Maggie Rogers: going viral is a trap

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Introduction to Maggie Rogers

1:13Welcome to Switched On Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. Ten years ago, Maggie Rogers was a senior at NYU scrambling to finish a song for a music production class that she was close to failing. The guest critic that week happened to be Pharrell Williams. She played him Alaska. Pharrell told her he'd never heard anything that sounded like it.

1:56Someone was filming, the clip went viral, and it launched Maggie into pop stardom. Ten years later, she's released three studio albums, earned a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, and gone back to school to pick up a master's from Harvard Divinity School where she studied the spirituality of public gatherings. And in the last few months, she's been as visible offstage as on, advocating for free speech in D.C., performing for 200,000 people at the No Kings protest in Minneapolis alongside Joan Baez, and delivering a haunting performance during the final run of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which CBS is ending in May.

Conversation with Maggie Rogers

2:31This week, I got to sit down with Maggie live at Chelsea Studios in front of a room of current NYU students, the same school, ten years later, now with me in the professor's chair and Maggie as the visiting artist. Here's my conversation with Maggie Rogers. Thank you all for being here. Thank you, Maggie, for being here. Yeah, of course. Hi, everybody. So, ten years ago, you graduated NYU. I did. It is the 10th anniversary of a moment exactly like this, where you're in front of an audience of your peers in conversation about music, except I'm not Pharrell. Definitely not.

3:02And his live reaction to your song, Alaska, changes your entire musical journey. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

3:39zero zero zero notes for that and i'll tell you why is because you're doing your own thing it's singular since it is the 10th anniversary and you've celebrated that song in a couple of

Writing Alaska

3:53ways we'll talk about i want to get a sense of what that song meant to you then and what does it mean to you today so there's a very long sort of behind the scenes of what writing that song was but basically i was studying music production at clive davis and i wasn't really making any music um like my entire junior year i really started focusing on an english major um i had spent my first two years in bands and then i kind of just like needed some time which i'm now so many years

4:28later i realized that i kind of do this every five or six years i like need a beat i hadn't made music in like two years and my professor nick sansano very gently brought me into his office and was like my guy you are going to fail like i was in an advanced music production class and i wasn't i was making music to fill to fulfill assignments but i wasn't making things that was really like my artistry that they knew that i could make and they were sort of like you're up like you have to

5:01present in class next week like we really need you to show up like we had like two months left in school so alaska was the first song i'd written in two years and it was three days old this is your senior year yeah so that went well i'd shown it to my college roommate mary who i'm still friends with and write songs with and um i'd shown it to her the night before and i had told her i don't know if i like this because it felt too poppy to me like it was outside of my comfort zone so i think

5:35what was interesting was that i got really famous for something that effectively was an experiment like it didn't feel like the truest version of myself it was at the time it felt like something i knew that i was trying it was sort of yeah i was playing around i was excited about it and i you know that ep that i ended up finishing um was my senior project but i think it was difficult at the time too because i cared so much about my classmates you know these are really small programs and i think

6:08i'd i'd really seen my classmates work really hard in those years and they'd really seen me do other things and invest my time and energy elsewhere so i think when that moment happened it was also really complicated because it was like a little awkward or like i felt my i had so much respect and love from my classmates who had really put in the work and it was just a really strange thing um the way it all happened and so this is a song that you know quickly came to define

6:38your early career you've probably performed it a thousand times many uh is there a lyrical or musical moment that that speaks to you in some sort of way now uh there's two in the second verse i say learn to talk and say whatever i wanted to there's so much space to play with that and then i also when we were playing colbert

7:11doing an acoustic version there's a moment always when i say i thought it was a dream where i get this like really surreal special connection to being a student and being an artist not knowing what i was doing and that still doesn't feel that different than now in many ways um but it all does feel like a dream and that time really was dreamy i feel like

Viral Success

8:09that that moment in time 2016 there was a whole meme this year about 2016 being a special year a transformational year i think part of it is that it just doesn't feel like it was actually 10 years ago i think that the pandemic just really warped all of our sense of it like it could be six years ago i'd believe that seven might be but the non-linearity i think is the big joke but it was also a different time in media you know that this thing happened to you you you you became with

