There is possibly nothing more annoying than someone posting multiple very low-quality videos from a concert on their Snapchat story. No one ever watches them. I’ll let it pass if you’re close enough for me to see their faces. Sometime in December 2017, my cousin Tara destroyed any respect I had for her after she did this very thing. Unlike most people I know, my cousin Tara is very musically talented and not the type to just listen to Taylor Swift. So for some unknown reason, I actually watched all of these horrible quality videos of this artist she was seeing because I trust her taste.
I proceeded to look up Maggie Rogers on Spotify and listen to a couple of songs. At first, I really wasn’t a huge fan at all. She sounded very Pop and I had been listening to a lot of The 1975. I was listening to “Alaska” on my phone and saw a Genius fact about the sounded getting traction because Pharrell held masterclass at NYU where Maggie was one of three artists to play a song for him. The original video on youtube has 3.7 million views. The video was then cut down to just Maggie’s part, which has 1.6 million views. “Alaska” now has 94 million listens on Spotify. In the video, Maggie talks about how she started out just playing banjo and then fell in love with dance music after studying abroad in France.
Image from @maggierogers on Twitter
Maggie blessed us with the release of her debut album “Heard It In A Past Life” in January of this year. As someone who goes back and forth between the Chicago suburbs and Cleveland suburbs depending on the time of year, I tend to have a hard time catching my favorite artists in concert because they kind of tend to skip over Ohio completely or at least Cleveland.
On September 28th, Maggie emerged in all white onto the EXPRESS LIVE! stage in Columbus. A single light lit her from the back and chills instantly ran down my back with the first notes of her opening song. I have gone to some good concerts this summer, but nothing has come close to the full-body chills I had the entire time Maggie sang “Color Song.”
Images from @nachofriesrback on Twitter
For how young and new to the industry Maggie is, she’s extremely professional. Every song was amazing, she practically danced across every inch of the stage, and the lighting was to die for. She surprisingly closed the show with an acoustic version of “Alaska” completely alone on stage with just her guitar, the way she originally wrote it in her room.
Image from Giphy