Maggie Rogers

**Margaret Debay Rogers** (born April 25, 1994) is an American singer-songwriter and record producer from Easton, Maryland.

## Biography

After her song "Alaska" was played to artist-in-residence Pharrell Williams during a master class at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts in 2016, she gained widespread recognition. She has released two independent albums, *The Echo* (2012) and *Blood Ballet* (2014) and two studio albums, *Heard It in a Past Life* (2019) and *Surrender* (2022). She was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 2019.

Maggie Rogers grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland along the banks of the Miles River in Easton, Maryland. Her father is a now-retired Ford Motor Company dealer and her mother, a former nurse, is now an end-of-life doula. She began playing harp at age seven and loved the music of Gustav Holst and Antonio Vivaldi. Her mother would play neo-soul artists such as Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill. By the time she was in middle school, Rogers had added piano and guitar to her repertoire and began songwriting in eighth grade. For high school, she graduated from St. Andrew's School, a boarding school in Middletown, Delaware. At school, she played harp in the orchestra, sang in the choir, joined a jazz band, learned banjo and became interested in folk music, and taught herself how to program. She also spent many summers at a rural camp in Maine.

The summer after her junior year in high school, Rogers attended a Berklee College of Music program and won the program's songwriting contest, which spurred her to focus on writing. During her high school senior year, she recorded what became her first album, *The Echo* (2012). Rogers included her demos as part of her application to the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, was accepted, and started in 2012.

At NYU, Rogers considered a career in music journalism, and in her first year, Rogers interned for music journalist Lizzy Goodman for whom she transcribed and edited hundreds of hours of interviews with major musicians and journalists, which were compiled into Goodman's 2017 book *Meet Me in the Bathroom*.

Rogers released another folk album, *Blood Ballet* (2014), during her second year at the school. Folk blog EarToTheGround Music explained that the album "...begs for listeners to confront deep personal emotions."

Rogers studied abroad in France while at NYU and after friends convinced her to go clubbing while they were in Berlin, she discovered a love for dance music. When she returned home, Rogers started distilling elements of dance music into her work.

In 2016, after two years of writer's block, Rogers wrote "Alaska", a song she wrote in fifteen minutes about a National Outdoor Leadership School course. She played the song for Pharrell Williams, an artist-in-residence who visited her class to critique student work. Williams said of the song: "I’ve never heard anything that sounds like that". A video of a visibly moved Williams listening to the song went viral that June, resulting in millions of views as well as hundreds of thousands of plays of *The Echo* and *Blood Ballet*.

Rogers graduated from New York University's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music in May 2016 with a degree in music engineering and production and English.

## Advising

Maggie Rogers was a Battle advisor for team Julia Michaels on fantasy voice Season 46.