8:40this i think what just even stephen colbert introduced the song when you performed it is like 10 years of the anniversary of this this viral song yeah and i'm just wondering is i i remember when that happened and every musician i know is like i want that to be me i want that to happen to me is is it still a teachable moment like could the can that happen again always yes because otherwise it's no and why not yes that shit went viral on youtube and then

9:15facebook i didn't put a record out till talking september 2016 my first record came out january 2019 i went slow and i think that that's actually the thing that i wonder if that could happen now like i really took my time i toured the world world like japan australia i toured the world for a year and a half on five songs on our ep and this was after i had grown up playing in bands like i really invested early on in like a sustainable relationship with an audience over basically anything else it's

9:55funny because when you asked could it happen again my thought was would i wish it on anybody um would you i don't think so no i mean i i think that great art will always find its way to listeners and find its way to the top i like really really believe that but that experience i think as we've seen time and time again there's something incredibly unnatural about the fast uh attention of the

10:32internet there's a reason it shares a word viral with something that we all suffered from it's really unnatural and like i feel so grateful to my friends and to my bandmates and to mental health care takers and managers and the people that really supported me through that time but more than anything i was really really scared and like i wouldn't go back and change it because it's not really how it works anyway and i i love who i've become and what my career has become but part of

11:09why i feel that way now is honestly because the pandemic because at the height of my career i also got a second to stop part of me thinks that i absolutely agree yes it will happen again because great songs will connect with people but it was also always happen that but it was also a particular moment and like yeah it went viral on facebook this was like a text and image based internet there was youtube but like youtube creator world was nowhere what it is today i don't even know what that is we now exist in a world where that like um you know songs can reach hundreds of millions of

11:43people and go viral on tiktok but then actually not connect with an audience and have an audience show up in the same sort of way i mean the thing that i've always felt is i would rather mean very little what is it i'd rather mean a lot to a few than a little to many yeah and even you know with alaska it was getting bigger than what i could handle and we killed the radio campaign on that song like it was going to go to pop radio and i was like you cannot do this like it was already it was

12:14going to like alternative and like independent radio and it was already more than what i could handle and at that point what it would take to support a pop radio campaign would be like going in and politicianing and shaking hands and i that wasn't why i wanted to become an artist i have always known that i am and was then an album artist i mean by the time alaska happened i had been in so many bands and had put out two independent records and i knew that i liked thinking in long form and if one song

12:48became bigger than me then i would never get the chance to do that again so uh lots of music students in the room right now yeah uh when one of their songs has this runaway success what are the things that they should and should not do i have no idea no genuinely because like i don't know what it's like to try and come up like now i'm not really on tiktok like i bop in every like four times a year and like say what up but like i i can't imagine like what about on the like the inner work it sounds

13:24like there was some sort of like soul searching on the inner world like keep making music like i don't know you know it's funny because the advice that everybody i think always gives you is like don't get too big for your britches or like don't let it change you but that is so ridiculous of course it's going to change you you just bought a new pair of britches with that amen but like of course like it it's going to change you and it's okay i think is what i would tell someone going through that

13:57and just like hang out with your friends and i think don't be afraid of people because it can make you feel a little like the the idea of being perceived all the time is really scary you had taken a big break from writing music this thing happens how did that change your relationship to writing music because then i mean you said you know you eventually put together ep yeah the album comes out a couple years later i mean the day the pharrell video happened i walked out of class i didn't really know what to do and i remember i turned my phone off and i walked to chinatown to my friend's

14:30apartment and we made a song called better that ended up on the ep like and i remember showing up and i was i said to him i was like this thing just happened he was like cool i was like girl really liked my song and he was like oh that's cool anyway so like it just was his response was so like weird that's awesome like what should we make now that it really was like yeah there is really nothing to say about this other than this weird thing just happened let's make music and that's

15:01kind of always been my reaction it's just like keep making things that you love but i the other thing i'll say is that every single person makes choices based on what they want out of a career and every single person wants something different from a career and that's like completely okay and i always set the bar like to me when i was playing in bands in new york city being able to play bowery ballroom was like the craziest thing i couldn't figure out even how you'd get that many

