Happy Monday to you!
Welcome to our weekly free edition of The New Cue, where we don’t passively-aggressively snarl at you for not being a paid subscriber because that is not good Monday vibes. Nope, this is us in free and easy mode, come right in, make yourself at home, hey, I was sitting there.
Today we’ve got a chat with Maggie Rogers to get your week rolling. Before we get to that though, shall we pat ourselves on the back? Yes, we shall. You can’t stop us. Wednesday will be our 200th edition. 200! So many interviews, so many recommendations - you can scroll through our back editions here. Hey, you know what would make our 200th edition really special? It would be for all those non-paying subscribers enjoying The New Cue to click Subscribe Now below and join the elite squad. I only said we wouldn’t do this sort of thing on a Monday to lull you into a false sense of security. Suckers!
Now, onto Maggie. Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Maggie Rogers
At the end of last month, US singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers released her brilliant second record Surrender. The follow-up to 2019’s Heard It In A Past Life, it retools the folk-tinged electronic-pop of her debut with a bold new sound that takes in anthemic pop, charged rock choruses and emotive ballads, Rogers frequently unleashing a dramatic holler to match her mate Florence’s. It was started at her parent’s house in Maine (she was there, she explains below, because of the pandemic, not because she was off on some cabin in the woods retreat) and completed in New York and the UK with producer Kid Harpoon. A few weeks ago on Zoom, she told Niall how it all came together and why cold-calling your heroes can work if you do it right…
Hey Maggie, how are you doing?
I’m good. I am in a hotel room in Berlin right now with a whole day of interviews ahead. It’s funny being on tour for press. It’s one of those things where I couldn’t imagine in my wildest dreams as a kid that I would someday travel the world just to talk to people. It’s very surreal but it’s also like all the worst parts of touring without the music, I don’t get to play any instruments.
Does this part come naturally to you, being probed about your songs?
I don’t know that it comes naturally to anyone. But I certainly create work with a lot of intention, so when people are like, ‘Why did you do this?’, I usually have an answer, because it was usually a choice. But no, it’s not the easiest. I think musicians are sensitive people that create work in small backrooms. I don’t think it’s the favourite thing for anyone.
That’s fair. Nice one on the record. It feels like my sort of summer music, sunny vibes with a healthy dose of melancholia.
Yeah, it feels like it could kick you into the fall, maybe.
How was the process of making it?
Oh, it was intense. But everything in the world was intense. When I look back on the process, all the songs were written in quite intense times in the world, during the Black Lives Matter movement, or during the presidential election, or during the first summer people took their masks off in New York City, there was just a lot happening all the time.
When I think about the process, I really am just so grateful to Kid Harpoon. I love and respect him so much. He helped me be the biggest version of myself. This record sounds so much like me, which is a gift. I saw him the other day and I was just like, ‘man, I am a different person now that this is outside of my body.’
How did the dynamic work between the two of you?
Well, I came in with four or five of the songs already written. Want Want and Anywhere With You were already pretty fully formed, they just needed a professional studio. I really knew the record I wanted to make. We’re just really good partners. It’s important to remember that music is for fun. I think that that’s the biggest thing I got back on this record. Starting in Maine, I was in my parent’s garage. It was the first time I’d had my own studio since I was 17. I went to college for engineering but I was using school studios, and then I was on the road. I hadn’t gotten to have a practice in a really long time. I would wake up and spend time and space and work in that way. I got to come back to making music in the way that I did when I was 18 and you can hear that on the record, it’s vulnerable and I’m talking about my personal life in a different way and it’s rawer in a different way. I think a lot of that came from getting to make music again, not even worrying if anyone was going to hear it.
That must be the hardest thing as a professional musician, holding on to that naivety you have when you start out.
I think what it was is there’s a lot of things that in the last couple of years, whether it’s the timespan of the pandemic, the pressure off of touring or going to grad school [Rogers undertook a Master Of Religion And Public Life degree during ‘downtime’ between records], I got to come back to music as a choice, not as something that was my job, like the difference between vocation and profession. Every time I came back to music, it was a really conscious, intentional act of choice.
Almost everything I’ve done in the last couple of years has been about really thinking consciously about how to preserve my love of music. When you mix money with anything, it becomes complicated. I was so burned out by the time the pandemic happened. I really needed a break but also I needed to restructure my relationship to all these things in order to get to do this for 20/30 years, because I saw a world in which if I just kept doing it the way I had been doing it, I wouldn’t be in the game much longer.
When you went back to Maine, what was the idea in your head? Did you need a bit of a reset?
No, it’s funny finding the press portray this almost like a Bon Iver story, like ‘she went away!’. It was a pandemic and I went to be with my family thinking it would be like two weeks just like everyone else. There’s this back to the woods narrative - you’re missing the global pandemic element of this!
Haha, OK. How long were you in Maine before you started writing again?
