Maggie Rogers – “Don’t Forget Me”
Maggie Rogers released Surrender in the summer of 2022. Hopefully that hasn’t escaped your memory by now, but if so, Rogers is here with a gentle rebuke. Don’t Forget Me, her third LP, is coming in April. She co-produced it with Ian Fitchuk (Kacey Musgraves), and then Shawn Everett (The War On Drugs) handled the mix.
“I wanted to make an album that sounded like a Sunday afternoon,” Rogers writes. “Worn in denim. A drive in your favorite car. No make up, but the right amount of lipstick. Something classic. The mohair throw and bottle of Whiskey in Joan Didion’s motel room. An old corvette. Vintage, but not overly Americana. I wanted to make an album to belt at full volume alone in your car, a trusted friend who could ride shotgun and be there when you needed her.”
The new album’s title track is out today. “Don’t Forget Me,” which you may have heard at Rogers’ live dates over the past year, is a bright, propulsive folk-rock track that, I think, lives up to her description for the project. It’s also the closing track on the new album. Listen below.
A statement from Rogers:
I have had so much fun at every stage of making this album. I think you can hear it in the songs. And I’m finding it’s sort of the key ingredient to making all of this really fly.
This album was written over five days, two songs a day – three days in December 2022, two in January 2023. It was written in chronological order.
Some of the stories on this album are mine. And for the first time really, some of them are not. The moments that are mine feel like memories – glimpses from college, details from when I was 18, 22, 28 (I’m 29 now). In writing the album sequentially, at some point a character emerged. I started to picture a girl on a roadtrip through the American south and west. A sort of younger Thelma & Louise character who was leaving home and leaving a relationship, processing out loud, finding solace in her friends and in the promise of a new city and new landscape. I tried to capture her life with the intimacy of Linda McCartney’s photographs, spontaneous and open and free. She’s starting over, turning the page on a new chapter in her life. Some of the stories and details in the songs are from friends or from the news. Some I just completely made up, or rather, sort of flew out of me. Pen to paper. Fully formed. There they were. I think in this way, some of the deepest truths about my present were able to come forward. I wasn’t looking for them or digging them up, harvesting their stories before they had the chance to become fully grown. The truths about my life came from my deepest intuition. Things I wasn’t ready to say out loud to myself, but they found a place in the music.
Eight of the ten songs were written with my sole collaborator and teammate on this album, Ian Fitchuk. The other two songs I uncovered on my own and were the product of my long friendship with Lee Foster, the Electric Lady manager who, in the days before Christmas, realized I was on a roll and gifted me an extra day of studio time to keep working and catching the songs coming through my hands.
Ian and I co-produced the album together, and he plays most of the instruments on the album. He’s such an amazingly gifted player and feeler, and has become an even better friend. We had never worked together before this record, but in late November of 2022, I had a whispering feeling that we could make something interesting together and I DM’d him out of the blue wondering if he’d be open to give it a shot. I’m so grateful he said yes. These songs and session days are a record of our first time meeting in person, and it’s so exciting to feel that we’ve only just scratched the surface.
Most of the performances you’ll hear are first takes. The recordings were initially a collection of demos to be re-recorded with a band. I think this is how and why it all came into being in the way that it did. I just thought we were playing, musically shaking hands for the first time. We met again in March to try to beef up the arrangements, but every time we tried to change them, we kept feeling like we lost something. When we listened back, we realized that taking the pressure off allowed us to drop our guards and pretenses in the studio, the result being a whole lot of character and heart. That week of throwing shit at the wall and testing our ideas turned the casualness of our original process into a deliberate creative choice that we could stand behind as an album. We decided to leave all the pieces that make the recordings feel real and feel human. Like performances, instead of manufactured or gridded perfection. In the end, the album was made because we weren’t trying to make an album.
There’s a warmth to Don’t Forget Me. In many ways, it feels like coming home, returning to the music and songwriting that grounded me when I first started making art in my bedroom when I was 16. My friends keep saying it sounds like the version of me that they know. Something looser, or sassier, or sillier than I’ve shown in public before. I wanted to make an album that sounded like a Sunday afternoon. Worn in denim. A drive in your favorite car. No make up, but the right amount of lipstick. Something classic. The mohair throw and bottle of Whiskey in Joan Didion’s motel room. An old corvette. Vintage, but not overly Americana. I wanted to make an album to belt at full volume alone in your car, a trusted friend who could ride shotgun and be there when you needed her.
The album’s title track is also out today. After an entire summer of playing this song live it feels GOOD to finally be feeling the levity of release. The song is a rough journal entry about going to a bunch of friends’ weddings and feeling so happy for them, but also realizing that I’m very simply in a different place in my life. I’ve joked with my friends that it’s a song about having low expectations, but really I think it’s about craving simple baselines – a good lover or someone that’s nice to me. When it comes down to it, our memories and relationships are all we have. I don’t have a lot of asks, but I want my time spent on this earth to add up to something. For it all to be worth it in the end. I think remembering someone can be the greatest form of loving because when we remember, the love lives on. When I’m standing at the end of my life, I hope a lifetime of accumulated love is what I’m left with.
I think its inherent that we give and take from each other. And that even with all the best intentions there can be some destruction too – take my money, wreck my Sundays. There are simple things I think we’d all give up for love. I think it’s just about wanting our sacrifices or suffering to be meaningful. To have it all not be forgotten. Don’t forget me.
This has been such a transformational and special time in my life. I’m so grateful for many years of support and care I’ve been offered to let me come to all of this in my way and in my time. I can honestly say I’m more ready than I’ve ever been…and most importantly, I’m having a blast. I hope you love this record as much as I do.
TRACKLIST:
01 “It Was Coming All Along”
02 “Drunk”
03 “So Sick Of Dreaming”
04 “The Kill”
05 “If Now Was Then”
06 “I Still Do”
07 “On & On & On”
08 “Never Going Home”
09 “All The Same”
10 “Don’t Forget Me”
Don’t Forget Me is out 4/12 via Capitol. Pre-order it here.
Maggie Rogers
