Maggie Rogers on New ‘Don’t Forget Me’ Album, Fall Arena Tour

Maggie Rogers is headlining arenas for the first time this fall, but she didn’t want it to feel like moving into bigger spaces for her concerts would mean a more impersonal experience. So for 11 shows that just went on sale in late April, she went out and personally manned the box office on opening day to help sell tickets for those big shows. Rogers had earlier done the same thing for a short series of club shows she performed to kick off the touring cycle behind her new album, “Don’t Forget Me.” For the fans who lined up to take advantage of having Rogers as their personal ticket concierge, the experience lived up to its unforgettable billing.

Maintaining intimacy in the face of expanding career growth has been important for Rogers, who came out of the gate as a near-instantaneous star in 2019 with her “Heard It in a Past Life” album, which debuted at No. 2 and produced signature songs like “Light On,” as well as placing her in the Grammys’ best new atist field. While Rogers went a bit harder and more electro-pop with the follow-up, 2022’s “Surrender,” the new album has her working in a more organic-sounding mode with co-writer and producer Ian Fitchuk (of Kacey Musgraves’ “Golden Hour” fame). It’s a style suited for the amphitheaters and arenas she’s about to play, while still letting fans feel like they’re getting an insider’s view into what is personally moving her as she crosses the threshold of 30.

(In the meantime, don’t be surprised if “Light On” suddenly gets a renewal on being your personal earworm: It plays out during the opening credits, and again in a pivotal scene, in the new Amazon film “The Idea of You,” with Anne Hathaway.)

Variety spoke with her just after she’d returned home from her short tour of… the nation’s box offices. Among the topics: enshrining the concept of friendship in the grooves of the new album; speaking of buddies, sharing a Bruce moment recently with her friend Zach Bryan; and wrapping up her graduate course work at Harvard Divinity School in this coming month, shortly before she hits the road.

In April, you personally worked the box office for the first on-sale of tickets for 11 arena shows you’ll be doing this fall. Did it make you feel like you’d missed your calling, working for Ticketmaster during the golden age of street lineups for tickets?

Oh my gosh, I had so much fun. I’ve just been on a high. You never get to choose the people that show up for your music, but I feel so lucky to really feel like I’ve got the best people holding my art, this community of such unbelievably kind and generous and sweet people. All the stories I heard of people taking care of each other in line — there was some girl I was talking to one night in Philly while I was on stage, while she was requesting a song, and then later I got all these comments of people being like, “Oh my God, we love her. Her dad brought us donuts in line.” It was such a high and so sweet to be able, in this era of empty digital transaction, to really hold hands in person with the people that allow me to do this thing that I love on a daily basis.

I always say about my fans that it always feels like we’re at a house party. Like, if you’re not the friend that I brought, you’re a friend of a friend. To be able to wake up in the morning and have coffee with people and see people make friends in line and then buy tickets together… or to be able to have the familiar faces who have been there from the beginning walk up to a box office door and choose exactly where they want to sit in an arena… but also the fact that it’s an arena bowl that we’re looking at, picking tickets together! — that was so surreal.

Did you give anybody who came through the lines any guidance about where the best place to sit in an arena is?

You know, I didn’t really grow up going to arena shows. All of my favorite artists always played rock clubs. And I think a symptom of streaming, in a positive way, is that it allows artists who aren’t putting on the biggest pop show in the world to reach an audience in a really different way, and so I feel like we’re in an era where some of my favorite bands are playing arenas. It’s nice to know that some of my fans are able to be in the pit and will get to be as close to the stage as possible. But I don’t know that I’m a good source of knowing where to sit in an arena.

You’re playing the big rooms — Madison Square Garden and the Forum. These are in the fall, when maybe amphitheaters aren’t advisable, but you must be doing arenas because you’re excited about that.

I am doing a shed run before that, by the way, playing a whole host of amphitheaters in May and June. But to me it’s about finding challenge in performance, and to me, arenas present that challenge, performance-wise. There are different capacities and modalities that open up when you have that level of stage space to play with. I’m always trying to just explore new space. I’m a naturally curious person and I love learning, and an arena is just kind of like another space to explore. Maybe I love it and only ever wanna play arenas again, and my next goal becomes stadiums. And also maybe I do it and I say, “Actually, I’m way happier in a club or in a shed.” It’s just about learning and seeing the capacity for my creativity, but I think each record will probably ask for a different atmosphere.