15:36people to come to your show like we could figure out like pianos and mercury lounge but i was like how do you have like i could not put it into my head how you would i was like if you were playing bowery ballroom you are famous like totally successful artist um and so that's always been the bar like i always want to make things that i'm engaged in and that like my creativity is fed and as long as i can do that and still play bowery ballroom like i'm good another amazing stage you played recently was

16:08the ad sullivan stage for the stephen colbert show late night with stephen colbert uh in addition to doing a complete new arrangement of alaska yeah strings and horns from his band you also performed harold arlen and johnny mercer's one for my baby and one for the road i'll make it one for my baby and one more for the road

16:40that's beautiful thanks so it's an interesting choice for song in 2026 so these are stephen colbert's final performances and that song uh was originally sung by fred astaire

17:19in a film and then there um you know many people have many famous versions of the song like sinatra etc that middler performed that song and specifically that version she rewrote a couple of the lyrics uh for the final episode uh for the final episode of johnny carson which if you haven't seen that performance it's so beautiful we're drinking my friend to the end of a sweet episode

17:52make it one for my baby and one more for the road it's such a lesson in like i love that performance because she's so grounded and she's so in her body and she's so personable and she's not really performing as much as she is talking and even when we were choosing the key i can sing that song higher but it's not really meant to be

18:25higher it's meant to be sort of spoken um anyway it was really fun and brin bliska is playing piano and did such a beautiful arrangement it's a really beautiful moment to mark a sort of a very challenging time expedia you're here but are you here here you go to hawaii in your head all the time during meetings in the car hawaii is on the mind but when you're ready to go there's expedia

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19:30percent of businesses finding someone to interview in the first week alone hire right the first time with linkedin hiring pro post a free job today at linkedin.com slash quality this summer serve up the cookout classics heinz ketchup and craft singles every good burger needs a layer of perfectly melty cheese and thick rich ketchup we all know it's not a cookout without heinz and craft most of us probably know this but the late show is even colbert it's going off the air forever in

20:02may it was canceled by its parent cbs back last summer it was announced uh colbert had criticized cbs's parent parent paramount who'd settled a lawsuit with donald trump over a 60-minute editorial decision they made a 16 million dollar settlement to trump's future presidential library cbs said it was purely a financial decision uh when they announced it last july uh but it was also at a moment when paramount was pursuing a merger with skydance and needed approval for the fcc the merger was approved a week later uh donald trump posted truth social that jimmy kimball's next he eventually

20:37is taken off the air momentarily i'm not asking you to comment on specifically on we don't have to

Free Speech and Activism

20:42get deep into presidential politics but we live in a moment where where free speech has been under assault and a few weeks ago you went to dc to perform at a protest in front of the kennedy center now trump kennedy center for the committee for the first amendment yeah so that was the dc event was actually just a press event but in minneapolis we were in front of 200 000 people you performed the times are changing with joan baez you also performed you were selling a different kind of world

21:16what has motivated you to participate in these events and sing these songs i'm motivated by being an artist which means feeling in general participating in any form of activism is inherently

21:50a creative practice because you have to be able to dream of a future that is different than the one you're currently living in to be there and so it feels like a really natural space for artists because it doesn't happen without creative thought and it's really just inherent to who i am and how i feel through the world and i think it's really complicated being in these spaces because it's so clear that the system doesn't work so then to show up at the

22:28protest for the system or against the system is like hard to rectify like i i was speaking with friends last week and they told me this quote from this like 1900 statistician who's also a composer who basically said any system is set up to produce the result that it's currently producing so then everything's broken so to show up at the protest even though you know things are broken

22:58to like hope you can change a tiny bit or just be with other people that are feeling is kind of like a complicated and interesting thing but i think about it in the same way as i think about changing a small detail of an arrangement like it makes everything better even if you can't change it all inherently you said that the the activism is fundamentally a creative act because you have to imagine another world and you and when you did the event in dc uh you said this more than anything

