Maggie Rogers

Maggie Rogers (born Margaret Debay Rogers on April 25, 1994) is an American musician, singer-songwriter, and producer from Easton, Maryland. She rose to fame after her song "Alaska" was played to Pharrell Williams during a master class at New York University. Her songs "Alaska" and "Dog Years" placed numbers 64 and 173 on Triple J Hottest 100, 2016, respectively. First known for her 2016 viral hit "Alaska," Rogers combines folk, dance, and R&B into a powerfully-emotional yet crowd-pleasing sound. Growing up in rural Maryland, Rogers began playing harp at age seven and loved the music of Gustav Holst and Vivaldi. Meanwhile, her mother played her neo-soul divas like Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill; by the time she was in middle school, she'd added piano, guitar, and songwriting to her repertoire. While studying at St. Andrews School in Delaware, she fell in love with the banjo and folk music, and attended a Berklee School of Music program during the summer after her junior year. Rogers won the program's songwriting contest, which spurred her to focus on writing as high school came to a close. During her senior year, she turned a broom closet into a makeshift studio and recorded what became her first album, 2012's The Echo; Rogers included her demos as part of her application to New York University's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. She released another folky album, 2014's Blood Ballet, during her sophomore year at the school. However, her sound was evolving, thanks in part to her discovery of electronic music while studying abroad in France. Rogers united the different strands of her music with huge success in 2016 with "Alaska," a song she wrote in 15 minutes about a hiking trip for a masterclass with Pharrell Williams. A video of a visibly-moved Williams listening to the song went viral that June, resulting in millions of views as well as hundreds of thousands of plays of The Echo and Blood Ballet. Her EP, "Now that the Light is Fading", was released on February 17, 2017. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.