Maggie Rogers is playing her best show ever. In the cooling Coachella desert, she’s gliding back and forth across the stage, crooning out her cowbell-driven hit “Burning” from her debut full-length record. The crowd is losing it as the beat kicks up, and the singer belts out song after song in her full, soulful register. She’s flinging herself around on stage in a simple white tank top and a red scarf that’s fluttering around her like wings.
The Coachella experience was a powerful moment of feeling like she was doing exactly what she was meant to do. “This is why I'm on this earth, to do this thing,” she tells Teen Vogue. Maggie believes in connections. She believes in gut feelings. During that show, a natural culmination of three years of work, she had a familiar twinge: “I feel an incredibly strong sense of purpose.”
Maggie’s career is often described in terms of luck, happy accidents, or being in the right place at the right time. All of this is true, but it’s a mistake to think that means her success is incidental or anything but the result of preparedness and a vision she’s slowly crafted for herself since she first began writing songs as a young teenager. And it's one that’s still in play now as a 25-year-old musician with sold-out tour dates at Radio City Music Hall, a Saturday Night Live spot under her belt, and a No. 1 album. A month ago, she made her Met Gala debut with Coach (a standout moment came when she heard fellow Teen Vogue June cover star Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” for the first time—thanks to Coach attendee Michael B. Jordan, who played it for her three times in a row). With these milestones in her past, Maggie is now looking toward the next thing she can dream up.
Maggie and I meet for lunch just blocks from the campus of New York University, where she graduated in 2016 with a degree in music and English. She lived in the city for years during college, moving from the small town of Easton, Maryland where she grew up. Her familiarity with the area shows — she’s a few minutes late to our meeting at the East Village staple Café Mogador, in part because she ran into a friend on her way over. Upon entering the restaurant, she’s stopped again by an acquaintance. During lunch, she’s interrupted again by a few people who say they have mutual friends.
NYU is the place where Maggie explored the business side of music. She also briefly followed a journalism career (she interned at Elle and with Meet Me in the Bathroom writer Lizzy Goodman) and met friends like Riverdale star Camila Mendes. It’s also where her life changed dramatically when Pharrell Williams sat in on one of her classes and listened to her self-produced song “Alaska” with actual tears in his eyes—turning her into a viral video star when the clip surfaced online.
Profiles and interviews with Maggie tend to split her life into pre-video and post-video. She’s talked before, to The New York Times, about how the video turned her life into a Cinderella story — a neat media narrative where she’s spoken about as a person who had something happen to her in the summer of 2016, instead of as a power player in her own right.
Maggie’s debut full-length album, Heard It in a Past Life, came out in January to critical acclaim. Its songs, like “Alaska,” are concerned with the idea of old and new, before and after, endings and beginnings. They speak to the kind of change that occurs in your life when you’re in your early 20s and you’re not bound by any institution, testing freedom from your parents and starting to make decisions to shape the life you want. The record is fully her own — she’s credited as a writer and producer on every track, along with carefully selected collaborators like Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij. Despite that leadership, despite her album’s No. 1 success, she still is asked about Pharrell in interviews. And sure, it’s part of her origin story, but she’s evolved from that now.
“There's a tendency to forget that people are multidimensional,” she says. “People's impression of me is that I'm a flower girl, or I’m this girl-next-door thing. She loves nature. She’s a nymph. She's authentic. What the f*ck does that mean?” she says. “Yes, I love nature, but I lived in New York City for five years. People know the details, but they don't put it together into a holistic thing. Yes, I am this, but also I'm this and also I'm this.”
Those multitudes are reflected in her voice, which can in turns take on the folky fullness of Joni Mitchell, the percussive instinct of Haim, the frankness of Stevie Nicks. She thinks of herself as a writer first and a performer second, much like punk-rock icon Patti Smith. Akin to her predecessors, she’s hyper-conscious of her image, maintaining a strong sense of agency for someone so young and relatively new to the business of music. On the Teen Vogue set she was even involved in the styling process, making sure nothing on her felt like a “costume” — she’s respectful, but she’s clear about her identity and intentional with every move.
