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By Amanda Petrusich
In the fall of 2021, singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers entered Harvard Divinity School’s graduate program. To anyone unfamiliar with the major points of Rogers’ career (a master’s degree in faith and public life), it might have seemed like she was abandoning burgeoning pop stardom to reinvent herself as a priest. “It’s a peace and justice program, it’s not a seminar,” Rogers told me over dinner in Cambridge in early February. “I don’t come from any specific devout tradition. I was not trained in any specific devotional tradition. Twenty-nine-year-old Rogers sought to make her life more functional and less surreal. “One day I woke up and I was famous,” she said. “I was exhausted. I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue. I had the idea that I was looking to quit music. A lot of what I came here to do was think about how to create more sustainable design around an artistic practice. This spring, Rogers will launch his third album, “Don’t Forget Me,” a joyous collection of pop-rock songs he wrote in consecutive order, over five kinetic and abundant days last winter. It is, in many ways, the loosest, most elemental music he has ever composed. .
In 2016, Rogers was “discovered” (although the word is, at best, a bit too pointed) by erudite hitmaker Pharrell Williams, while he was reading at New York University. Williams visited one of Rogers’ categories at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, a program of the Tisch School of the Arts; he was an artist in an apartment there and she was a senior. The institute is the kind of position where, for example, Questlove could teach a seven-week course on the Beastie Boys, and the Beastie Boys could perform on the last day. During Williams’ visit, Rogers played him a rough cut of “Alaska,” a song he had written after going to Berlin and having “a really religious experience” with dance music. “Club culture, for a New York University. For freshmen or sophomores, it meant tight dresses, a certain amount of money, the meat district,” Rogers said. “I didn’t have clothes for that. ” The scene in Berlin was different: less fluid, more raw. “They said I had to wear shoes or I wouldn’t get in,” Rogers recalled. At the same time, he was learning more about how to produce and manipulate rhythm, employing analog and electronic elements (drums, bass, synthesizers, outboard equipment, programming software). “I thought making a song was the oldest, most primordial form of connection,” he said. “When I discovered the connection that other people can make through rhythm, everything changed. ”
“Alaska” is a fragile meditation on interpersonal dissonance. “You and me, air in the middle,” Rogers sings in chorus. This tension is deftly reflected in the sound of the song. There’s something earthy about Rogers’ presence (she grew up in rural Maryland and played harp and banjo as a teenager), yet the song’s production is spectral, icy, and electronic. Rogers told me he wrote “Alaska” in five minutes, as if he were running frequently: with urgency and deep concentration, as if he were channeling a faint signal.
Williams’ montage with elegance was recorded on video. Rogers was wearing jeans, a used L. L. Bean blouse, and a necklace made from two moose vertebrae tied together with kitchen twine. She told Williams that in the past she had only done folk music. Her teacher, sound maker and engineer Bob Power, interrupted: “But also postmodern things. It wasn’t just boom-chicka-boom-chicka. She clarified her intentions for the track. “All I need to do is mix those folk images and that concord and the herbal samples that I’ve learned on my walks over the last few years with the kind of powerful, backbone dance music,” she said. “We’ll see if I can make it. ” When the song started playing, Rogers seemed a little unsure of where to direct her gaze. The video is about to finish playing: a young artist presents her paintings and nervously awaits the trial. It temporarily becomes transparent that Williams is sorry. At the end of the song, he tells her that she has “0, 0, 0 notes”, then compares her individuality to that of the Wu-Tang Clan. “I can hear the ride,” Williams told him. “I had never heard anything like that. ArrayArrayArray It’s a drug to me.
The full thirty-minute clip of the lecture, adding Williams’ responses to the other students, was uploaded to his label’s YouTube channel in March of that year; In June, a fan posted the Rogers component on Reddit. It didn’t take long for the clip to go viral. One of Rogers’ friends from his formative years, Nora Neil, remembers Rogers calling her to tell her he was trending on Reddit. It was at my grandmother’s house,” Neil recalls. And I said, ‘Unfortunately, I don’t know what that means. ‘That first day, the first few hours, it was like, ‘Wow, what’s this?’ . . . His life changed overnight.
Rogers was one of the first pop stars to rise to fame by accidentally captivating the web and, interestingly, she was also one of the last. Today, virality is not so much love at first sight but a marketing strategy, reverse-engineered. through executives and disguised as chance. Representatives of A.
