I found myself, Maggie Rogers sings on her major-label debut, when I was going everywhere.In 2016, Rogers played her song Alaska for Pharrell Williams at an NYU undergraduate seminar. A video of the performance went viral, resulting in a major-label deal, an EP and a sold-out headlining tour all within a year of graduation. And so,the 24-year-old spends herfirst proper album making sense of what it means to be Maggie Rogers after skyrocketing into a peculiar form of semi-stardom. At its core, Heard It In a Past Life is a collection of self-searching moments: miniature mental flashbulbs of realization from a young adult striving to adjust to the swiftly shifting world around her.
Rogers has a rare knack for dramatizing and finding beauty in these flashes, and for making them into three-minute pop songs. Rogers wrote, co-produced and arranged nearly all of the albums 12 tracks, which play like a carefully crafted pseudo-concept-album song cycle: turmoil and reflection in the first half, love and hard-won resolution in the second. The songs, which draw on muscular pop rock, synth-driven electro pop and Seventies singer-songwriter piano balladry, reflect Rogers wide-reaching tastes. She nods to forebearslike James Taylor and Joni Mitchell as readily as she references contemporaries like Haim, Jack Antonoff, Taylor Swift.
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Because some of these tracks were released and recorded as early as 2016,Heard It In a Past Life is a chronicle of Rogers development as a singer-songwriter. The evolution of those tracks from the sparse electro-folk origins of the oldest songs like Alaska and On+Off to the grand, Eighties-inspired, Greg Kurstin-produced bombast of The Knife and Retrograde mirrors the story of perpetual self-change that Rogers is narrating throughout.
Rogers never once loses sight of that story on Heard It In a Past Life, and the result is a laser-focused statement with nary a wasted lyric or synth line. People change/Overnight, she sings early on, offering a test run of the albums central premise: Things get strange/But Im all right.