Maggie Rogers claims she has never watched herself perform, not after her Saturday Night Live performance in November or after a slew of late-night show appearances this past spring. She made a thing out of purposely not watching herself. That is until she played that formative Coachella show on April 13, a set that was live-streamed through the festival and shared widely online.
When she finally did watch snippets of herself owning the Coachella stage, her first response was, “holy sh*t.” “I didn't realize I was getting good at it,” she says. “I didn't recognize myself, which is a really wild experience … I just got goosebumps thinking about it [right now]. I think it was the best performance I've ever played.”
Maggie is in tune with those moments, the ones that feel significant to her, not just the ones the world names as significant. She tells me about a special concert she saw in college that taught her the way a performance could be. “I realized how much fun the band was having,” she says. “It gave the whole audience permission to have fun…[which] just changes the mood. It really empowers everyone to let go.”
Serendipitously, not even twenty minutes after she shares this memory, the bandleader of art-pop group Tune-Yards, Merrill Garbus, enters the restaurant and walks past us. “There's a woman that just went in the bathroom and she’s like my favorite artist,” Maggie whispers excitedly. “Remember I was talking about that show where the performer was so empowering and I never forgot it? Oh wow.” She looks awed, but when I ask her if she wants to introduce herself, she declines. She’s confident she’ll have her moment elsewhere down the line.
If there is one thing that Maggie has, it’s an innate sense of knowing when the time is right. In college, there were a couple years where she couldn’t make new music at all, so she switched gears, to pursue prose writing and journalism. (A lingering effect of this manifests in the reading list she recently shared on Instagram to accompany Past Life. It contains recommendations for John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and Joan Didion’s The White Album, among other English-lit favorites.) After she became an Internet phenom, she didn’t rush production on a quick album to capitalize on all the good press. Instead she drew out the songwriting process, embracing the time to travel and tour and examine all the changes in her life.
Maggie knew when and how to advocate for herself with the frenzy of record labels following the video because she’d already been studying it in school. She had a 15-page business plan that was a roadmap for her first album, music videos included. (When she is sitting with Pharrell and he asks what her “visuals would look like,” she jumps in, whispering back, “I have them. I’m excited.”)
She respects artists who do the same—who create across mediums and are intentional about the timing of their craft as well as the work itself. People like Merrill Garbus or Mavis Staples (whom she recently joined at the Apollo for the gospel singer’s birthday celebration) or Billie Eilish, whom she also likes. “She is 17 and she's calling the shots, like that's f*cking cool,” Maggie says about Billie, adding that in her own career, “it's part of not asking permission. This is my art, support it or don't.”
She remembers the first time she felt in control of a stage, when she won a songwriting contest at the summer program she attended at Berklee College of Music. The prize was that she got to arrange the song with a live band; it was the start of her “production brain,” of conducting a collaborative experience on stage. Since then, she’s had the driving purpose in her head of becoming a musician, but didn’t predict she’d be here.
“The goals that I had for myself didn't extend this far,” she says. “I've always been able to see this vision of me doing this thing. It's unfolding on its own now.”
A few weeks ago, she was able to take time away from the tour to go to her parents’ home in Maryland, where she has a small studio, still filled with her things from college. Upon arrival, she immediately wrote three songs. Maggie says she’s been trying to live in the moment, but that invites a new fear that she “won’t have time to catch” the song.
So she’s making time to write, in between interviews, stateside performances, and an Australia tour. She’s leaning into the freedom of not having to introduce herself anymore, in interviews or in her songwriting. Once she’s finished touring for the record, it will become the latest in a series of past lives. “We've already had that conversation,” she says, and you can sense it in the way she talks, that a new vision is already taking shape in her mind.
“What I make next gets to be born out of this. Now we can actually start getting into it.”
Credits:
Photographer: Peter Ash Lee
Stylist: Jaime Kay Waxman
Hair: Edward Lampley
Makeup: Laura Stiassni
Like this? Check out our other June Music Month cover star Lil Nas X.
