Maggie Rogers Concert Review: Boston Won’t Forget Her
With a thousand fans surrounding her and her voice cartwheeling over every song she sang, Rogers’s performance was nothing short of ethereal.Approximately 5 a.m. on Tuesday morning is when the concert really started.
Maggie Rogers announced her pop-up show at Boston’s Paradise Rock Club only five days earlier, with a stipulation that ticket sales would begin at 9 a.m. the day of the concert. That’s how Boston’s hopeful concertgoers ended up in line at the box office as early as 5 a.m. on April 16 to secure their spot at the 933-person-capacity venue.
Rogers took to the stage, accompanied by screams of euphoria, as the first few chords of “It Was Coming All Along,” the opening track to her new album, “Don’t Forget Me,” rang out. The album was released on April 12, just four days before the concert, yet the Paradise Rock Club was filled with a chorus of people singing along to every word Rogers sang.
As the show was officially in support of the new LP, Rogers eventually played through the entire album in order, with fast highlights like “Drunk” distilling an emphatic energy from her and her band. As Rogers danced around the stage, singing, “I’m drunk, but not drinking,” the culmination of frenzied stage lights, churning guitars, and lucid movement precisely embodied the song’s panicked tone.
Halfway through the album, Rogers took a break from it and began taking audience requests. Although she insisted that she and her band could not guarantee they knew all of her discography, they never failed the audience once, successfully pulling out songs as old as “Dog Years,” which Rogers released in 2016 — even before her debut album. Rogers’s playful, empathetic approach to crowd work in moments such as these song requests created a friendly energy that permeated the Paradise Rock Club — one that had started that morning when Rogers walked down the ticket line to say hello to starstruck fans.
Later in the set, Rogers traded more song requests in exchange for gossip from the fans, which was told to her and then subsequently passed around the rest of the audience in a large group game of telephone, often to hilarious effect. Rogers laughed along with the stories she was told of various breakups and get-togethers in a well-timed break from the music that made her seem like a down-to-earth, genuine person, rather than just a performer onstage.
Easily the best moment of the show was Rogers’s performance of “Alaska.” A 2016 single, “Alaska” is Rogers’s most popular song, and the one that catapulted her to fame when a video showing Pharrell’s incredulous reaction to it went viral. In a deviation from its recorded version, however, Rogers promised to play the song acoustic for the first time on the tour.
As she shushed the crowd to silence, Rogers prefaced the song with an emotional monologue about how the song has grown new meanings to her.
“You write songs about one moment in your life,” Rogers said. “The moment passes, and people move on.”
And yet Alaska still has continued relevance to her. As she stood alone on stage, acoustic guitar in hand and spotlights trained upon her, Rogers began, soft and lilting, with the opening lyrics.
“I was walking through icy streams,” she sang, “that took my breath away.”
Her expression was magical, with the slow strumming filling the room with low, soft tones rounded out by her grounded yet airy voice. As she progressed to the second half of “Alaska,” Rogers jumped up an octave and stayed there, unwavering in her quiet commitment to some of the highest notes of the concert.
After Rogers flipped and dove across the softer half of her higher register to finish off “Alaska,” her band returned on stage, and the concert resumed as before. “Shatter” was incredibly high-energy, with the band dancing all around the stage, as was her encore of “Don’t Forget Me,” the last track from the eponymous album.
While Rogers is set to return to Boston in October, nothing will quite match her performance at the Paradise Rock Club on Tuesday. With a thousand fans surrounding her, having bought tickets early that morning, and her voice cartwheeling over every song she sang, Rogers’s performance was nothing short of ethereal.
—Staff writer Alessandro M. M. Drake can be reached at alessandro.drake@thecrimson.com.