Maggie Rogers
Appearances
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
was walking through icy streams that took my breath away moving slowly through westward water over glacial plains and i walked off you Oh my, I thought it was a dream. So it seemed.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
And now breathe deep, I'm inhaling. You and others stare in between. Leave me be.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
Yeah, I mean, well, I think that the coldness that you're talking about in that song comes from the synthesizers and how smooth they are.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
Exactly. There is space to it. But even in those background vocals that sort of come to help transition from the pre-chorus to the chorus... There is a sort of, it's a plate reverb. You know, there's a lot of different kinds of reverb, but a plate reverb is quite metallic in the way that it's designed.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
And I think that some of that smoothness of the synth and the way that the sonic palette of that song is designed does sort of represent the landscape I was talking about. And that to me is like... It's something I'm always trying to do, you know, make the music try and echo or tell the story of the emotion that it's soundtracking.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
And that comes from, you know, I grew up really loving classical music and playing the harp in orchestras. And I remember my mom... really early telling me to listen to orchestral music because they were telling a story without words. And I was just so, so taken with that idea. As far as these color mood boards go, I think it goes back to how fast everything was because...
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
I've always had a very strong connection to color and sound. But also as I got sort of like thrown into the like big dogs of the music industry and was suddenly working with all of these different collaborators after really just working alone for a really long time.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
Putting down my thoughts and feelings of the sonic palette or texture that I was trying to create into a couple different one sheets were really helpful to walk into different people's studios with. Because I could show them in a couple different terms, whether it was just blocks of color on a page or images I had pulled off of the internet about how I wanted the record to feel.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
It was something that helped me communicate my artistic vision, but also keep things really coherent, even as I was sort of navigating all of these wonderful new people that were coming into my life because of all of this new attention.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
I mean, I think I was lucky to work with a lot of really wonderful people who were true artists and really— And listened to you. Well, and the work of a co-producer is to serve the artist or to serve the art. I think that's also part of the reason that I was drawn to music production or to education in the first place. Because in so many ways, knowledge is power.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
And I got into music production because I was writing songs in high school and I couldn't get the guys to play my arrangements. So I learned how to program. I learned how to play the songs by myself and create the arrangements for drums and bass and synth and all these things on the computer because it was like a gender problem.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
And when I got to school and I could learn about engineering and software and production and microphones and drum technique, it became something that allowed me to protect my vision. They were just tools that allowed me to get the thing that I heard in my head down onto paper.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
This has been such a dream. I have to just tell you, I'm a big, big Fresh Air NPR girl, and this has been really special. Thank you so much for having me.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
Would you believe me now If I told you I got caught up in a wave Almost gave it away Would you hear me out If I told you I was terrified for days Thought I was gonna break That's Light On by Maggie Rogers from her album Heard It in a Past Life.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
Cruising on the bridge in your great Cadillac, yeah, they get seasick. Walking on the water like they're stepping stones, but every little thing's up for taking. Oh, it makes me want to sing, my heart's breaking. Oh.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
Massively so. I mean, I think in being able to sort of inhabit a character, I was able to weave this tapestry of all of these different memories throughout really my 20s. I just turned 30. And I was sort of able to tell maybe even a more real version of the truth in telling fiction. Over the course of writing this record, this character who's like a...
