It's Mid - 'Don't Forget Me' - Maggie Rogers
You'll probably end up forgetting this one, tbh.
Maggie Rogers' second album, 2022's Surrender, has got to be one of the most overwrought and overproduced albums I've heard in recent years.
Co-produced with Kid Harpoon, everything was just so big on this album: Big arrangements, big drums, big vocals. It's a rather exhausting. Rogers - known for her willowy, featherlight tone - manages to oversing every line like its her last, like she's suddenly Jessie J or Rachel from Glee. Needless to say, this album is the very definition of extra.
Her latest single, 'Don't Forget Me,' thankfully cuts down on the excess, but also sees Rogers retreat into the bland folk pop we first got a taste of on her 2019 debut, Heard It in a Past Life.
And boy, what an unfortunate title. This song is pretty but also pretty beige, destined to be forgotten along with all the other country-folk adjacent tracks that are currently saturating the market. At least she’s not oversinging this time, I guess…
I can’t help but wonder what happened to the Rogers we got to know all those years ago on ‘Alaska,’ from the now-viral video of the singer/songwriter reducing Pharrell to tears with her buoyant yet ethereal song, complete with beautiful nature sounds. Why did she move on so quickly? Why did she not stay in that experimental vein for a little while longer, choosing to please the mainstream with either ill-fitting maximalist bops or bland 90s coffee house folk? For Rogers, there doesn’t seem to be an in-between.
For so long, Rogers seems to have been stuck in this strange creative purgatory, unable to decide just what kind of artist she wants to be, so instead remains safe, even if it means producing a lot of rather anodyne tracks that, in a cruel irony, the mainstream seems to have wholly ignored. I know it sounds like I'm ragging on Rogers, but I'm really not. It's just that I know she's way, way more capable than this.
On her upcoming album of the same name, Rogers says that she wanted to create music 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.’
If this is music for a dull and dreary Sunday afternoon, with nothing on TV and sitting on the couch mindlessly scrolling through your Twitter feed, then Rogers has, unfortunately, succeeded.
Maggie Rogers’ Don’t Forget Me is out April 12.