23:30these days i feel scared and i feel afraid and when i feel that way i make music so i'm so happy to be here today a quick moment but there's a lot there you know typically when we are fearful we run or hide those are like the natural those are good reactions and and instead you're saying i'm making music well i've learned that singing makes me feel better about everything especially singing with other people it makes me feel better and and also like at the end of our performances in minneapolis we were

24:06joined on stage by the resistance choir and it was it was like the whole point it was so joyful and so present and after like many long very smart very wonderfully eloquated like spoken speeches people really just needed to dance together like and that's the thing you know i'm not dancing right like i don't really know where to go to dance right now and that is like stressing me out a little

24:40bit because that to me is like medicine in the same way that making music or singing is and i think it's that same like mind body spirit thing like the spirit i think is the first thing that starts to suffer when like mass oppression happens and art's always going to be the thing to me that saves it i'm hearing a bit of like especially in that minneapolis event like song and dance literally are an act of

25:10making that world that you want to be true present in that moment i mean it's joy is resistance the most powerful moment from that was that there was um like a who streets our streets chant happening while the resistance choir came on stage and there was one woman i watched yell our streets with it was like the most bone chilling power and pain and ferocity and community and like

25:41her voice and her presence in that moment is the thing that like shook me and and took me like day like i can still picture it so presently but it leaving that protest i mean playing for 200 000 people is like not something your body normally does so i knew it would like take me a second to come down but like leaving the energy in that place like really took me a couple days to shake down i feel like we could stay here for a while but maybe bridging the conversation is um if we need song to unite us

26:13in those moments are there certain qualities that you think make a good song for uh protest activism i think you have to be able to sing it about something else can you say more about that i think protest songs that are too on the nose which i would say different kind of world is like on the line but that was actually written for a group of friends of mine we were all doing like a song a day writing um group in the pandemic and so it wasn't written as a protest song it was written as like a

26:44love song for my friends um i think great protest songs are about you can listen in a bar you can like i always think about like what's going on marvin gay like that to me is like one of the best ones or times there are changing you can just like put on on a drive and like it could be it needs to it needs to work for the global and the personal and i think where protest songs don't work for me um like we were talking about we are the world you know mega smash hit great documentary and very impactful moment of activism raised a lot of

27:31money not putting it on at a bar actually like kind of a jam though i'm like now i'm gonna do that but like that's funny but for a sort of camp like quality perhaps yeah i think i i when i think about it today it's through the lens of um it's hard to figure out what if this song is about celebrity or not because so much of it is oh right i mean if that happened in 2026 people would call bullshit real well they tried to in the pandemic and it went really poorly with uh the redo of imagined

28:03imagine there's no heaven it's easy if you try no hell below us above us only sky oh yeah i mean the system is broken you uh it just produces more broken systems one one thing you're doing

Maggie Rogers Foundation

28:33and trying to maybe build a participate in building a different system as you've launched the maggie rogers foundation yeah how come and what are you hoping to do with it how come because i wanted a place to organize all the things that i care about and the things i care about are like everyone's health care and like women's bodies and everyone being able to have access to health care and um music education and so the first and i don't know you know i'm not totally sure what

29:03it's going to become but i'm excited that it's happening and that i now have a place for all these efforts and i'm really excited that the first effort is a music scholarship at myu very cool but in an ideal world you don't need a scholarship because music education shouldn't be that expensive is also the like that's the like the system's broken but like here we are yeah yeah so when we last spoke it was 2022 and you had put out the album surrender and uh you're on the

29:33podcast and what you said was i don't know if i'm gonna make another record and i will be honest the journalist me was like yes i got the good quote right and i was like obviously it's not true you went you later went on to put out don't forget me in 2024 uh you kept making music but um it sort of ties back to the beginning of the conversation with alaska you had taken a break you needed a break again i take breaks you take breaks what does what do breaks do for you they help me renew my artistic

30:04vows because i think what it means for me to be an artist is always changing because what it means to be a human and whatever stage of my life is changing and what i'm willing to share what i'm willing to negotiate what i'm willing compromise on where i want to explore what my goals are for myself and my my exploration are always changing i think why i fell in love with the music industry in the first place is because it's always changing and i love that um i find that it's really innovative and it means that

