Celebrated Indie pop artist Maggie Rogers is back with a second album

Indie pop artist Maggie Rogers found inspiration and is back with a second album that pays tribute to her university thesis.

Any hope Maggie Rogers harboured for the answers to her Harvard Masters thesis to be revealed when she walked on stage at the Coachella Festival evaporated within seconds of launching into her first song.

The 28-year-old indie pop artist took time out last year to go back to university and research her thesis titled Surrender: Cultural Consciousness, the Spirituality of Public Gatherings, and Ethics of Power in Pop Culture.

Her return to the festival stage in April would play a pivotal role in her 150-page paper.

She had spent months plotting her setlist, her outfit, the band members’ outfits, their pre-gig meditation, and had pondered long and hard about “performance as a practice of presence”.

“So I got on stage and sort of expected to look out into the crowd and see all of the research and the answers and understand … and I just had a f---ing blast,” she says.

“There was no theoretical conclusion, it was just ‘Weeeeeeeeee!’”

Rogers has been on that “Weeeeeeeeee!” ride for the past six years. The singer and songwriter was launched into the pop stratosphere in 2016 courtesy of a viral video of the moment an awe-struck Pharrell Williams was played what would end up as her debut single Alaska while conducting a masterclass at New York University.

Maggie Rogers performs on the Coachella stage during the 2022 Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival in April in Indio, California. Picture: Amy Sussman/Getty Images for Coachella

Since then, she has built a global following via the Now That The Light Is Fading EP, debut album Heard It In a Past Life – which scored her a Grammy nomination – a series of mixtapes, and now stokes the fan fires with her second album Surrender.

In the video for the album’s first single That’s Where I Am, there’s a cameo from Talking Heads legend David Byrne riding a bicycle; Rogers is an artist’s artist while also being a pop culture fiend.

Dolly Parton, Britney Spears and actor Robert Pattinson get name-checked in her new work and the songwriter hesitates just briefly when asked which of her song subjects she would most love to hear from.

“I think the correct answer is always Dolly Parton,” she says.

After chasing her success around the world for four years on a seemingly endless tour – which featured two legs of gigs in Australia – Rogers needed a time-out.

She retreated to her family’s home in coastal Maine, took long walks, read books and eventually, when the muse returned, started writing songs. Lots of them; she proudly boasts she composed 100 tracks just to whittle them down to the 12 cuts on Surrender.

Some of the motivation to get back to work came from a virtual songwriting club she joined during lockdown, with peers including Mac DeMarco, Feist and Damian Rice keeping each other honest by sharing their works in progress.

And while the subject matter – love and anger as she distils Surrender’s themes – may have sprung from the experiences accumulated in the years after her solo album, it was how they would sound when she would finally be allowed to get back on a stage which dictated their sonic direction.

“I used this so much as a ways of escape. I was mouth-watering for a festival, for someone to spill beer on my shoes, to feel the bass in my collarbone, I was thinking a lot about Glastonbury and that cold tent feeling, and the times I’ve been to Australia – I remember being at Splendour and freezing and beer drunk and huddling around a heater,” she says.

“They’re some of my favourite times as a fan, and those were the things I was hungry for; I missed that physicality and I wanted to make a record that could carry me back into that once it was time.”

Rogers is a rare songwriter in that she believes music is a co-creation with her fans. While she may be satisfied and proud of the recorded versions of the tracks on Surrender, there is a sense they are incomplete until shared from the stage.

“I learn so much about a record when I play it live; I feel like I really don’t know what I’ve made until you go play it over and over again and have that sort of co-creation that can only happen with an audience that is also engaged with it,” she says.

“There’s things that just seep out of the floorboards of the songs; I’ll catch a lyric one night on the 28th time I’ve sang a song and be like, Oh f---, that’s what that means. It can just come out of nowhere.”

The Australian translations of songs including That’s Where I Am, Want Want, Horses, Honey and Be Cool will have to wait with Rogers expecting to tour here next year.

By then, she may have also added to her merch range of condoms and underwear.

Rogers laughs when asked if she could have imagined creating her own line of prophylactics when she commenced her music studies a decade ago.

“The first band I was in when I was 18, we made condoms,” she says. “But I’ve never made underwear before, that just feels fun.”

Surrender is out now.