Alaska – Maggie Rogers

I was first introduced to Maggie Rogers through her feature on Zach Bryan’s song “Dawns“, or so I thought. After a quick Google search, I realized I had seen her before. In 2016, (I think) Maggie was a student at NYU, taking a master class with the legendary producer Pharrell Williams. In a clip that went viral, she demoed this song, Alaska, for Pharrell, and his reaction was pretty great. I believe she was 21 or 22 at the time.

Link if the embedded video doesn’t work – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAM1N1APk80

As I’m sure I’ve said before, I’m not much of a modern pop guy, but I can certainly appreciate good music from any genre, and this is an outstanding song. I love what she says about dance music in the interview. She talks about how she was originally a folk artist but had an experience that opened her eyes to different genres and different takes on music. “Suddenly this thing that had always been the most unnatural and the most artificial. I understood the release of it… Since there was fire, people were beating sticks together, and suddenly it became the most natural thing.” I love her words there, and I feel a similar way about music. As I get older and continue to listen to more variety, I have begun to really enjoy a lot of music I would’ve considered boring a few years ago and appreciate a lot of stuff I would’ve written off as “manufactured” or something like that.

I love this quote about were Maggie talks about the production of the song “When I had been hiking in summers after Alaska, I had been creating a natural sample bank of birds, noises. A good chunk of the rhythm in the song started from me just patting a rhythm on my jeans. That sample is the main rhythm. Me snapping in a room. I wanted to make dance music, or pop music, feel as human as possible”

Alaska is just an all around great song, with great vocals by an artist who is really passionate about her work.

Link to song – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BvRgwUisSg

Link to live – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHrY4rzziWE