The singer-songwriter’s sudden celebrity made her a kind of minister without training. So she went and got some. ![Maggie Rogers lies in a bathtub while wearing lingerie, photographed by Fumi Nagasaka for The New Yorker.]()
In 2016,Pharrell Williams attended a class at New York University. The visit, during which he listened to and critiqued students’ music, was taped and uploaded to YouTube as a thirty-minute video. About eighteen minutes in, a star emerges. Maggie Rogers was a senior at N.Y.U. when she played Williams a clip from her song “Alaska.” Upon hearing it, he told her he had “zero, zero, zero notes.” Eventually, the video was posted on Reddit and, though it wasn’t overnight fame for Rogers, it was pretty close. She soon found herself in an odd position. “I started to realize that there was this functional misalignment with the work that I had trained to do and the work that I was being asked to perform,” she tells Amanda Petrusichin a winding, wonderful new profile for this week’s issue. “I was put in this unconventional ministerial position without having undergone any of the training.” So, she enrolled at Harvard Divinity School, where she got her master’s in religion and public life. Petrusich follows Rogers from those first moments of stardom through the process of writing and recording her third studio album, “Don’t Forget Me,” which is out today. In the years since Rogers was thrust into the spotlight, her career has become steadier and quieter. “That’s even better—there’s no mess. I’m trying to have a good time, and make shit that I love with people I love,” she says. “If that works, if it communicates or connects, awesome. If it doesn’t, eighty thousand other records came out that day. It’s O.K.!” SupportThe New Yorker’saward-winning journalism.Subscribe today » | 