Let’s see… I think it was for three or four months that I was just completely quiet. I felt like I’d earned it. I got really comfortable with the idea of like, ‘maybe I won’t make a record for a year, maybe I won’t start my second record for two years’, just let go of this measure of time. And then I was just bored. I think boredom is such an important key to creativity. In Maine, I wrote 100 songs, I started just making songs for fun, songs that no-one will hear, just writing stupid stuff.
Once you started to realise you were writing songs for a new record, what did you find yourself writing about? Did you notice certain lyrical themes cropping up?
Hmm, that’s interesting. I always think about albums as the record of a period of time. When I’m in a writing phase, I look back at the last couple years of my life and think, ‘what are the stories I would want to tell? What are the highs? What are the lows? What are the really detailed, juicy moments that stand out?’. So it was a lot of cataloguing but this record is largely about trying to find a sense of freedom. It’s about love. It’s about sex, it’s about anger. It’s about feeling and trying to feel as much as possible. It’s like a statement of being alive in this time where it felt like death was everywhere. That was a real escape for me, it’s something that like really healed me through that time.
In terms of the title of the album, what are you surrendering to?
The title is funny because I had the title for a couple of years. I’ve always had the title first. I think ‘surrender’ can sometimes be quite a negative word but, for me, it feels quite positive. It’s about surrendering to feeling, and about surrendering to the experiences of just feeling as much as possible in the world. I talked about the feelings you feel in your teeth, the feelings that run through your hand, that physicality. I think a lot of time joy and anger are feelings that just take over your body and you have to just sort of get into them. But I think that in doing that, we can find the most central experiences of what it means to be alive.
You first came to prominence with that video of Pharrell being wowed by your song Alaska during a class on your course at NYU with you sitting next to him. Do you recognize the Maggie in the video these days?
Oh, that’s an interesting question. I’m just getting to the age I think where I’m old enough to look back on my life and see different selves. I don’t think that starts happening until your late twenties, but I have so much love for her. Man, I’m getting emotional thinking about it. I definitely recognise her. She’s still with me, man, and I think I think she’d be pretty shocked to see how this all turned out.
What advice would you give her?
Oh, man. I think I’d just tell her that it’s gonna be okay. I had such big goals my entire life and I’m really proud of that girl, she did it. But also it was pretty tough and I wouldn’t take any of it back, I’m enjoying such a sense of freedom and openness in my life now, because I’m living in this world that is the dreams beyond dreams.
The first single you released from the record, That’s Where I Am, was described in the press release as a “love letter to New York”. What is it you love about the city?
I love the close-knit nature of it. I love how raw it is. I love the people watching. My first night I ever spent in New York, I was 18 and a woman came up and asked me if I had a cigarette and I didn't and she turned around and dropped her pants and showed her asshole. That's what I love about New York. It never ceases to surprise you. And there is such community within the city of what it takes to survive it. Everyone does feel quite together in it, there is a real common humanity. Especially in the pandemic, that was something I really missed.
Are you a different person there to when you’re in Maine?
Yeah, I think different places bring out different people in all of us.
Do you write differently?
I don't write very well in New York. I write a lot in my journal and I write a lot of prose. But I have a hard time writing music there because it's just a lot. What I love about being an artist in New York, I love getting to have conversations and see a lot of art, it feels like a place where I’m a sponge, and I need some space to process it.
What was your favourite moment making the record?
Making music alone can be quite intense, like doing anything alone. It's just so much more joyful when there's other people involved. My favourite moment of making the record was the time we spent at Electric Lady Studios in New York, because I lived two blocks away when I moved there when I was 18 and it was always a dream to get to be there. I used to walk by it on my way to school where I was studying engineering and production, like it's the Holy Grail. Yeah. When we were there, we started inviting friends into the studio. I got that Electric Lady magic, whether it was Florence [Welch] who was upstairs or Jon Batiste next door, people that I love and genuinely have spent a lot of time with started coming through the door, pieces of New York I was obsessed with. Tom and I both love The Rat by The Walkman, so we invited Matt Barrick, who's the drummer on that song, to come play on Want Want and a couple other songs in the record.
It was stuff like that, letting New York bleed into the album. I wrote Shatter in New York and that felt really essential. There was a night where we were recording with Jon to two or three in the morning, and a bunch of my old New York friends came by the studio and we were drinking and it was the vision of everything I've ever wanted as an artist. I was behind the board at Electric Lady and an artist I love and respect was recording and there were friends around and it was late in the summer. It was perfect.
You really captured that essence in the video to That’s Where I Am.
Yeah, that video is such a love song, a love letter to New York. And a part of that was having David Byrne involved. I just cold emailed him and was like, ‘Hey, we don't know each other but here's the song and are you available?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, I'll be there at 2.30pm’.
That’s amazing. How long did it take him to reply?
Maybe a day.
That's good! Were you refreshing your emails a lot?
You know, I've done this before. I did that when I met Florence, I was playing in South London. I knew she lived there and was like, ‘Hey, I love your music, would you ever want to come sing with me?’ She was like, ‘what time is soundcheck?’ Sometimes there is a little bit of magic if you ask for it.
ND