Each one of your albums does have a very different personality, so it makes sense that you would be thinking about how each type of album might play in a different kind of venue. Your last album, “Surrender,” seemed like a pretty dramatic album. This one has some drama in the lyrics, too, but the critical line on this album… the New Yorker called it “breezy,” and Pitchfork said “zippy, even groovy.” So there’s a lot of adjectives with a Y on the end that suggest something that makes people feel good. It seems like there might’ve been a concentrated effort on this album to have a very kind of friendly vibe to it.

The record was made so quickly that there wasn’t a lot of conscious intention. When I was making it, I just felt really open, and that’s what you can hear. There’s a real sparkly, fun lightheartedness in the record because that’s how I felt as I was making it. But there wasn’t a lot of premeditation. I had no concepts for songs; I had no mood boards. As Ian Fitchuk and I were going into the studio, we had never really ever worked together before, and then on day one we wrote “It Was Coming All Along” and “Drunk.” Day two, we wrote “So Sick of Dreaming” and “The Kill.” So it was following a sense of openness and lightheartedness, and the result is that all my friends say that this is the version of me that they know.

I think also that that openness is a product of becoming a little bit more comfortable in all of this. You know, my transition into music happened very publicly, very quickly, and it really scared me. Now I’m coming into this place where I turn 30 in two days, and I really love my work and feel really comfortable and confident in my art. It’s been a path through my twenties and finding and refining my voice and how I want to express myself. There are different types of music that I love that I want to explore, like trying on different clothes, and that feels super normal, too.

Speaking of trying on different clothes… this will be the most superficial question I’ll ask, but you’ve had a pretty different hairstyle during each album cycle you’ve come through now. Not to be a hairstyle reviewer, but in some way it has felt like your look reflects a change in the music, and the look now is kind of mature and yet free-and-easy. Is that in any way part-and-parcel for you, like, yes, there’s a whole new me than there was two years ago, and that’s reflected in the album?

In the way I look and the way I feel, and everything else, it’s certainly not a marketing choice, and it’s not intentional. I think that what you’re seeing is authentic growth. Hair is such an external representation of internal change, which I think you can see in the songwriting as well. And if you ask any of my friends, I’ve cut off my hair into a pixie cut four or five times in my life before [as she did during the “Surrender” period]. I cut my hair off for the first time in the sixth grade, I did it in the 11th grade, I did it once in college. So it’s something I’ve done my entire life, but it’s also just a really authentic reflection of change that I’m going through, and I think I let it be fluid, and I think you can hear that in the songwriting over that period of growth too, and how it aligns with putting a record out. So it’s this real cycle of long, short, weird, middle-ground midlife growth that I’ve been through. It’s way more of a reflection of time than it is a reflection of a “new album, new me” scenario.

That segues perfectly into the next question, about how the passage of time factors a lot into these songs. The album has lines like “when all the years start to blend in together,” or “time moves slow until one day you wake up and realize”… and specifically, “I’m flying long past 22,” which is a very specific reference for you to make. As you said, you’re about to turn 30 and there are lots of markers in your life. It’s been five years since your first album, but eight years since you had kind of a viral moment. So “flying long past 22,” does that kind of signal a moment when everything changed for you, but it feels like a long way in the rear view mirror?

Totally. I mean, I’m a really naturally nostalgic person. And especially because I’m in the business of documenting time. That’s kind of why I got into songwriting in the first place, because I wanted to be able to mark time and archive. I’m definitely an archivist. There’s a lot of different parts of my life that I have archived, and I journal almost every night before I fall asleep. I’ve always said that a record is a record of a period of time. On this album, there are so many scenarios or stories that have never happened to me as a person, but the feelings or the details within them are very specific to my life. So it feels in a way like some woven tapestry owed to my twenties. Though the story that runs through the album is not the exact one-to-one story in my life, I think that by saying something that was fiction, I was able to tell a much greater truth about the reality of my life or the way that I felt in my twenties. And it’s really helped me. You know, you’re catching me in the last two days where I’m like saying goodbye to this decade of my life and taking stock of what I really want to leave in the past and what I want to welcome and usher in. And music has always been a way that I do that.

The album is very conversational at times — literally, at times, because in the very first song you’re talking about a conversation with Nora, and you quote her talking to you by name. Later on you have some other names, a Sally and a Molly. One throughline in the lyrics is a lot of breakup songs, or anticipating a breakup or remembering someone who’s gone or anticipating someone being gone in the future. But it feels like these references to friends anchor that, with the fact that you have friends who are there for you, even when romantic relationships may be temporary or fickle. Is throwing the names of actual people in there — specifically, women friends — intentionally trying to create that sense of balance?

