For Rogers, releasing this body of work was about “looking to the future by honoring the past.” That sentiment is reflected in every song, every bit of audio commentary sprinkled throughout the album.
THE ARCHIVE SONGS FULL
Organized in reverse chronological order, the premise of the album is that listeners are offered a full look into Rogers’s past and hear her “get younger,” she said in the album’s commentary section. This past December, Rogers put out Notes From the Archive: Recordings 2011-2016, a collection not of new material but of songs from her back catalogue - some of which had even been previously released. After touring with artists like HAIM and Kacey Musgraves, and even headlining a tour of her own (which included not one but two nights at Radio City Music Hall), her path to solidifying herself as an industry staple seemed clear. Rogers, who is now signed with Capitol Records, released her critically acclaimed debut album Heard It in a Past Life in 2019, and she was nominated for Best New Artist at the 2020 Grammy Awards.
A video of the interaction went viral, and the rest is history. As the story goes, she got her big break in a master class session with Pharell Williams at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute where she played a recording of the now-hit song ‘Alaska’ to a visibly stunned Williams. Blink and you probably would have missed it.
Maggie Rogers appeared on the music scene seemingly overnight.