Maggie Rogers
Surrender
Debay/Capitol
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No one knew it, but Maggie Rogers’ performance at Coachella this past Spring was part of her final credits—the public presentation element—toward her masters at Harvard Divinity School. Her thesis, titled Surrender: Cultural Consciousness, the Spirituality of Public Gatherings, and Ethics of Power in Pop Culture, was on the responsibilities of the pop star as one who brings people together, and that person’s role in dismantling oppression.
"When you're on stage, there's a lot of energy being sent directly towards you," she said. "Over the last year, I've really thought a lot about what that means. What is your ethical responsibility to the audience? How do I help people feel a connection to something bigger than themselves—me included? How do you bring people together at a time when we've never been more divided?"
Since the ’90s, the academic study of pop culture has been serious business—just ask any Madonna Studies scholar—but it’s still quite rare for a pop star to take on that academic rigor herself. And Maggie Rogers is indeed a pop star, though possibly an unlikely or an unconventional one.
She became one first by being a student, thrust into a viral spotlight in 2016 when Pharrell Williams was a visiting lecturer at a recording class she was enrolled in at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute. The clip of Williams’ enthralled reaction upon hearing her electro-folk track “Alaska” racked up views in the millions (he calls the song—and Rogers— “singular”), and an EP was followed by Rogers’ full-length debut Heard It In A Past Life (2019) three years later.
The best thing about the clip, besides Williams’ stunned reaction, is that Rogers unabashedly grooves to her own music without yet knowing what Williams thinks. She likes it, and that’s what matters. And yet that kind of self-containment can make things difficult for someone expected to give to an audience night after night, and years of touring nonstop led to Rogers burning out. “I had only been working. I hadn’t lived a life,” she told The Guardian.
Enrolling in graduate school was a way for her to restore a sense of normalcy to her life. Around the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and so she also began working on her second album while holing up at her parents’ house in Maine. “I made bread and went for walks and read a bunch,” Rogers recalls, “and then suddenly was like: ‘Oh, there’s this thing I love doing to pass the time. It’s making music.’” She built a home studio over the garage, and got to serious work, writing 100 songs for the record.
She pruned the 100 down to 12, and the title of the resulting album—Surrender—borrows from, or complements, her thesis. She refers to it as a pandemic record, and even though I’m somewhat cynical about what that even means anymore, the listen makes you get it. With its lush, pulsing stadium sound, Surrender captures a shivering, sensual yearning for connection, the desire to experience packed, crowded humanity in glistening, sweaty, undulating Technicolor. It also crystallizes the deepened self-assurance one can hone through being alone.
There’s a new, husky maturity to Rogers’ delivery—a searing confidence; she embraces wholly the Stevie-ness she briefly flirted with in Heard It In A Past Life’s “Retrograde.” While Past Life is defined mostly by its breezy, earthy earnestness that holds a little bit back in the name of cool, detached observation, Surrender brings passion and wail. The overproduction that sometimes drowned out Rogers’ folk elements and ethereal vocals on her first album can’t be found on Surrender, and that’s because Rogers’ roar matches every stomping beat, bold synth and fiery riff. Surrender is much more rock ‘n’ roll.
“Overdrive” is a strong, gorgeous opener with full-bodied guitar fingerpicking and waves of building-and-dissolving electronic sound that mount into a tsunami. Rogers’ voice is steeped in whiskey tones as she reminisces on a past leather-clad love that tested her endurance—“Oh, young were we / But I'm sick of sayin', ‘You made me weak at the knees’ / 'Cause I was a runner and I could go for miles / Give me a reason.” She wrestles with herself over whether to take this person back into her heart, or maybe just her headspace, admitting that it’s a risky proposition—“I don’t wanna do this again if you’re gon’ break my heart.” It’s sad and sexy, and some jagged, wailing guitar makes an entrance at just the right time to match Rogers’ throaty lament.