It wasn’t intentional. But I really wanted to weave in pieces of my life that are important to me, like Nora or Molly or Sally. Or my friend Anna; I threw her in, too – she lived next door to me in the pandemic, and then we went to grad school together. When I look back on my twenties, I’ve had these unbelievably big, wonderful, great loves, but my female friends, or just my friends in general, are the greatest loves of my life, and certainly of my twenties. And friendship has been a really big theme throughout my work. There’s a love song on “Surrender” called “I’ve Got a Friend” that is a love song to my friend Taylor, who came on the road and sold merch with me out of the van on my very first tour, just to keep being my roommate and keep me sane when everything was crazy. Female friendship, or just friendship in general, has always been one of the biggest themes in my music.

It feels very simple and silly, but I really love my friends, and putting them in the record has been so fun. My friend Nora and I met on the eastern shore of Maryland when we were 15, and we both walked into a Christmas party wearing all black and have been best friends ever since. You know, I’ve only played four shows so far for this record, but I get to hear Nora’s voice on stage every night [in a spoken-word interlude during “So Sick of Dreaming”]. I just called her and put her on speaker and that was how she answered the phone — that was a one-take. And hearing Nora’s voice on stage every night is the absolute sweetest thing.

In “So Sick of Dreaming,” you do have that very specific storytelling moment in the bridge with Nora’s voice, and that’s not your experience. Did you feel like, although the song is very general, you needed to ground it in something that was about as specific as it gets?

That was me just being really playful. When we made all these demos, Ian and I had this plan and I really wanted to go to Muscle Shoals or some great Southern studio and make a live record. These were just demos that we assumed we would play with a great band later. So when I put that voicemail in, it was just to make Ian and I laugh, knowing that later we would probably fill it with some great instrumental section. But after we made all these demos, we realized that because we weren’t trying to make a record, there was actually this incredibly beautiful, unguarded version of ourselves that was able to come through in all of these first takes. And there was a looseness about the record that sort of worked as, like, a live record made by two people.

And that Knicks voicemail… I would like to go on record that I’m rooting for the Knicks in the playoffs. It’s very important to me that that is known! But that story (told by Nora), that’s some New York perfect thing, like Carrie Bradshaw, the clueless silliness… You know, even the voice I’m using, like, “By the way, the Knicks lost,” it’s so sassy and silly, and it’s been cool on the road. I’ve been changing the team to be whatever the home team is for the town. And it is still shocking to me that I figured out how to write a song that can get a city to root against their own home team! People are yelling, like, “And by the way…” It’s “the Bulls lost” in Chicago. I’m learning more about basketball actively every day than I ever have in my entire life.

When you play Los Angeles, we will wait for you to diss the Lakers. Well, we have two basketball teams to diss, so you’ll be picking one.

I’m gonna have to pick? All right. We’ll see. I don’t even know what the other one is, so I’ll be learning actively on the road.

You were recently on stage not just with Zach Bryan, who you have sat in with before, but but Bruce Springsteen. What was that experience like?

Oh my gosh. Because I played in bands forever, I’m used to sharing a microphone. But to share a microphone and to look out of the corner of my eye and have the person I’m sharing a microphone with be Bruce Springsteen, it was so cool and so surreal. Danny Clinch, who’s one of my favorite photographers, was luckily there to capture so much of it, and Danny has a couple of amazing photos of Bruce playing and singing with Zach and I behind him, just looking at each other like children. Both Zach’s and my parents were in the audience that night, and it was so fun that they were standing next to each other, watching the two of us run around and live out this absolutely insane childhood dream. It was so awesome, and I feel so grateful to Zach. I am such a massive Springsteen fan, but that is truly Zach’s big, top, absolute ultimate. And that was so generous and such a sign of who Zach is as a person that he shared that experience with me. I’ve got so much respect and care for Zach, and he’s such a great friend, and a wonderful collaborator. So the whole night couldn’t have been more special.

I saw Zach’s show at Crypto.com Arena last fall, where you were a guest on several songs. He was playing in the round, and he did the thing where he is constanty moving around and performing on one of the four sides of the stage. And I thought, is Maggie going to know to do that too? And sure enough, you went around to all four sides of the stage.