It helped that “Alaska”’s unique sound – a fusion of the biological and the synthesized – was starting to take hold in indie music. For a brief moment, it looked like the battery powered device and trail harvester might be the next big vibe. A bidding war broke out between interested record companies. Rogers eventually signed with Capitol, where he gained his own label, Debay Sounds. In early 2017, he released an innovative and adventurous EP, “Now That the Light Is Fading,” which included an updated edition of “Alaska. ” She was invited to appear on the “Tonight Show” and “Saturday Night Live,” notable bookings for an artist who had only officially released a handful of songs. These first performances were magnetic. The first time I saw her in concert, in April 2017, at Williamsburg Music Hall, a 650-seat venue in Brooklyn, the room had the stuffy feel of a revival tent. On stage, Rogers can be a bit wild. Her movement is spontaneous, erratic; she can seem almost possessed. In the video for “Alaska,” she walks through a forest at dusk, dressed in jeans and a baggy zip-up sweatshirt, with her hair down, no visual makeup, periodically spinning and shaking her body in a way that reminds me of any of both. the most productive fashion dancers. and my granddaughter when she listens to the Supremes.
Rogers told me that when he was in high school, he won an essay contest with an article on how to observe how others have fun. “I’m adjusting enough; I’ve had wonderful friends,” she said. “I don’t need to glorify myself, like I’m a big madman. I think I’m a pretty general guy. He paused and laughed. “But also, I’m pretty general. ” He described his favorite artists as “fearless monsters” and said that the idea that a little distance can simply be a beneficial artistic tool: “To do something real, it’s rarely beneficial to know what it’s like not to be like everyone else. “
Rogers’ first full-length album, “Heard It in a Past Life,” was released in January 2019 and peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200. The following year, she was nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammys. Speaking of which now, Rogers tends to point out that his timeline is measured, almost outdated by some standards (it was a mere three years between his viral moment and the release of his deyet LP), but it’s evident that the speed and scale of his good fortune is baffling nonetheless. On “Light On,” a single from “Heard It in a Past Life,” Rogers sings about the feeling of being alienated and panicked:
I tried to slow everything down. Crying in the bathroom, I had to understand. Everyone around me was saying, “You’ll have to be very satisfied now. “
“I’m very young, but I’m also old compared to the age of other people going through this situation today. I can fully blossom, go to college, myself and think I’m going to be a journalist,” she said. “I was in stupid bands that played in clubs and there’s no footage of that. “Ironically, the pleasure of becoming a celebrity meant she didn’t have time to make music. “I’ve never been less of an artist than when I’ve become a professional artist,” she said. “There was a very explicit moment, in 2017 or 2018, when I was in front of the camera blocking what was meant to be my fourth, fifth or sixth late-night performance doing a song. Alaska. ” I had a massive panic attack. I said to myself, “What’s my life like?I felt like a show pony.
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Rogers’ second album, “Surrfinisher,” released in 2022, a carnal, hungry pop record about the preference for transfinishence, has a name with his master’s thesis; his appearance at Coachella in April of that year filled the public presentation portion of the race. Lately, Rogers is in the midst of a graduate fellowship, which will end in May. He used this time to adapt his thesis into a book, a procedure he discovered in some songwriting tactics. You have to be quick about the experience,” he said. The manuscript focuses on the concept of creativity as a form of faith and celebrity as a kind of fashionable pulpit by default. “Early in my career, other people used devout language to describe my programs,” he said. “Rolling Stone published an article in 2019 called ‘Maggie Rogers: Festival Healer. ‘The BBC published one that read: “Billie Eilish is my cult leader”. . . . Maggie is my God. “
The headlines are exaggerated through the design, but the devotion of his audience — anything resembling worship — was real. The tumult of Trump’s administration and the pandemic meant that Rogers fans, like everyone else, increasingly desperately needed ethical guidance. So does Rogers. ” I was looking for answers, just like everyone else,” he said. “It was shocking: other people were asking me for recommendations about suicide or marriage. I began to realize that there was a functional misalignment between the paints I had been trained to do and the paints I was asked to make. I was placed in this unconventional ministerial position without any training. Anyway, that’s how I got into theology school. What I ended up doing was coming up with a formula for me to engage those things. And then I went out and tried it.
