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\n \u201cIt\u2019s funny, because when you asked, \u2018Could it happen again?\u2019 my thought was, Would I wish it on anybody?<\/em>\u201d Ten years ago, Maggie Rogers was a senior at NYU, scrambling to finish a song for a music-production class she was close to failing. The guest critic that week happened to be Pharrell Williams. She played him \u201cAlaska,\u201d a track she\u2019d written in about 15 minutes. It\u2019s a bit of folk songwriting crossed with the electronic music she\u2019d fallen for while studying abroad in Berlin. Pharrell told her he\u2019d never heard anything like it. Someone was filming, the clip went viral, and it launched Maggie into pop stardom.<\/p>\n A decade later, she\u2019s released three studio albums, earned a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist<\/a>, and gone back to school to pick up a master\u2019s degree from Harvard Divinity School<\/a>, where she studied the spirituality of public gatherings. In the past few months, she\u2019s been as visible offstage as on: She advocated for free speech in D.C., performed for 200,000 people at a protest in Minneapolis alongside Joan Baez, and delivered a haunting performance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert<\/em><\/a> <\/em>ahead of the show\u2019s farewell on CBS in May.<\/p>\n This month, I spoke with Maggie Rogers in front of a room of my current NYU music students. We looked back on the hit that launched her career.<\/p>\n I want to get a sense of what \u201cAlaska\u201d meant to you ten years ago and what it means to you today.<\/strong> I hadn\u2019t made music in two years, and my professor Nick Sansano very gently brought me into his office and was like, \u201cMy guy, you are going to fail.\u201d I was in an advanced music-production class and making music to fulfill assignments, but I wasn\u2019t making things that were really my artistry, that they knew that I could make. They were sort of like, \u201cYou have to present in class next week. We really need you to show up.\u201d We had two months left in school. So \u201cAlaska\u201d was the first song I\u2019d written in two years, and it was three days old.<\/p>\n This is your senior year.<\/strong> But I think it was difficult at the time, too, because I cared so much about my classmates. These are really small programs, and I\u2019d seen my classmates work really hard in those years, and they\u2019d really seen me do other things and invest my time and energy elsewhere. So when that moment happened, it was also really complicated, because it was a little awkward. I had so much respect and love for my classmates who had really put in the work, and it was just a really strange thing, the way it all happened.<\/p>\n
\n Photo: YouTube<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
There\u2019s a very long behind the scenes of what writing that song was. Basically, I was studying music production at Clive Davis, and I wasn\u2019t really making any music. My entire junior year, I really started focusing on an English major. I had spent my first two years in bands, and then I kind of just needed some time \u2014 which now, so many years later, I\u2019ve realized I kind of do this every five or six years; I need a beat.<\/p>\n
Yeah. I had shown it to my college roommate, Mary, who I\u2019m still friends with and write songs with. I had told her, \u201cI don\u2019t know if I like this,\u201d because it felt too poppy to me. It was outside my comfort zone. So what was interesting was that I got really famous for something that effectively was an experiment. It didn\u2019t feel like the truest version of myself. At the time, it felt like something I was trying. I was playing around, I was excited about it, and that EP that I ended up finishing was my senior project.<\/p>\n