Maggie Rogers

Margaret Debay Rogers (born April 25, 1994) is an American singer-songwriter and record producer from Easton, Maryland. After her song "Alaska" was played to artist-in-residence Pharrell Williams during a master class at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts in 2016, she gained widespread recognition. She has released two independent albums, The Echo (2012) and Blood Ballet (2014) and two studio albums, Heard It in a Past Life (2019) and Surrender (2022). She was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 2019. Biography Early life (1994–2012) Maggie Rogers grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland along the banks of the Miles River in Easton, Maryland. Her father is a now-retired Ford Motor Company dealer and her mother, a former nurse, is now an end-of-life doula. She began playing harp at age seven and loved the music of Gustav Holst and Antonio Vivaldi. Her mother would play neo-soul artists such as Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill. By the time she was in middle school, Rogers had added piano and guitar to her repertoire and began songwriting in eighth grade. For high school, she attended The Gunston School before attending and graduating from St. Andrew's School, a boarding school in Middletown, Delaware. At school, she played harp in the orchestra, sang in the choir, joined a jazz band, learned banjo and became interested in folk music, and taught herself how to program. She also spent many summers at a rural camp in Maine. The summer after her junior year in high school, Rogers attended a Berklee College of Music program and won the program's songwriting contest, which spurred her to focus on writing. During her high school senior year, she recorded what became her first album, The Echo (2012). Rogers included her demos as part of her application to the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, was accepted, and started in 2012.