“That’s Where I Am,” the album’s lead single, is Rogers’ love letter to New York, her adopted hometown. Dissonant, skipping beats and rhythmic handclaps serve as the backdrop to a storyline comparing the city to a lover who’s somewhat elusive, or maybe not easily pinned down—“Now when I wait in your doorway / Covered in flowers I think of her / The woman you once dated / I couldn’t relate to her glitter and furs.” The artful chaos of the beats and the melodic dance hooks are reflective of New York’s unique blend of electricity and chaos that can become an addiction to anyone who’s ever lived there.
“Want Want,” Surrender’s second single, is a slinky pumping-and-grinding celebration of desire of the purely sexual kind, with undulating waves of vibrational sound and wailing vocal harmonies. “If you want-want what you want-want, then you want it,” Rogers sings in gospel-style, highlighting the transcendent, spiritual quality that desire can take on. “And I want you, oh, ohhh,” she sings resolutely, later admitting of her desire: “I feel it in my teeth.”
“Anywhere With You,” a gritty road-trip narrative, is the most obviously Stevie Nicks-influenced song on Surrender, and it begins slow and half-spoken over melancholy piano, and then slowly morphs into a pulsing arena track with wild, careening wails tinged with ragged heartache and hard-earned experience. (“You tell me that forever couldn’t come too soon / I want to lose my mind in a hotel room with you / Anywhere would do” ). The song ends with the stripped-down piano from the beginning, echoing in an empty room.
The album takes a contemplative turn on its third single, twangy Americana track “Horses,” which combines the palpable sensual desire Surrender has quaked with so far and combines it with a more general desire for an uncomplicated freedom—the kind where sun kisses your skin and wind blows through your hair. There’s an unadulterated innocence to it, even as Rogers sings of watching a hot cowboy swagger across the street—“Sucking nicotine down my throat / Thinking of you giving head.” The chorus soars, and tearing across a prairie on the back of a horse has never been more tempting.
“Be Cool” is a ballad with chill beats and a hypnotic groove, a necessary slight comedown from all the lust and heat. And then “Shatter” takes us way back up to 11 as a fun, high-energy, unapologetically ’80s synth track that you can imagine Jennifer Beals doing her running-in-place dance move to. “Begging For Rain” then takes us into total cooldown with acoustic guitar, celestial vocals, and an appeal to life to settle down just a little bit, to give a girl a break.
“I’ve Got A Friend” is an artsy, slightly chaotic collage of acoustic guitar, Rogers’ gently soaring vocals, friends talking in the background and banging on a keyboard, and good-natured joking. Rogers utters something to the effect of, “Ok, I’m loosened up now,” and we understand that these friends are confidants in her process. It’s a sweet ode to almost familial friendships, and it adds a certain depth to Surrender, peeling back another layer of pandemic life—our little bubbles and “pods.”
“Honey” is aptly titled for its smooth-flowing honeyed vocals, but the sudden, abrasive return of the booming arena sound on this track makes it feel a little bit schtick-y and repetitive. “Symphony,” on the other hand, has a warmth at its edges that envelops the ears and contributes to an overall rounding out of the album.
The final track, “Different Kind Of World,” brings back Surrender’s softer acoustic elements, and the lyrics tie in Rogers’ ambitions towards ethics and inclusion: “One more song, I'll write a song / And know that it's for you / That new friend I haven't met / With a different point of view.” And then, suddenly, the song booms with a thunderous glam-rock roar before diverting back to, and ending humbly, with the acoustic guitar, almost like it never happened.
“I was thinking about this world in which people are moving further and further away from traditional religion, yet are seeking to be connected to both something bigger than oneself and to each other,” Rogers said on her university website, in summary of her thesis. It’s safe to say that on Surrender, Rogers has gotten closer to the divine.
Notable Tracks: “Anywhere With You” | “Horses” | “Overdrive” | “Want Want”
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