I feel really grateful. I’ve had many wonderful teachers throughout the eight years that I’ve done this. And in 2017 and 2018 I opened for Mumford and Sons, and they played in the round on a very similar stage. They’re also a band where it’s really live and there can be guests and you’re running around and going to this side and that side, and those guys really taught me how to handle a stage like that, where there’s an immense amount of perfect chaos, and you need to keep an eye on the audience and keep an eye on the band. So when I got onto that stage (with Bryan), in that perfect moment, it was one of these times of alignment in my life where I had really done my homework, where I had had great teachers and great experiences that made me feel like I was really ready for it.

Did you feel like you learned anything from Zach about how you’re going to rock arenas, or did you already feel prepared for that before?

What’s amazing about Zach is that he’s so wonderfully himself both on stage and off. And I love the sort of dramatic performance element of putting on a show, but playing with Zach is a really great reminder that just being yourself is also always enough.

Finally, to really shift gears… you’ve been attending Harvard divinity school for years. The New Yorker article said you’re writing a book based off your thesis that ties together ideas about religion and pop. So this a book you’re actually going be publishing, not just turning in as something academic, right?

Yeah, I’m about halfway through with it right now. I’ve decided that, rather than selling the book, I’d rather just write it and then I’ll find a publisher once I’m finished writing it, rather than sort of bringing a couple chapters forward first. But, yeah, I love writing, and I wrote a hundred-ish pages for my academic master’s thesis. I’ve had this fellowship at Harvard over the last semester where I feel just so lucky to get to work with so many wonderful teachers and have such a creative space that feels just really safe and really nourishing there. And yeah, I’m just working away on it. I like creative projects that take a long time and that ask you to sit with ideas, and this is something that I’ve been sitting with and working on for the last three or four years, if you count my academic work. So I don’t really have a timeline for it, but I’m loving having this project in my back pocket.

You’re wrapping up your academic work in May. How do you feel about closing out that chapter in your life?

I love school so much. I’m sad to go, but it feels time, and the good news is that I’ve made friends and connections and have mentors there that I think I’ll carry for a lifetime. And I see a world where like I would love to teach or be a professor one day. That’s far, far off in the future, but I know that it’s not the last time I’ll be in and around school. And I’m really happy to take the sort of structure and groundedness I’ve found in academics on the road, as something I can work on in a hotel room or a dressing room.

Rogers’ summer and fall tour schedule:

5/4         Charlotte NC                                                      Lovin’ Life Festival^

5/23       San Diego, CA                                                     Gallagher Square at Petco Park

5/24       Phoenix, AZ                                                         Arizona Financial Theatre

5/27       Morrison, CO                                                     Red Rocks Amphitheatre +

5/28       Morrison, CO                                                     Red Rocks Amphitheatre +

5/31       Irving, TX                                                              The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory

6/1         The Woodlands, TX                                          The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion presented by Huntsman

6/3         Rogers, AR                                                           Walmart AMP

6/5         Indianapolis, IN                                                 Everwise Amphitheater at White River State Park

6/7         Cincinnati, OH                                                    The ICON Festival Stage at Smale Park

6/8         Milwaukee, WI                                                  BMO Pavilion

6/9         Sterling Heights, MI                                         Michigan Lottery Amphitheatre

6/11       Alpharetta, GA                                                   Ameris Bank Amphitheatre

6/14       Manchester, TN                                                Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival^

6/16       Columbia, MD                                                    Merriweather Post Pavilion +

6/19       Raleigh, NC                                                         Coastal Credit Union Music Park

6/20       Charleston, SC                                                   Credit One Stadium

6/22       Miami, FL                                                             FPL Solar Amphitheater at Bayfront Park

“THE DON’T FORGET ME TOUR, PART II”

10/9      Austin, TX                           Moody Center                                                 

10/15    Philadelphia, PA              Wells Fargo Center                                       

10/17    Boston, MA                        TD Garden                                                         

10/19    New York, NY                    Madison Square Garden                            

10/22    Toronto, ON                      Coca-Cola Coliseum                                   

10/24    Chicago, IL                        United Center                                                                                                                

10/25    Minneapolis, MN            Target Center                                                  

10/29    Seattle, WA                       Climate Pledge Arena                                 

10/30    Portland, OR                     Moda Center                                                                                                      

11/1      San Francisco, CA         Chase Center                                                  

11/2      Inglewood, CA                  Kia Forum