During a recent press tour of Britain, Rogers recalled how comfortable she feels now. “They asked me to do some fun promotional stuff,” he said. But it’s not about who I am or what I do. My Twenty Year Two-Year Edition just wanted to be smart about it. But I can’t improvise with you, I can’t be the cool, giggly girl. She continued, “I wanted to have this life and I was willing to do it. “do whatever it takes. But then I learned that there had to be limits, because I felt like I had betrayed myself. “
After our dinner, Rogers suggested we stop at Emerson Chapel, a stately wood-paneled room where he took a writing session with conservationist Terry Tempest Williams. He put on a long parka and we walked through Cambridge in a cold wind. The campus was silent. Rogers ushered us into the building. In 1838, the Transcendentalist poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson gave his position at the Divinity School to a group of six graduates and their theology professors in the room. Emerson had resigned as a Unitarian minister after becoming frustrated with the way church doctrine segregated the sacred and the profane. In his speech he advised that God provide in everything. “Basically, he was saying, ‘What if the outer light was God?’ “Rogers said. The room smelled of lemon oil. “Only now do I feel up to it,” he said of his career. “I feel good. In the middle of this. Finally. ” We stood there, admiring the stained glass windows and the organ, until a security guard appeared at the door and told us it was time to leave.
Rogers did “Don’t Forget Me” at Electric Lady, a recording studio on West Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. One afternoon, he showed up to show me around. The studio was built in 1970 for Jimi Hendrix, who died less than a month later. after its opening, who remains its guiding spirit; In a portrait hanging in a stairwell, he wears some sort of exquisite jacket, four or five necklaces, and a thin moustache. His eyes are downcast. The air smells like palo santo all the time. On a coffee table were bowls of new fruit and candy, as well as a copy of the Morning Times. Rogers lived on West Fourth Street. “Every day I would walk further afield, look at my image reflected in the mirror and think, ‘I wonder if I’ll ever have the chance to shoot here. ‘It was a position where I saw myself reflected literally and physically, a time in my life where I was still in fact, in fact, dreaming.
Although “Don’t Forget Me” wouldn’t be released for another month, Rogers was already working on songs for his next album. She talks about songwriting as a whole-body process. “When I write, the first thing I do is take off my shoes. My hands get warm. It’s so physical,” he said. The paintings also require a kind of religious stillness. “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle,” he says. If you manage to stay focused on it long enough, it shows. It’s there, but as soon as your brain moves, it’s gone. She’s going into a kind of hyper-objective state. “When I’m at the level or when I’m creating something, I don’t think about who I am or what I’m looking to do. Time gets really nervous. It’s slow and like a spider. There is amazement. And it’s just special, and I’m there, and I’ve got my hands up and I’m finding it. And then I come out of it and I don’t even feel like it was mine in the first place.
Since “Heard It in a Past Life”, Rogers has commonly eschewed dance music in favor of a fuller, rockier sound. “Don’t Forget Me” reminds me of Linda Ronstadt and Carole King’s output from the mid-’70s: chunky, coltish, tender, and fun. Rogers no longer relies on first-person confessional writing. “I saw a woman in her 20s on a road trip,” she said. “In my brain, this recording occupies a space of twenty-four or forty-eight hours. It was like writing a movie, scene after scene. One track, “Never Going Home,” is a moving, propulsive account of an evening, featuring Shania Twain and Sheryl Crow: “We start talking, but those lips aren’t your lips / We bend together, those hips are “No. ” It’s your hips,” Rogers sings. She told me, “I’ve never lived this story, but I can believe a version of my life where I was going through a breakup and a friend said, ‘Shut up, let’s go out together,’ and he made me dance and made me kiss a guy. ” boy. Inhabiting other characters allowed Rogers to be clumsier, more handsome, and more mischievous. “So Sick of Dreaming” comprises a chatty interlude about being jilted in a steakhouse that ends with “I mean, what a loser!” I told Rogers that there was a vertigo in his functionality on this album that I had never heard before. “All my friends told me, ‘This is the side of you we’re seeing,'” he said.
Rogers wrote most of the album with producer Ian Fitchuk. They met in Los Angeles in 2019, when Fitchuk was there for the Grammy Awards. (He was co-editor and co-producer of Kacey Musgraves’ “Golden Hour,” which won album of the year and most productive country album. )Rogers was having dinner with editor Lizzy Goodman, who years earlier had hired Rogers. I asked him to transcribe many of the many hours of interviews that later made up “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” Goodman’s oral history of the downtown rock scene after 9/11. After dinner, Rogers and Goodman went to see the Strokes. “I freaked him out when I greeted him and got together,” Fitchuk recalled. In November 2022, Rogers sent him a D. M. ” We called him and he said, ‘You haven’t recorded your live feature on a record yet. ‘And I said, ‘yes, that’s completely true,'” he told me. “My recording brain and my functionality brain are binary. For me, in a way, it felt like separate professions. Spontaneity is the guideline.
