Background and career
Margaret Debay Rogers (born April 25, 1994) is an American singer-songwriter and record producer from Easton, Maryland. She received widespread recognition after her song "Alaska" was played to artist-in-residence Pharrell Williams during a master class at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts in Manhattan in 2016. She has released two independent albums, The Echo (2012) and Blood Ballet (2014), and three studio albums, Heard It in a Past Life (2019), Surrender (2022), and Don't Forget Me (2024). She was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 2020.
Maggie Rogers grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland along the banks of the Miles River in Easton, Maryland. Her father is a retired Ford Motor Company dealership owner and her mother, a former nurse, is an end-of-life doula. Neither of her parents are musical. She began playing harp at age seven and loved the music of Gustav Holst and Antonio Vivaldi. Her mother often played music by neo-soul artists including Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill. By the time she was in middle school, she had added piano and guitar to her repertoire and began writing songs in eighth grade. She attended Worcester Preparatory School, followed by The Gunston School, a high school in Centreville, Maryland before going to St. Andrew's School, a boarding school in Middletown, Delaware, from which she graduated. At school, she played harp in the orchestra, sang in the choir, joined a jazz band, learned banjo, and became interested in folk music. She also taught herself how to program and create music. Many of the first concerts she went to were at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, including Mumford & Sons and the Black Eyed Peas. She went to a rural camp which had no electricity in Maine for many summers. The summer after her junior year in high school, Rogers attended a Berklee College of Music program and won the program's songwriting contest, which spurred her to focus on songwriting. During her high school senior year, she made her television debut at DelmarvaLife and recorded music for what became her first album, The Echo (2012). She included her demos as part of her application to the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, was accepted there and enrolled in 2012. She and her friend often dj'ed at her favorite bar, Enid's in Greenpoint.
At NYU, Rogers considered a career in music journalism, and in her first year, Rogers interned for music journalist Lizzy Goodman for whom she transcribed and edited hundreds of hours of interviews with major musicians and journalists. They were compiled into Goodman's 2017 book Meet Me in the Bathroom. Rogers formed a band called Del Water Gap with singer-songwriter S. Holden Jaffe. They later split so that each could explore more solo work. Their song "New Song" appears on Notes from the Archive: Recordings 2011–2016 (2020). Rogers released another folk album, Blood Ballet (2014) during her second year at the school. Folk blog EarToTheGround Music said that the album "begs for listeners to confront deep personal emotions." Buzzkill Magazine felt that Rogers "really starts to find her folksy feet" with "Little Joys" from Blood Ballet. She studied abroad in France while at NYU and after friends convinced her to go clubbing while they were in Berlin, she discovered an affinity for dance music. When she returned home, she began distilling elements of dance music into her work. In 2016, after experiencing two years of writer's block, Rogers wrote "Alaska", a song she wrote in fifteen minutes about a National Outdoor Leadership School course. She played the song for Pharrell Williams, an artist-in-residence who visited her class to critique student work. Williams said of the song: "I've never heard anything that sounds like that." A video of a visibly moved Williams listening to the song went viral that June, resulting in millions of views as well as hundreds of thousands of plays of The Echo and Blood Ballet. Rogers graduated from New York University's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music in May 2016 with a degree in music engineering and production and English.
In September 2021, Rogers tweeted that she had started graduate school at Harvard Divinity School, where she was "studying the spirituality of public gatherings and the ethics of power in pop culture" and to learn "how to keep art sacred". She graduated in May 2022 with a master's degree in religion and public life, writing a thesis which "examined cultural consciousness, the spirituality of public gathering and the ethics of pop power". Her 2022 studio album, Surrender, was a component of the thesis. From December 1, 2023, through May 31, 2024, Rogers was a Religion and Public Life Fellow at Harvard Divinity School. During that time she researched and wrote for work for her MRPL degree which explored the relationships of religion, spirituality, and pop culture from her vantage point as a performing artist.
