#4 For Maggie & the love of music
about Maggie Rogers, music, and how it saves our lives
Music has been essential to my life since I have a memory. I grew up surrounded by it: the love of it, performance of it, exuberance of it. Finding the right song feels like what a life in technicolor must be like: accessing moments that didn't exist before, building stories with it. Closeness. Community. Growing up in a household where my family made a living through music, running a radio station, bringing concerts to our cities every year: I understood, without the words for it, what it was like to connect through sound. Something massive, with a body of its own.
To be in communion with music, with artists, the electricity of sharing something across time and space with someone who you've never met. To me, Maggie Rogers is one of those artists, someone who helped me trace my early twenties, saw me mold and shape myself into someone new entirely. She could put words to feelings I felt for the first time —like being out of my body— as if reaching to me to say, I'm here too. This is an ode to music and the ways it's saved me, over and over.
The first time I listened to Fallingwater was about four years ago. I was 21 and had just graduated university, and was a few months into my first full-time job. I remember my fascination with the intro, how the beat resembled a beating heart, steady and building into Maggie's voice, how so much of the lyrics sounded like a near-wail, begging, understanding, giving in, releasing. I remember the music video, marvelling at the choreography, Maggie drowned in red fabric, the desert alive with her, a backdrop of nothingness. There was something really enchanting about the melody, the humming, the repetition; I found her album a short while after and quickly became a dedicated listener, downloading almost each of them onto my phone to soundtrack my walks. It was 2019 and the year had just begun, February's darkness giving way to the light of Spring. It was a year of transitions (isn't every year in your 20s one massive transition? I like to think the older you get, the more you handle those with grace).
In April, I reached the 6-month mark at my job, which was based in Amsterdam. I decided to move there for the first time, a city move that felt daunting even though it was only a 40-minute train ride from Rotterdam, where I'd been since 2015. I had decided to move out of obligation, not excitement, much less curiosity —maybe I'll cover that topic another time— and suddenly, I was living in a shared apartment with five other twenty-somethings that May of 2019.
As the days got longer, brighter, I started playing one song over and over in my head, what I call the Burning era. I remember thinking I found something beautiful in that song. Maggie, again, waking up: falling in love after a year and a half of sleepwalking, waking from her dreamless state in a stupor of burning, bright, alive love. Lit on fire. Burning.
That summertime was beautiful. My best friend and I decided to pack our bags and take his car through France for a few weeks, riding the piercing heat at the tail's end of July. I must've played that song a hundred times. He knew I loved it, and he loved it too. Burning was the summer, burning was the love, which I've always contended is not only reserved for the romantic kind. I've always believed platonic love is in a league of its own. I have rarely found love that's as loyal, as kind, as friendship. As our holiday closed in on August in Lyon, we got matching tattoos: the Sun hugging the Moon on our arms. I told him I felt like the Sun was a reminder of Maggie's song. That love could always feel warm on your skin, bright and inviting, its color golden like daylight (to borrow from Swift). He agreed.
Then the Fall came, leaves turning a bright auburn, I was still trying to find my pace in Amsterdam. All my friends remained in Rotterdam and I found myself taking the train back almost every weekend, struggling to feel comfortable in my own skin. Finding the pretty canals in the center of Amsterdam unreachable, untouchable, the sleek BMWs and the lawyer offices and endless tourists overwhelming. I felt so unidentified with its elegant, massive windows filled with people I'd never meet. It's not that Amsterdam was too big or too scary; it just didn't feel like home to me.
That Fall I kept replaying Light On at La Blogothèque, live in Paris. The warm tones, people singing together, it really felt like I was there. I shared it with my flatmates, played it in the living room, sat intently in front of the TV. I loved this version even more than the original recording. I thought it was so fresh, the sound of Maggie's voice, how everyone sang along and it became part of the song in such a communal way. Her music always seemed to scream, I am with you. We're together. I kept weaving my way through narrow streets, finding the city increasingly difficult to live with, another person in my story. Amsterdam and I couldn't seem to find our pace. It kept feeling filled with clumsy missteps.
As November rolled around, the Sun started hiding. The winter of 2019 was excruciatingly hard. I was still trying to make a home out of a city I felt nothing for, felt like it kept rejecting me, my job becoming a source of frustration. I felt increasingly anxious. In retrospect, I call it the Blue Period. Good days like my birthday were fun, there was a visit from a best friend from university. One of my most cherished presents: Maggie's album in vinyl. I played it constantly that entire winter, Burning in the back of my mind like a little feeling of warmth. She had so many feelings, and I wanted to feel them, too. It was like a roadmap for all these things that were so visceral, so exciting about being alive. At a time where I constantly felt tired, where it was difficult to find joy, Maggie kept on singing. Keeping company, tracking time.
I had a hard time talking. Had a hard time pinning down the feeling. But Maggie knew about it. Felt what it was like to be outside her body, at least that's how I felt when I listened to Back in My Body. I kept trying to find places I could feel at home in, in Amsterdam. Kept building small routines, rituals to feel connected to. A coffee place in Jordaan. A writer's group in the Scheltema every Tuesday night. Sweet potato fries at Captain Zeppo's. Decided to keep trying.