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
25-ish year old girl who's leaving home and sort of going on this road trip through the American Southwest kind of appeared in my mind. And I was able to write the songs in sequence. The album is sequenced in the order that I wrote the songs in.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
And I was sort of writing them like scenes in a movie, you know, that takes place over like 36 hours and has a very like Thelma and Louise-esque ride to it. And yeah, and it was just helpful structure.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
I think at its core, music has always been the most sacred and most spiritual thing that I've ever been a part of.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
They're definitely woven through. I have no problem revealing, you know, because I mean, yeah, I've been doing that for a long time. I'm also just sort of like professionally vulnerable and just naturally very comfortable with that. But I think it's the feelings in all of these songs are very real.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
I think that was really true when I started writing songs. I started writing songs kind of at the end of middle school and the beginning of high school. And it was very much a like one-to-one diary entry directive where I would write songs as a form of like self-soothing therapy and sort of play the song until I felt a new way.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
And it was also at this time where I was experiencing so much in my life for the first time. And it was 15 years ago now. And I think now, I think about songwriting a lot as a form of archiving. I mean, obviously, I'm a nostalgic person if my record is called Don't Forget Me. But there's so much beauty in life and so much detail and so much memory.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
And I do worry about forgetting it all or being able to, like, I get my arms so full of detail that I don't drop anything. And putting it into my art feels like one way of being able to just keep holding it.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
I think it's really a part of who I am. Like, my dad always tells this story of the night I turned five, he found me sobbing. And I was just, like, completely overwhelmed at the fact that I would never be four again.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
Yeah, hey, yeah, I do. I do write about that. And it is just, I think this idea of...
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
time and the way that it slips through your fingers and not being able to go back I mean I think not to talk more about live performance and why I love it but it kind of is because the thing about being on stage is the second it's awesome and you're like something is really happening here it's gone and you can't hold it you can just be present in it and hope that you remember it and so anyway yeah I'm a nostalgic person
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
Yeah, that's important to sort of note that I didn't go to any kind of seminary. I didn't train to be a priest.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
So my master's degree is in religion and public life. So this program that I went to was specifically for people who don't work in religion, who want a greater understanding of religion and the way it works in the world to be able to inform their sort of non-religious life.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
And I found as I was performing and on stage that people were asking me for answers to questions I felt really unqualified to answer. Like I found myself in this unconventional ministerial position without undergoing any of the training. Like people were asking me for my perspective on music. Politics, suicide, people were asking me to perform marriages, depression. And I was like, I'm 24.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
Like, I have no idea. I was in no way any more qualified than anybody else to have an answer on these things. The thing that I really spent time learning about and being an expert in was music. But people didn't even really ask me about music much. And even that I was still early in learning and still am. And so...
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
The program, it was just really nice to have some quiet time to think about what I believed and really thinking about, you know, in this time that is more divisive than it's ever been, how do people come together and how do people create meaning? And I think at its core, music has always been the most sacred and most spiritual thing that I've ever been a part of.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
Whether it's being in the crowd at a show at an early age or being on stage with my band when we're all jamming or playing music together and we just hit that right thing all at the same time. Like something was telepathically communicated. That to me, it's the closest thing I've ever felt to something divine. And so a lot of what I did was study religious theory.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
and study the sort of like technical philosophical ways that people think about and talk about religion and the structure of religion. And then I applied it to music and to touring and to festivals and used all of that to sort of create this system for myself to navigate some of these bigger questions I was having about ethics of having a public platform and sustainability within my career?
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
And how do I use the work that I love to do the most amount of good in the world?
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
I mean, it was really, really scary when it happened. I was incredibly overwhelmed. But it was also, it was complicated because I got the job that I had trained for and that I'd always wanted.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
Exactly in the moment when I needed a job. And yet it was so deeply and wildly out of my control. Like it felt like something that was happening to me. Even though it was something I had prepared for for like a decade at that point.
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
Yeah, exactly. And then there was this moment where the door just opened. Part of me wishes that I got to upload that song and present my artistic statement. But also what's beautiful about the video is how unguarded it is. So if it happened any other way, it wouldn't be what it is. And I feel actually really lucky that the version of me that got introduced to the world...
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
Is and was the most authentic version of myself because that's the kind of art that I love and I've always been drawn towards making. And so, like, do I wish that I, like, brushed my hair and, like, put on a real outfit?
Fresh Air
Maggie Rogers / Kathleen Hanna
I mean, I think that that's the thing that's sort of wild and funny about it is like when I suddenly overnight became a pop star, like I needed a lot of clothes and all of the clothes I had were for like, I lived in the studio. Like I was a studio rat and suddenly I needed like colorful glittery outfits. And I was like, what do you mean? I can't wear like my jeans and boots.