When I think of my absolute favorite singer-songwriters, I realize that I gravitate towards abstract lyrics. These lyrics are not especially literal or clear in a traditional sense. Stevie Nicks is a master of this. Examples from Nicks’ work include: “The stillness of what you had / And what you lost” (“Dreams”) and “She chases beneath the moon / Her horse is like a dragonfly / She is just a fool” (“The Highwayman”).
Lyrics like these invite listeners to do some detective work. What could Patti Smith possibly mean by “Night of wonder for us to keep / Set our sails, channel the deep” in her song “Frederick” from 1979? When listeners are pulled into the mystery of the lyrics, we can tether our own meaning to the phrases. Whether what we come up with was the songwriter’s intent or not doesn’t matter so much — it’s the bespoke result of the process that is wondrous. When a roomful of people hears these lyrics, there can be a roomful of completely different interpretations.
I found this quality in several tracks on Maggie Rogers’ 2017 EP, “Now That The Light Is Fading”, and on her first album, “Heard It In A Past Life,” which came out in 2019. These two works are meaningful to me, and I’ve loved marinating in their incredible, conceptual, lyrics over the past five years.
Then, late last month, “Surrender” came along. Rogers’ second album marks a change in the artist’s songwriting, a significant shift towards much more literal, concrete lyrics.
For instance, in Rogers’ “Dog Years”, from 2017, she sings “I count my time in dog years / Swimming in sevens / Slow dancing in seconds”. In “Alaska”, also from 2017, “And I walked off you / And I walked off an old me.”
On the other hand, throughout “Surrender,” Rogers uses lyrics like “You work all day to find religion / And end up standing in your kitchen” (“Begging for Rain”), “Walked in straight away and slammed the door last night/ I caught you on the couch, you were having a fright” (“Anywhere with you”), and “We could listen to Britney, overload the speakers” (“Be Cool”). These paint more specific pictures in listeners’ heads. There is not nearly as much space for interpretation.
This consequential shift was what I thought about the most with “Surrender” — an elephant in the proverbial room, listening to the album with me. That being said, there are a few tracks on “Surrender” that feel more like a middle ground, between Rogers’ previous work and this album. “That’s Where I Am”, “Want Want”, and “Horses” are my favorite tracks (and the three singles off the album). They feel much less manufactured, less like they’re trying to make you think about anything, and more like songs you can just effortlessly listen to and have fun with.
In Rogers’ other work, the instrumentals feel decidedly tiered behind the vocals — they are running along separate, though complementary tracks, to tell the story of the songs. On “Surrender,” they interact much more. Different instruments ebb in and out to accent certain lines. In “Anywhere with You,” the drums come in heavily at the line “when I found you,” for instance. Across the album, the instruments are working in overt synchronicity with the words.
“That’s Where I Am”, which came out in early April, served as a booming start to the “Surrender” advent. The music video, released simultaneously, is transfixing. We see Rogers strut around New York City, seldom breaking eye contact. David Byrne (frontman of Talking Heads) and a flock of Catholic nuns make appearances — what more could one want?
“Want Want” is a song you’ll want to experience in a jam-packed space so loud it doesn’t even matter that you’re screaming the lyrics. “Horses” is a different kind of beauty altogether; Rogers, sounding near-desperate, pleads for an unbridled life.
The first two singles are resounding in their electropop, synthpop style — with booming drums and synthesizers alongside powerful singing. These are big songs; they could fill stadiums and hopefully will. “Horses” is just about the opposite, with Rogers’ unembellished vocals just backed by guitar.
It’s a whole new era for Rogers, and it is exciting without a doubt. “Surrender” is an album where listeners can understand her songs in a different way than before. Instead of being broadly applicable in their ambiguity, these songs are vivid in the experiences they so precisely convey. The feelings this album may induce range all the way from mental-breaking-point to wild-Friday-night-fourth-bar-you’ve-been-todanceparty. Regardless of how each of us reaches these varied emotional turning points, we can relate to the minutiae of those crowning moments. It’s difficult to find someone better than Maggie Rogers at describing that phenomenon — intimate although universal.
