Maggie Rogers announces her third studio album, Don’t Forget Me

“I wanted to make an album that sounded like a Sunday afternoon,” explains Rogers in a letter, which tells the story of the making of Don’t Forget Me. “Worn in denim. A drive in your favorite car. No make up, but the right amount of lipstick. Something classic. The mohair throw and bottle of Whiskey in Joan Didion’s motel room. An old corvette. Vintage, but not overly Americana. I wanted to make an album to belt at full volume alone in your car, a trusted friend who could ride shotgun and be there when you needed her.”

Maggie Rogers co-produced Don’t Forget Me with Ian Fitchuk (Kacey Musgraves, Maren Morris) at Electric Lady Studios in New York City, writing eight of its ten songs with him and penning two alone. Earlier this year, she announced Heard It In A Past Life: 5 Year Anniversary Exclusive Deluxe LP, to celebrate five years of her debut album. During some of the listening sessions, she previewed unreleased music.

Explaining that most of the recordings on the album are first takes, as they were originally meant to be "collection of demos to be re-recorded with a band", Maggie Rogers revealed that there was a kind of magic to the speed in which Don't Forget Me, took shape – written over five days, two songs a day — three days in December 2022, two in January 2023. It was written in chronological order.

"Some of the 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. I started to picture a girl on a roadtrip through the American south and west. A sort of younger Thelma & Louise character who was leaving home and leaving a relationship, processing out loud, finding solace in her friends and in the promise of a new city and new landscape," she explains.

"I tried to capture her life with the intimacy of Linda McCartney’s photographs, spontaneous and open and free. She’s starting over, turning the page on a new chapter in her life. Some of the stories and details in the songs are from friends or from the news. Some I just completely made up, or rather, sort of flew out of me. Pen to paper. Fully formed. There they were. I think in this way, some of the deepest truths about my present were able to come forward. I wasn’t looking for them or digging them up, harvesting their stories before they had the chance to become fully grown. The truths about my life came from my deepest intuition. Things I wasn’t ready to say out loud to myself, but they found a place in the music".

Tracklist:

Side A

1. It Was Coming All Along
2. Drunk
3. So Sick of Dreaming
4. The Kill
5. If Now Was Then

Side B

1. I Still Do
2. On & On & On
3. Never Going Home
4. All The Same
5. Don't Forget Me