Interview Present tense: Maggie Rogers

She may possess a huge sense of pride in her music now, but Maggie's future as a performer and producer hasn't always been a given. She arrived at music via a detour in journalism, interning at Elle and Spin and working as an assistant editor on Lizzy Goodman's book Meet Me In The Bathroom, a 2001-2011 oral history of rock 'n' roll in New York. "I've done a fair amount of these!" she says, referring to our interview. "From your side and from mine. It's interesting, I went through this really long period of writer’s block and I sort of realised that instead of telling my story I could just tell other people's and that was interesting enough for me for a little while, but I never felt completely fulfilled by it or like there's a story that I have to tell. And the work I make in music, it's for me."

This awareness of both sides shows - both in the way she pushes for more specificity in the questions she's asked and seems sensitive to how her words will be portrayed. She'd rather not talk about how she sees her music career expanding over the next few years ("I mean I could bullshit my way through that answer but I think I'd rather not. Leave the future to unfold for itself...") and, despite having worked with huge pop producers Greg Kurstin, Rostam and Ricky Reid on the album, she's reluctant to talk about it as a pop record, explaining "I inevitably just believe genre exists to sell music, not to make music…"

She is, however, often refreshingly open about her own struggles, both personally and as a performer. On the day of our interview, it's not long after her set at last summer's Reading Festival, where someone accidentally unplugged some of her and her band's gear, meaning they arrived on stage late and had to cut their set to just a handful of songs. "It's kind of just how it goes. It's not worth panicking cause then you can't really think about it clearly," she shrugs. "I feel like the only thing to do is be like 'OK, what's within my control, and what’s not within my control'." Not only that, but being scheduled to play at the same time as Post Malone on the main stage meant the crowd was sparser than expected. "[It] was a bummer… If I wanted to make music I thought people were going to like, I would be Cardi B and I'm clearly not. I think she's so authentic to her, but you know there's a reason people went to Post Malone's set and not to mine and that's ok."

It's been a strange few years for Maggie and 'Heard It In A Past Life' catalogues that. On it, there's ecstatic highs but also the sense of fear and isolation that comes with being given an incredible opportunity and finding out it doesn't necessarily mean everything in your life just falls into place.

"I made the EP so I could try out making pop or making dance music and then actually sort of ended up missing some more human elements," she says. "So the record is about this crazy time in my life where everything changed and I fell in love and fell out of love and fell in and out of love with music too. I mean, there was a time when I didn’t know if I was really going to do this.

"But I think the record is about me really powerfully and poignantly choosing this and deciding that this is what I love and this is what I wanna do," she adds, "instead of having the internet really beautifully choose for me."

'Heard It In A Past Life' is out now via Polydor.

Tags: Maggie Rogers, Features, Interviews