She and Fitchuk booked time in the studio in December. “I hadn’t written any songs, there wasn’t a temperament chart, there wasn’t a color chart, there wasn’t a sense of, ‘I want to document this in my life. ‘Everything, everything, it was a first take,” Rogers said. I played instruments. Ian played instruments. I knew when something looked like me and when it didn’t. It was instinctive. He added: “We work from ten to five. Afterwards, I went to dinner with my friends.
“A lot of times a song was completely formed in less than an hour and then we’d move on to the next one,” Fitchuk said. “I find it easier to work with artists who have strong opinions,” he added. “It makes it less difficult to know when we’re on the right track. “
Despite the effervescence of the album, many of its tracks depict the prolonged dissolution of a romantic relationship. “A lot of this album is a breakup album,” Rogers said. “Since I did it, I’ve been through a breakup. ” That relationship, which Rogers said lasted five years, ended peacefully. “I’ve literally struggled with this for the last few months,” he said. “What does that mean? It wasn’t a premonition. For now, Rogers described his grief as falling in love backwards. “You’re on fire and I’m waking up the world,” he said. The music sounds better. The food sucks. She added: “I’ve never really been single. I’m in a time of mourning for this. But I also feel a sense of freedom.
I told Rogers that I had detected a theme in his lyrics: the option to love someone without possessiveness or panic. “Oh,” he said. That’s how I feel about love. He paused. I think by opting for someone, I need to be selected again. You know? A big component of this case has to do with mutual blame. He continued, “There’s a certain friction with art that worries me the most. For me, living an intelligent life is first and foremost a matter of devotion, and devotion to art is about telling the truth. It’s not an easy story to tell, especially when it comes to “I’m screwed too. “
In late February, Rogers conducted at Carnegie Hall, as part of a benefit concert for Tibet House, a nonprofit organization created at the request of the Dalai Lama for Tibetan culture under Chinese occupation. Composer Philip Glass, co-founder of the organization’s U. S. edition, had sent Rogers a handwritten letter inviting him to participate. “I think you’d like it,” he said.
Rogers told me she planned to dress “like Beethoven” for the occasion and took a selfie in which she was wearing black pants paired with a ruffled white shirt, much like the famous button-down blouse. flyers that appear in the episode “Seinfeld. ” “The puffy shirt. ” “I love clothes,” he told me later. “I love global construction. It’s the childish component of me. It is also an environmental issue that is helping me transfer between my other brains. Put your uniform. When he appeared on the “Today” show shortly after the release of “Heard It in a Past Life,” he wore a vintage T-shirt with a picture of Eleanor Roosevelt, tucked into high-waisted silk pants. “I was so terrified of being sexualized in some way that I squashed my own sexuality in an effort to protect myself,” she said. Now her look alternates between something vaguely professorial and something more glamorous. He followed a different hairstyle for each record, adding long surfer waves on “Heard It in a Past Life” and a dramatic pixie cut on “Surrender. ” Today he wears shoulder-length golden hair. “It’s not a pop star thing,” she said of the changes. “Everyone who’s known me for more than ten years says, ‘Oh, are we going to do this again?’ I got a pixie cut in 6th and 11th grade and my sophomore year of college. ” I talked about a word from “Alaska. ” (“Cut my hair so I can rock back and forth / Without thinking about you. ”) “Thank you!” -she said laughing- “I have receipts! For me it’s the externalization of an internal transition. It’s a bit the same as I can’t hide what I feel. I’ll tell you. Or you can just take a look at my haircut. “
During rehearsals the night before the show at Carnegie Hall, Rogers met Joan Baez, who was also scheduled to perform. Rogers told me that he had long admired Baez and his “bohemian writer” contemporaries, such as Patti Smith and Joni Mitchell. the lineage that I want to write about,” Rogers said. As rock band Gogol Bordello played their set, Rogers, Baez and avant-garde musician Laurie Anderson danced wildly to the side of the stage. Baez moved euphorically; Anderson introduced a “Saturday Night Fever”-style arm movement. Rogers moved freely, up and down, a satisfied bounce that looked more like levitation.