30:40like a girl in her bedroom in ohio in high school can change the way that everyone does everything forever and that's really inspiring to me but yeah i think i also just naturally go through periods of internal winter or quiet i think i that my introvert really needs a sec to process sometimes and i find that if i let myself have that time the writing of the record will actually be very quick because oftentimes

31:12the record making process is just measured as the number of days you were in the studio not as all the living that happened before that so like alaska i'm like okay i made it in 10 minutes three days before the thing but it really took two years to make or you know i the last time i took a year off i went to grad school and then i made don't forget me in five days in track list order two songs a day and those were like basically the final masters so it's like measuring productivity in time to me

31:48doesn't really work for creativity because it's not linear are you currently in a resting time or a making time i'm coming out of resting time and i am in like big making time and it's really fun but also resting time is making time without having to get into your like deep you know private personal life um what are the things that are that they're nurturing during rest time that other artists can learn from the specific thing is just like because i'm on tour all the time that's a specific

32:20existence so a year off the road every four years it makes sure that i continue to move forward in my like practical adulthood like like you're laughing but like otherwise you'll never like go to the doctor or like learn how to deal with health insurance or like any of that stuff like doesn't really happen when you're on the road so there is like an emotional human development piece that like is really important for me to make sure that that doesn't get left behind or just like work on other things

32:55that like challenge me or ask for creativity in a different form so like i worked on that meditation record with the dalai lama or like i did a bunch of writing um i like got really into like i learned a lot of random things like i'll sort of like pick a topic and go really deep what's what's one example i read a lot of like random things about mythology and then i got really into the roman empire like kind of i got into the roman empire for a while

33:31i got really into like um japanese films on criterion i got really into like going to the whitney every month i learned how to surf i went to antarctica like i did some traveling if this is rest time there's kind of like an implicit trust that maybe one of these things will provide meaningful input into creativity or does that not matter i think it's again it kind of comes back to the thing of like what what's the goal and to me the goal is really like to live a beautiful life

34:07and so then it's about how that's defined and this idea that there's just like work time and rest time like i when i'm making music or i'm on tour doing this this never feels like work because i love it so much and and so it's really just making sure that i stay full as a person so you keep an ongoing talk about like other mediums you keep an ongoing dialogue with your audience you have a newsletter yeah uh you have spoken about adapting your thesis you went to divinity school into a book yeah uh and

34:42you make music obviously how do you think about these different mediums as being good at communicating certain kinds of things or why do you use each medium for different kinds of different kinds of communication this has changed over time but it's really grounding for me in this creative cycle right now that um like essay writing or like me typing at my laptop alone is a really really special and nourishing like solo creative process that is completely unfiltered by anyone else

35:15and writing to me really works for both my structure brain and my creative brain and that's a good place for me to be music i think is really meant to be collaborative like i i am such a prince devotee but people are going to come for me for this but like i kind of think he fucked it all up for everybody in a way because he was doing so much by himself right and i think well then like i want to to be like prince and like do everything like that but i really i am have found that like now that i've let

35:49go of that thank god because i was never going to be prince i just really love making music with my friends and i really think that music is something that's meant to be shared and i think when all the pressure happens for it to just be on you to do it it like isn't as good as it could be if somebody else helped and it's just to me not as fun and so now that i have this real those are the two practices i'm in most actively and they really really balance and feed each other wow thank you maggie yeah thank

36:28you all of you thanks y'all thank you to chelsea studios thank you to nyu all right go out with uh where we started i'm just giving this a walk-off song i'm so curious about what it's gonna be it's the it's it's uh the song we didn't listen to at the very beginning oh hey switched on pop is produced by rihanna cruz edited by lissa so up

37:09engineered by brandon mcfarlane illustrations by rs gottlieb video by nick rips music by jossie adams and zach scenario of arc iris remember the vox media podcast network and new york magazines vulture you can subscribe at nymag.com slash pod we'll be back again on tuesday with another episode and until then thanks for listening you you you you you