Maggie Rogers names the “first pop song I fell in love with”
It’s impossible to put the sound of Maggie Rogers into one package. Throughout albums like Surrender, every song has its own genre identity, fluctuating between the sounds of roots-infused folk music at one point, pure pop the next, and then electronic dreamscape in the back half of the record. Although Rogers is one of the leading voices in indie pop, there was a point where she almost didn’t play pop music at all.
Throughout her upbringing, Rogers had a somewhat eclectic musical background, known for working out music on a harp and blending it with folk instruments. Although artists like Björk helped expose her to what the power of electronics could do, Rogers was still hesitant to take a deep dive into pop-focused music.
Speaking about that time to Line of Best Fit, Rogers explained: “I never really partied or went wild; I just spent a lot of time alone writing or planning band practices. The way I was approaching music didn’t really represent my age or where I was in my life. I wasn’t having fun with music in that way.” Once she heard the sounds of Carly Rae Jepsen, her perspective started to change.
While Jepsen was known to most 2010s music fans as the woman behind the single ‘Call Me Maybe’, her following projects would see her expand into writing classic pop music. However, none of them had the same acclaim on the charts as her debut single. Albums like Emotion put every element of excellent pop music into one project, feeling like a throwback to the 1980s glossy production style with a modern twist.
Compared to the disposable pop on the radio, Rogers saw Jepsen writing the kind of music she could identify with, explaining, “‘Run Away With Me’ was the first pop song that I ever really fell in love with, and it made me understand there was a version of pop music that I could make, that could combine all the things I love.”
Opening with a sublime saxophone solo, Jepsen wrote the ultimate declaration of teenage love, asking the song’s subject to forget about their problems and run away with her somewhere else. Instead of the trite lyrics that would normally fit into a song of this style, Jepsen turned in a song that hit with the same force as a heartland rocker, wanting to throw caution to the wind and have fun instead of droning on about life’s problems.
Considering the more depressive mood going on in the mid-2010s sonically, Jepsen’s song helped push Rogers away from writing overly serious material, saying: “I could write about going out with my friends, or sex, or something I was feeling that day because I wanted to write about it. I realised that my songs didn’t have to be a direct reflection of my morals or something more serious. It could just be a diary entry about what my week looked like.”
From there, Rogers has taken Jepsen’s lessons to heart throughout her discography. Throughout Surrender, listeners see many different sides of what makes Rogers tick, whether that be uncertainty, pain, or just mindless fun. Any songwriter can find themselves writing into a corner, but Jepsen was there to remind Rogers that when she sits down with a melody and a lyric sheet, there are no limits to what she can write about.