That winter, I flew to New York City for the last week of 2019. I met one of my best friends from high school there; she flew in from Canada and we met at the Jane Hotel on Christmas morning. She asked me if I was happy when we crossed Washington Square Park. I tried to hold back tears. I was still trying to get back in my body.
It was a strange, scary feeling to have; up in the skyscrapers, witnessing little miracles in the subway, the funny coincidences, our strolls through West Village, getting compliments on our coats, walking arm in arm. The world was swallowing me whole but there was also pain. I felt open and exposed in the midst of it: some city as big as New York, me feeling so small. There was so much. I was so overwhelmed with it.
In February 2020, I decided I would quit my job after one of my therapy sessions. I also decided to pack my bags and move back to Rotterdam, a place of comfort, a place I knew. I remember feeling relieved once I made the decision, recognizing myself. The need to return to a place I felt at home in. Wanting to recognize my surroundings; I needed the safety. Needed the familiarity while so much of myself was foreign, changing.
Then the pandemic hit us. And the rest of that we all know about. I marched on with one of my plans, I moved back by the end of April. I held on to my job for another year and a half. I set my new room up and slept in it feeling brand new. The spring turned to summer and I felt colors again, blossoming, coming home to myself. Returning to my body. Going on dates. The world felt hesitant during those years, but I felt more ready. I was beginning again. Burning became part of my soundtrack again, almost cyclically, a summer anthem, blinding me with daylight. Aliveness.
I stayed in Rotterdam that summer, cycling through streets and taking time off to cook, tie-dye, write about returning home, waiting to fly across the world, the resilience I had to build to feel like I could survive.
The winter of 2020 found me happier. And relieved. It found me with my friends at three a.m. at someone's apartment, dancing and promising to myself that I knew the way out now if I ever felt blue again. 2021, January, my first close encounter with love. March, the heartbreak after it. Maggie's re-recordings, James playing in a loop, the sorrow and repetition of it comforting me. Guitar sounds. Black and white visuals. I found solace in how so much of the music then seemed to mirror my own actions; retracing, feeling, sitting with it. Another winter, another spring, another summer. Isolation that didn't feel so threatening. Waking up in the Fall, quitting my job. Using my savings to live for the next three months, figure out what would come next.
By the end of 2021 I was crying into a friend's arms at midnight, relieved the year was done. Feeling like I had been swimming for so long, waiting for a residence permit that would take another half year to arrive. Suspended in time. Yet by 2022, I was feeling the excitement of a new purpose, writing for myself, taking time to rest; becoming someone different, someone more certain of who she was. That's Where I Am came out that April. Maggie's first music video in a few years, set in New York City. She's waking up in the first frame, brushes her teeth, grabs a cup of coffee. Happy to be alive. A short haircut. The next frame bursts with movement. The city's dancing with her, alive. I felt the first rays of sunshine on my skin, walked to the beat through the street. There she was again, singing about hoping and loving and dreaming.
Just when I needed it, there she was. Her new album, slated for a release in late July. The summer was about to burst. The joy of new music, feeling brand new. It was all there! I was alive! I'd made it. A new summer, a new life. Reuniting with friends. Holding my mom after 3 years of waiting. Surrender was a testament to what can happen if you just let go. If you just trust. It felt like coming up for air after being underwater, rocked in my heels from the sound of drums, Maggie singing about sex and rage and melancholy. But mostly, about the right to feel joy. Feral joy. I couldn't have made something more beautiful if I tried.
And that's the thing about music, isn't it? You live it. It lives in you. It can build you and it can break you in the same second. In three minutes, you're born again.
I don't really understand the process of what happened during that summer in 2022, but I came out another person once more. I'd visited my mom in Florida, met my friend in Lisbon after seeing her last in New York City, taken a trip to Paris, took a swim in Monterosso al Mare. The world opened up again and swallowed me whole and I dug my nails deep into it. I hugged it with my life. I felt the Sun on my skin. I cried and danced and laughed. I saw Lorde live for the first time, after ten years of growing up with her music, that June. Cried when she played Ribs. And there I was again: back in my body. 25 years old. Someone free. Someone new.
Moving. Maybe that's all that needed to happen. Moving my physical body, hugging people I'd missed. Ferocious, feral, all-consuming joy. Understanding that the fabric of life is made up of intense, demanding joy as it is of piercing sadness. That often, they go hand in hand. I could not have one without the other. Feeling pride at the depths with which I could feel both. Understanding its silent power.
By the Fall I decided to try Amsterdam one more time. Flirted with the possibility of a second chance. Long-lost lovers who left each other scorned. Could it work? Moving in October. Finding a place that kept me warm. Feeling more sure of who I am. Flying back to my mom, flying back home to my dad. Thinking about how music mirrors our lives. How it saves us, every time. How it creates constellations of feelings, places, loves, people. Memory. How it is a communion, a gathering, how it feels divine.
Through it all, months get shorter and darker, the year comes to a close. Playing Anywhere With You in my earphones through long walks. Drowning in the sound in my room.
Maggie's voice climbing to a scream in the last thirty seconds, the chorus one more time.
Thank you for the last few years, for being part of my life.
I'll go anywhere with you, Anywhere with you, Anywhere with you, Anywhere with you.