Later that afternoon, Rogers and Baez will sing Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” together on stage. Dylan wrote the song in 1962. Es the most treacherous, a little bitter, a little devastated kind of breaking piece. : “I think and wonder as I walk down the road / I enjoyed a woman, a child, they tell me / I gave her my center but she searched for my soul / But don’t think twice, it’s all right. Rogers called his parents and encouraged them to come all the way from Maryland for the concert.
The next night began with a prayer sung by Tibetan monks, followed by Anderson performing an edit of his song “Walk the Dog,” infused with spoken koans: “We don’t know where we come from,” he sang. We don’t know what we are. ” What followed was appealingly simple. There were some sound disruptions: at one point, Michael Riesman of the Philip Glass Ensemble, performing a segment of “Music in Twelve Parts,” let go of his keyboard and walked toward the soundboard, searching. . . however, the power was low. “Wish given with a hand of meat and a cock, preference taken with/mouth and ass, preference returned. “)
Rogers had turned down Beethoven’s set and wore a blouse with a less competitive collar. He played an acoustic edition of “Alaska”, supported by the Scorchio Quartet. She followed that up with “Don’t Forget Me,” accompanied by the Patti Smith Band. Rogers’ vocals get a little crude in the chorus:
So close the door and replace the channel Give me anything I can take care of A smart lover or someone who’s great to me Take my money, destroy my Sundays Love me till your next someone Oh, but promise me when it’s time to stop by Don’t
Soon after, it was time for the duet. Dylan probably didn’t write “Don’t Think Twice” about Baez, even though they were worried in the early 1960s and broke up in 1965, just as Dylan’s career was taking off. “I think about her and Bob Dylan, and that makes me need to destroy that guy,” Rogers told me. “This song, the more I play it, the more I’m like, ‘This shit is fucking unhappy. ‘”Don’t forget me” too. They’re both unhappy. The concept that the basis is just someone being great to me. . . Damn, man. Baez’s voice is lower, heavier, and rougher these days; When Rogers joined in on the harmonies, it was like a butterfly landing on a tree branch. They swapped pronouns in the song (“I enjoyed a kid, a kid, I said it,” they bellowed), which gave him a great sense of revenge. The crowd went wild. Later, offstage, Baez told Rogers, “You sang every single note that I would have sung. “»
From the age of nine, Rogers spent summers at Wohelo, an all-female camp founded in 1907 on Lake Sebago, Maine. There is no electricity or running water in the cabins. One morning, he texted me old sepia-colored photographs of the place: women in modest bathing suits, paddling canoes. I learned how to write letters,” he says. In my childhood life, there were generational constraints that kept my inner child for a long time. “In high school, he attended St. Andrew’s, a boarding school located on more than two thousand bucolic, wooded acres in Middletown, Delaware. Classical institutions—including, more recently, Harvard—are imbued with a sense of stoicism, seriousness, and scholarship. They had an undeniable aesthetic and non-secular influence on her. “It wasn’t until I saw ‘The Holdovers’ that I thought, ‘I’m profoundly the product of this environment,'” Rogers told me. “I’m so obsessed with creating anything that feels timeless yet modern. “
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Rogers, by his own admission, can be intense. I’m very stubborn,” she told me one morning. We were having fried eggs for dinner at Washington Square Diner, an old-fashioned breakfast near New York University. “I’m not crazy in any way. People are afraid of me, but other smart people are afraid. In conversation, Rogers is open, generous, and cerebral, but not susceptible to foolishness. (One day, when I was pestering her to describe her childhood, she stopped me, warned me that I could probably locate most of the data I was looking for online, and then said, “It’s like a quick fact-check. quotes,” which didn’t seem like a birthday party of my journalistic prowess). “I’m essentially in the business of promoting my own emotions,” he said. “There will have to be a true humanity that remains sacred. “
It’s easy to be skeptical of artists who recommend that they can’t, actually, take it or leave it (after all, fame demands constant maintenance and effort), but I came to Rogers when she said she was more interested in the artistic process. . do things that in everything that happens afterwards. For years, I’ve listened to the single “Light On” about a love doomed to failure due to bad timing; One user seriously wonders: What if there was a way to hug and hug each other?to take care of each other, beyond the confines, rarely more improbable, of a classic relationship. The chorus presents a kind of compromise:
If you keep getting close to me, I’ll be back if I’m gone for good, so I’m okay with that. If you leave gentleness, then I’ll leave gentleness.
