‘Miracles Happen (When You Believe)’ before that – the video features the singer styling her way through an array of iconic outfits with a boundless sense of empowered resilience. It’s an open invitation to revel in the triumph and satisfaction of a happy ending, a dose of hopeless romanticism as an act of resilience, even if it’s just an escape – real life, after all, is rarely that straightforward.

“The other day, someone asked me what I learned during the pandemic,” Maggie states. “I learned I was really angry. I didn’t know. It took the quiet for it to come out.” When she started writing for this record in her parents’ garage two years ago, this is the path she thought ‘Surrender’ would walk down. Fuelled by frustration at the state of the world, it wasn’t until she started playing the songs back that she found the hope she’d subconsciously been fighting to find already existed in what she was creating. “I was shocked,” she laughs. “I used the record to process a lot of feelings, but it sounds really joyful.”

While, on paper, that might read like a cataclysm of emotion, on ‘Surrender’ it feels like two sides of the same coin. “Joy and anger, they’re both feelings that totally overtake your body,” Maggie explains. “I think that it makes the joy feel hard-won. I believe it when I hear it because you can tell that I fought to get there.” Listening to the record, you can hear the fight. It’s in every heartfelt echo and screaming hook, pent up in delicate chords and unleashed in thunderous refrains. Even in the stripped-back, quiet moments, there’s an instinctive power to these songs, one that feels raw and untameable – and purpose-built for the stage.

These are songs for muddy fields. They’re songs for when you don’t quite know what time it is, or who most the people around you are, or even quite where you are. They’re songs for not being able to hit the high notes but singing them anyway, songs for screaming and dancing along to with strangers and just being in the moment – and none fit this description more than ‘Shatter’.

With its rapturous chorus refrains of “I don’t really care if it nearly kills me,” and “I’d do anything just to feel with you”, the song is an ode to fear and resolve and fighting and feeling alive, delivered with so much thunder it feels capable of bringing the roof down from any stage it’s performed on. “Oh my god, it was all I wanted,” Maggie exclaims of performing live. “I think I felt so numb in the pandemic that I really just wanted something that could be embodied in that way. I wanted that live feeling.”

It’s an energy that can be felt throughout ‘Surrender’. “Playing music... It’s my favourite thing to do in the whole world,” she declares. “It had also been my life for so long, so it was what I knew.” Inspired by British festivals in particular (“they’re my favourite music experiences I’ve ever had as a fan”), with her second record, the pop star has made an album full of songs made for getting lost in. But more than that, these are songs made to stay with you. These are songs made to last.

“Making this record, after making ‘Heard It In A Past Life’, I was keenly aware of the fact that I was going to play these songs millions of times,” she describes. Knowing how big a part performing live will play in the life of any song she writes, it seemed natural to her to write songs with that destination in mind. “I’m going to live inside them – for a couple of years, but if they’re good, for the rest of my life,” she continues, then shrugs. “I might as well like them.”

The live stage is something Maggie’s spent a lot of time thinking about over the past couple of years – and not only in the context of writing and performing her own music. “Going to concerts, that’s always been the most spiritual experience I’ve ever had,” she conveys. “Coming out of the pandemic, I really wanted to think about community and about how we come together and how we create meaning, and I really wanted to think about power.”

To do this, she returned to formal education, enrolling to study for her masters at Harvard Divinity School. “Trump’s probably going to run for re-election, and I’m going to be on stage with a microphone,” she states. “What do I do with that?” Through her studies, she set about educating herself on the best and most ethical way to use the platform she’s been given. “It felt like the best way to spend a year, just really thinking about how to dismantle systems of oppression, how to bring people together, and how to create a structure around being an artist that would keep the art really intact for a long time.”