Maggie Rogers’ ‘Don’t Forget Me’ keeps dreaming

Don’t Forget Me

Maggie Rogers (Debay Sounds, 2024)

When Maggie Rogers became famous after the release of her 2019 album Heard It in a Past Life, she realized her role as a musician wasn’t only about making music but about being someone whom fans can look up to. “I was constantly put in this sort of nontraditional ministerial position where I was being asked for moral and spiritual guidance,” she said. This eventually led her to enroll in Harvard Divinity School.

Her latest album, Don’t Forget Me, conveys a trust in her creative process as she settles into these public roles. The album isn’t as experimental or edgy as her previous albums, but it digs into her roots: She wrote that the album is a return to the songwriting that grounded her creative process while making music in her bedroom at 16.

“My world’s a honey shade of blue,” she sings in “It Was Coming All Along,” a song about the losses of growing older. The looping drum, piano, bass, guitar, and banjo evoke that color and its rawness—most of what’s recorded on the album are demos that Rogers and the band decided to keep.

Don’t Forget Me has a ’90s and early-2000s Sheryl Crow rock vibe in sound and imagery, with open roads and landscapes providing a place to reflect on lessons Rogers learned throughout her 20s, such as in “If Now Was Then,” “On & On & On,” and “The Kill.”

In “So Sick Of Dreaming,” Rogers sings about being let down by romantic love—but it could also be about trying to make it as an artist and finding oneself through the heartbreak and hope, trusting in one’s art even when it’s scary. “Put on my red lipstick like a hero / And swallow the fear down my throat,” she sings in “Never Going Home.” She may have been sick of dreaming, but she never gave the dream up.