During my time at Rogers, I started listening to the song as a rejoinder to fame. The kind of attention he deserved early in his career has been supplanted by a quieter, more solid type of celebrity, and now he focuses, he says, on seeing “that the cup is full and not overflowing, and how big it is. “Buttering a triangle of toast, he continued: “It’s even better, there’s no mess. I go out for a smart time and do what I love with the other people I love. If it works, if it communicates or connects, great. ” If not, another 80,000 albums are released that day. It’s smart!” She continued, “On ‘Heard It in a Past Life,’ I’m very commercially ambitious. On ‘Surrender’, I’m very artistically ambitious. I’m now at a point where I’m feeling very ambitious personally, in the sense that I’m just checking out to spend the most productive time possible while I’m here.
Musically, the emphasis on emotion suits him well. The songs on “Don’t Forget Me” are just as striking as those on “Alaska,” but they have a heady ease: Rogers sounds calm, languid and free. I listen to the single “So Sick of Dreaming” as a kind of fashionable couple. to Linda Ronstadt’s “When Will I Be Loved,” a number one country hit in 1975, written through the Everly Brothers. Both are rebuttals of self-centered lovers, even if “So Sick of Dreaming” comprises a bolder declaration of independence. I’m so tired of dreaming,” Rogers sings.
I asked Rogers if he wanted his rise to fame to have been different. It occurred to him for a moment. ” I wish I had downloaded ‘Alaska’ myself,” she said. “But, because of the way it happened, this deeply overlooked edition of Me as a Student is the edition that other people saw for the first time. My complete and core authenticity. I didn’t get a chance to put the mask on. She also had to deal with another very prominent user who is an inextricable component. “I asked about him every day and had to say, ‘I don’t know him. ‘You’ve noticed it all,” he said. More recently, she and Williams have reconnected. “And now we’re friends. It’s so cool, of course.
The experience of playing “Alaska” at Carnegie Hall, in front of other people from other areas of his life — his parents, his Harvard classmates, his former professors, his fellow musicians, Joan Baez — felt like an apotheosis. “I’m going to get emotional talking about it,” Rogers said, as his eyes slowly filled with tears. “It’s been almost ten years since I wrote this song. I was thinking about the user I was when I wrote it and where I am now. “I think the woman who wrote that song would be proud. He’s been through a lot of moments like this in the past. In late March, he conducted with Bruce Springsteen and country singer Zach Bryan at the Barclays Center. total world,” he said the next morning. My hand is purple. I played the tambourine too enthusiastically and bruised.
Rogers recently bought an apartment in New York. He was on a list of 3 things (find an apartment, release a new album, finish the book) that he must do before he turns thirty at the end of April. One afternoon, she and I stopped at the Dream House, a “soft, sonic environment” designed in the 1960s by the minimalist composer La Monte Young and his wife, the multimedia artist Marian Zazeela. The Dream House has been situated in a two-bedroom area on Tribeca’s third lot since 1993. (Young, eighty-eight, lives downstairs; Zazeela died last month. ) Inside, two atonal song compositions (one via Young and one via the artist). Jung Hee Choi) broadcast through giant speakers. None of the pieces signal melody or rhythm, and because of the way the speakers are arranged, each and every movement, no matter how gentle, a breath, a blink, adjusts the shape of the sound. Zazeela’s soft accessories give the room a fresh purplish-pink glow. If you’ve ever walked past a humming neon sign late at night and wondered what it would be like if you could squeeze your entire body inward and slowly dissociate from time and space, welcome to Dream House.
No shoes are allowed, and due to the volume, it is unimaginable to speak. If you’re accompanied, you’ll have to come up with a fancy little gesture to let yourself know that your insides have been rearranged and that you’re ready to leave. The area has a thick white carpet. A stick of incense perpetually falls to ashes. After a while, Rogers and I nodded frantically and headed back down the street. She asked me if I knew how long we had been inside. Time seemed elastic. I calculated that it was fifteen minutes (thirty at most) when in fact it was an hour. “Dude,” Rogers said.
It was invigoratingly cold outside. We wandered around until we discovered a small champagne bar, which seemed like a fitting finale. Inside, we toast to the House of Dreams, to dreams, to sleep. Rogers said she’s looking to move further away from the isolation of what she calls “First Name, Last Name,” pop celebrity. It’s been helpful to focus on music as an inherently communal practice, shared with collaborators and fans. “I had all those moments in the early years where I felt alone,” she said. I was putting a lot of stuff on one leg, now it’s a tripod and it’s a lot stronger. ♦
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