I grew up in a musical household. No, my parents didn’t play instruments (not beyond my dad’s high school guitar lesson or my mom and her cello in middle school), but they did always have music playing. With no TV in the living room (or anywhere else in the house, for that matter), a lovingly wired network of bookshelf speakers connected the house under one sonic banner held aloft by a multi-CD changer that’s sadly lost its jingle.
The earliest voices echoing from my childhood, other than those of my family, belonged to Bono, Sting, Enya, Kate Bush, Eros Ramazzotti, Andrea Bocelli, Robert Plant and Sade, to name a few Gen-X heroes. To this day, I can’t hear “Fields of Gold” without being borne back into the fields of childhood, namely the backyard with open French doors through which all of the above music often wafted during the course of an afternoon on the trampoline.
Naturally, over the course of growing up, I charted my own course musically, though a number of the above artists have remained close to my heart. After becoming a teenager, I gave little thought to what the music of adulthood would be, never thinking it might not be the same as adolescence. Turns out, Lorde was right. The music you loved at 16 you mostly grow out of. I’m happy to report there isn’t a whole lot I’ve felt the need to shed, though what I have I remember fondly for what it was to me at the time (looking at you Green Day and AJJ).
The first time I heard something that felt like a sound of a future life was Courtney Barnett’s debut record. It was an album I saw myself listening to while gardening on a Sunday afternoon, which is funny because A) I don’t have much of a green thumb and B) songs like “Depreston” and “Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go To The Party” don’t exactly spell out recipes for domestic bliss. But that’s exactly what they conjured up: a sunny day and a leisurely meal prepared with the love of my life. I’d never even had a girlfriend, but all of a sudden, I could picture daily moments of contentment. Courtney Barnett provided the vision but it was Maggie Rogers who conveyed the feeling.
Like many, my introduction to Ms. Rogers was her buzzy single “Alaska”, which failed to meet my precious 19-year-old ideals of compelling music. I instantly relegated her to the dreaded category of “coworker music”, an unfortunate reflection more of my mindset at the time than of the coworkers who introduced her to me. Her first album came and went. I sidestepped it. When it came to music, at that point in my life, I was broadly pretty bad at hewing to the very real wisdom of not saying anything if you don’t have anything nice to say but with Maggie Rogers I held my peace. I can’t say why. I was unsparing in my disdain for musicians of her peerage that I’m mature enough at last to not mention. Maybe it’s because while “Light On” was never something I reached for, it was also something I didn’t recoil from.
Then came “Love You For A Long Time”.
I’m not sure what drew me to it initially but the line “If devotion is a river/Then I’m floating away” is what earned it a permanent place in my hallowed ‘Liked Songs’ playlist, matriculating from a never-skip to something to seek out when feeling like a little float.
If I could bottle up my associations and projections with Maggie Rogers into one word, it would be “aspirational”. From the devotion lyric to the idea of knowing from the get-go of a relationship that you’re gonna love them for a long time, her music began to reassure me that I too would figure “it” out—“it” being life, love, the universe and everything.

While it never found a perch on an album, “Love You For A Long Time” set me up perfectly to receive her second album “Surrender”, which I eagerly did with open ears. It’s an album I immediately purchased on vinyl after my first listen, a rare honor. From the first spine-tickling notes of the chorus of “Horses” to the actual words being sung, I was hooked. Over the course of falling for that album, Maggie Rogers’ music slowly began to sound like the future for me. I can’t quite place why, but every song felt like delivering on the life pursuit of “figuring it out”, whatever that looks like. The good job, the nice place to live, someone to love and, one day, little feet. It became increasingly automatic to picture her music as soundtracking my future home, much in the way that Sting and Sade soundtracked my parents.
Her latest album only furthered these feelings. A small irony in all this is that Rogers only recently turned 30 and by her own admission on songs like tour closer “Don’t Forget Me”, she’s far from figuring it out.
My friend Sally's getting married
And to me that sounds so scary
I'm still tryin' to clean up my side of the street
Maybe that’s part of the magic. As I age and draw (proportionally) closer to her in age, our feelings about the state of the world and our place in it more closely align. Even if those places are fundamentally different, the missing pieces are the same. We lack the same things. Celebs, they’re just like us, animals making our way up the hill.
You kept my secrets and stole my weaknesses
In your white T-shirt, but I couldn't fill
The shoes you laid down for me from the ones that came before
I was all the way in, you were halfway out the door
Oh, I was an animal making my way up the hill
And you were going in for the kill
It’s not lost on me that the most prominent degrees of her musical heel turn followed her stint at Harvard Divinity School, where she made the relationship between the artistic and the sacred the object of her study. For not overly featuring religious themes in her work, neither before nor after this course of study, it seems a curious choice, though one that’s already paid substantial dividends.
During her show last night at Madison Square Garden that I attended with my sister, she regaled the crowd with an extended interlude detailing her journey over the past 12 years across the concert venues in New York. From Sullivan Hall to Mercury Lounge to Madison Square Garden, she’s just about played it all. Something she said that struck me was no matter where else she plays, in her mind the biggest venue will always be the Bowery Ballroom. She is, after all, an NYU alumn.
It’s been a journey for her and, to a lesser extent, a journey for me. I never would’ve imagined in 2017 that one of my most anticipated concerts of 2024 would be Maggie Rogers. I wonder if she imagined in 2012 that twelve years later she’d be playing in the most famous arena in America. I wonder what else I can’t imagine that will come to pass. What I don’t have to wonder is if Maggie Rogers’ music will be a part of it. Wherever her sound goes and wherever I go and whomever I share it with, I’m gonna love it for a long time