When I interviewed Maggie Rogers in 2022, she existed at the centre of a rare Venn diagram I was also precariously occupying as someone still in the midst of transitioning out of academic writing and into music journalism. Here was this pop star who had already achieved viral fame before the first single from her debut album, Heard It in a Past Life, even came out, and was now also attending Divinity School at Harvard.
Having missed the tour behind sophomore album Surrender, which she was promoting at the time of our conversation, I sat in the bleacher-style seats at Coca-Cola Coliseum last night waiting for her Don't Forget Me tour performance and realized it had been over five years since I saw Rogers perform last: at Echo Beach in 2019, when I was still in grad school, just a few months after revisiting her appearance on the Song Exploder podcast helped me get back to the core of what I had wanted to do with my Cultural Studies MA program and unlocked my thesis.
With these past selves — nor the ones we were when we convened over Zoom in 2022 — not to be forgotten, who were we now? Opener Ryan Beatty set the contemplative mood, wearing jeans and a hoodie, a backwards ball cap and headphones as he perched himself on a centre-stage stump to sing songs from his lush 2023 album, Calico.
His casual, unassuming stage presence was quickly betrayed when he sang, becoming a quotidian conduit for the sublime. There's nothing careless about his approach. With a musicality that refuses to be contained, Beatty seemed fully in the moment as he stared off into space during the instrumental break in "Andromeda," allowing himself to be transported by his three-piece backing band's dreamy — and surprisingly robust — bedrock of lap steel, piano and acoustic guitar.
"Thanks Maggie for having us on this tour, it's been a lot of fun," Beatty remarked to the crowd in a tone that did not indicate any fun at all, still caught in the melancholy of the music. However, it felt totally earnest when the artist followed it up by saying, "Um, it's really been so great to be able to sit out here on a stump and close my eyes and sing."
Rogers would speak to a similar sentiment in the latter half of her 90-minute-plus performance, sitting at the piano with incense burning, telling us about how, when she and her friend Alexa walked through a park on the way home from dinner the night before, somebody was playing amplified guitar amidst the trees, singing solely for themselves. Giggling throughout her account, she tells us that's why she started making music; she loves nothing more than singing for the sake of singing.
That was palpable throughout the night, but so was the polished professionalism Rogers brought vocally. I was thoroughly impressed by how much her confidence and skill level as a singer had improved since I saw her last. I'm not sure if people who haven't seen her live understand that it's not just the delightful Americana rasps and warm passaggios that make her voice so compelling — Maggie Rogers can really sing.
That was nowhere more evident than during a new R&B-inspired arrangement of Heard It in a Past Life cut "Say It." I remember reading in an old interview that something happened to Rogers during an SNL performance of "Fallingwater" early in her whirlwind success. For lack of a better term, she surrendered — and sang like she never had before, not even knowing she had access to those notes. Now she lives inside that pocket of knowledge, and it's truly something to behold.
When she proceeded into "Love You for a Long Time," a beloved one-off from 2019, I realized that it was kind of a precursor to the sound of her latest record. In a live setting, the songs from Don't Forget Me — she played all but one of them, which I thought was maybe too many — revealed tighter craft and more streamlined structures. Despite having admittedly not listened to that album as much as the others, I still felt like I somehow knew all the words, the short-and-sweet refrains pouring out of me almost subconsciously, despite lacking the specific staying power of lines like "Cut my hair so I could rock back and forth / Without thinking of you," or "And when we're cheek to cheek / I feel it in my teeth."
"On & On & On" was a highlight when Rogers was joined by saxophonist Hailey Niswanger to give the arrangement some more funk grit. Jane Fonda once called the singer-songwriter "the sexiest, most sensual mover on stage I think I've ever seen," and Rogers made it clear why. Opting for simplistic dresses with form-fitting bodices and flowy skirts (as well as some mesh and sparkly capes strewn over top just so), she was free to let the music flow through her body.
When a fan requested the very embodied, electrifying Surrender highlight "Shatter," Rogers let her down easy by explaining that there's this other level of flow state performers get to access when they do the same setlist every night. "This tour has felt so momentous and big and grand, and I'm getting to see so many faces in the crowd that I recognize," she said, a couple songs ahead of an acoustic rendition of her breakout hit "Alaska" with a countrified, slowed-down arrangement that brought it into the Don't Forget Me universe.
That fateful clip of Pharrell Williams listening to "Alaska" and telling Rogers he hadn't heard anything like it before has been a prophetic blessing and curse for the artist to work with. And, to her credit, she's continued trying to be singular in her approach, changing styles with each new album, whether playing into what would eventually become trend with the twangy organicism of Don't Forget Me or veering off the beaten path into swathes of distortion on Surrender.
A lot of people (myself included — and the charts, if they count for anything) still love Heard It in a Past Life the most, with songs from that album reliably drawing the biggest reactions from the crowd. Rogers seems to have a deft understanding that she has no control over whether a body of work connects at large or not; ll that she can do is throw her light in new directions while remaining true enough to be entirely recognizable to those who fell in love with her on that first record.
When I saw a post on Twitter earlier this week that said something along the lines of, "when people say 'socialism works on paper but not in real life,' that's how I feel about Maggie Rogers," I couldn't help but laugh. I wanted to love Surrender and Don't Forget Me more than I actually did. However, they came together to make for a very cohesive, intimate-feeling live show from who is probably the most relatable, girl-next-door pop star we have — and her magnetism as a performer has blossomed with such conviction. She was proof of concept dizzyingly fast with "Alaska," and her potential continues to be realized anew in the long-term.
Through the different hair cuts and sonic palettes, the essence of Rogers's voice as a writer is a constant. Part of that has to do with who she is as a person, which is something her fans seem to recognize. Everybody thinks that, in another life, they would be able to be genuine friends with her. They see something in her that they see in themselves. Rogers is the kind of artist that makes people want to be where she is.