After the Pharrell video went viral in 2016, several record labels tried to sign Rogers. She signed a recording contract with Capitol Records on the same day she signed a lease for a Greenpoint, Brooklyn studio apartment. "She licenses her music to them through her own imprint, Debay Sounds." As a result, she has more control over her sound and image than many artists at a similar place in their music careers. Rogers' EP, Now That the Light Is Fading, was released on February 17, 2017. She released her major-label debut studio album, Heard It in a Past Life, on January 18, 2019. The album debuted at No. 2 on the US Billboard 200. Rogers made her The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon debut on February 15, 2017, Saturday Night Live debut on November 3, 2018, and Today Show debut on July 12, 2019. In April 2019, Rogers covered the Taylor Swift song "Tim McGraw" as a Spotify Single. On November 1, 2019, she guested with Dead & Company, a rock band consisting of former Grateful Dead members, performing cover versions of the latter's "Friend of the Devil" and the Band's "The Weight" at Madison Square Garden in Midtown Manhattan. Also in November 2019, Rogers earned a nomination for Best New Artist at the 62nd Grammy Awards. Rogers performed during the 2020 Democratic National Convention, appearing remotely from Scarborough, Maine due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. She was introduced by the speaker of the Maine House of Representatives and Sara Gideon, a 2020 U.S. Senate candidate from Maine. On November 13, 2020, Rogers collaborated with Phoebe Bridgers on a cover version of the Goo Goo Dolls' 1998 single "Iris", which Bridgers said she would make if Donald Trump lost the 2020 United States elections. The song was released as a one-day exclusive on Bandcamp and was downloaded 28,000 times at a pay what you want cost, with all proceeds going to Fair Fight Action. Despite only being available for purchase for one day, the song debuted at number one on the Digital Songs chart and No. 57 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it both artists' first entry on the latter chart. The song also charted in Australia, New Zealand, and Scotland. On December 18, 2020, Rogers released Notes from the Archive: Recordings 2011–2016 via her label Debay Sounds. The album is a compilation of songs she wrote and recorded in the previous ten years of her recording career. Some of the songs are from her first two independently released albums: The Echo (2012) and Blood Ballet (2014). Other songs are from her previously unreleased 2016 rock EP and a band she was previously in with Holden Jaffe, Del Water Gap. The album was released along with a deluxe version in which Rogers provides an auditory commentary talking through each stage of her music career that the songs in that section reflect. Her second studio album, Surrender, was released on July 29, 2022. It includes the singles "That's Where I Am", "Want Want", and "Horses". The track "Shatter" features Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine providing additional vocals and playing tambourine, and "I've Got a Friend" features Clairo and Claud speaking. On January 27, 2023, Rogers collaborated with country star Zach Bryan on the single “Dawns”. The single peaked at 42 on the Billboard Hot 100. On June 24, 2023, Rogers played Glastonbury Festival, in Somerset, UK. On August 5, 2023, Rogers played at Lollapalooza, in Chicago, Illinois. On January 24, 2024, Rogers announced the February 8, 2024, release of "Don't Forget Me" as the first single of her third album. On April 12, 2024, Rogers released her third album, Don't Forget Me. The album was written over five days in December 2022 and January 2023. Rogers said of the album, "Some of these stories on this album are mine. And for the first time really, some of them are not. The moments that are mine feel like memories—glimpses from college, details from when I was 18, 22, 28 (I'm 29 now). In writing the album sequentially, at some point a character emerged." On October 8, 2024, Rogers released the standalone single "In the Living Room". On April 24, 2025, Rogers and Sylvan Esso released a cover of Broken Social Scene's "Anthems For a Seventeen Year-Old Girl" as the lead single for a cover album to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the band's album You Forgot It in People. On May 16, 2025, Rogers returned to Tisch School for the Arts, where she attended and graduated in 2016, to deliver the commencement address to the class of 2025. She told the graduates, "The thing about being an artist is that it's not a profession, it's a vocation. It's not something you do, or sign up for, it's who you are." Rogers provided backing vocals for the song "Mind" on the Dalai Lama's album Meditation: Reflections Of His Holiness The Dalai Lama, which was released August 29, 2025. The work won Best Audio Book, Narration & Storytelling Recording at the 68th Annual Grammy Awards.
Rogers cites Carrie Brownstein, Patti Smith, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, and Björk as her musical inspirations, while prominent singers Brandi Carlile and Sharon Van Etten — whom she calls her "musical big sisters" — have become mentors.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
