In a nondescript building in a small Pennsylvania town, Maggie Rogers prepared for her big moment. Lititz, Pennsylvania is where arena acts rehearse their shows before embarking on a national tour, and every detail counts. “Sunday Morning” caught up with Rogers there, just weeks before her concerts at Madison Square Garden.

A career-defining event sold out the New York City venue. “Twice!” she laughed. “I don’t know how to calculate this in my brain. I don’t really understand it!”

To be clear, this wasn’t Rogers’ first time on a big stage; She had already shared it with artists like Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez and an opening act for Coldplay. She was also nominated for a 2020 Grammy for Best New Artist.

But for Rogers, who studied music at New York University, playing Madison Square Garden was a homecoming of sorts. As she walked through Washington Square Park, not far from her former dorm room, she pointed to the benches where she used to write songs. It was at NYU that Rogers got her big break – or at least she did A Her big break came when superstar producer and musician Pharrell Williams visited her class. Rogers played him a song she had been working on called “Alaska.” “What I remember is just staring at my shoes and holding on,” she said.

Williams’ response: “Wow! Wow! I have zero, zero, zero marks for this, and I’ll tell you why: you do your own thing. It’s unique.”

The video clip of Williams’ masterclass went viral, but Rogers – who had actually started studying music technology – still had to learn the craft of writing and performing, and that’s exactly what she did. “I played every bar and club on the Lower East Side and every DIY venue in Brooklyn that existed when I was here,” she said.

Now, at age 30, Rogers has developed a close relationship with her fans, many of whom watched her grow from small clubs to an artist that record companies fought over.

Remember the demo she played for Pharrell Williams as a student? To date, the music video for the finished version of “Alaska” has been viewed more than 23 million times.

It’s all been an incredible journey, considering Rogers says she didn’t really do much public music growing up on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Her interest was more personal, private and idiosyncratic: “Basically, as soon as I could ask for music lessons, all I wanted to do was play the harp,” she said. “My first CD purchase was a double purchase of the orchestral score to ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ and Britney’s ‘Baby One More Time.’ Which is perhaps all you need to know about me!”

And you hear it in their songs – a pop sensibility with a tremendous intellect behind it. Rogers says the whole arena thing is fun, but what she’s really hoping to do is create a deep, long-term connection with her listeners over the themes of love and heartbreak and the strange wonder that it’s just being alive . “I really prefer to work in long form,” Rogers said. “And I’m really very grateful for the listeners who want to do an active listening exercise and who also have the patience to spend an hour of their time listening to the way I, you know, sequence the recording, or.” Who has appreciation for these things? I have always loved art that takes time.

Something else sets Rogers apart from a typical pop star: In 2021, she took time off from her music to enroll in a graduate program at Harvard University that focused on religion and public life. “I really needed a second,” she said. “I had to kind of reorient my life, and I had to be new at something. I lived in a world for about five years where everything was about me and my career, and then I applied that to music, and going to concerts and going to these really big public gatherings.”

Large public gatherings that have become something almost spiritual for both Rogers and her fans: “It couldn’t have happened any other way,” she said. “For example, I get to Madison Square Garden, step on stage and think, ‘I’m really ready for this.’ And that’s such a gift in itself that I’ve tried not to contextualize it for myself because once you find out what it is, it changes, you know? The storm! It’s really quiet where I’m sitting. And I’ll never know what it looks like from the outside. But what I can know is when I’m truly committed to my art I’m at my best and I like to think that I do both as often as possible.

You can stream Maggie Rogers’ 2024 album Don’t Forget Me by clicking the embed below (free Spotify registration required to hear tracks in full):

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The story was produced by Julie Kracov. Publisher: Remington Body.