Bad Religion: Maggie Rogers and the Joy of Surrendering
Maggie Rogers creates a pseudo-religious experience for listeners through her most recent album, Surrender, twisting the negative connotation of surrendering yourself to an unknown force into an emotional release.
Bad Religion explores the relationship between music and spirituality, from Christianity and Islam to the paranormal and the occult.
Written by Rachel Joy Thomas
Photo courtesy of Kelly Jeffrey
In 2020, Maggie Rogers wrote a college thesis that undeniably linked to her music career. Titled "Surrender: Cultural Consciousness, the Spirituality of Public Gatherings, and Ethics of Power in Pop Culture," the thesis came with an interesting final project: a performance of her 2nd album, Surrender. Her Coachella performance was her final project for her master’s degree in Religion and Public Life. When defining how music leads to the same collaboration as organized religion, Rogers identified music as its own form of spiritual practice. In a world where more and more people stray from religion due to its negative connotations, Rogers found herself in — what seemed like — a ministerial position due to her profession. Realizing this, she wanted to explore the nuances between community building and religion.
Rogers had previously blown up after a Masterclass video with Pharell Williams went viral. Playing the song for him, Williams was enraptured, saying “You’re doing your own thing. It’s singular.” Her silvery song "Alaska" was an instant hit and circled social media throughout 2017. However, after she released her 2019 debut album, Heard It In A Past Life, Rogers was quieter on social media, only releasing a few covers and live recordings here and there.
In an interview with Audacy, Rogers said her partial hiatus was due in part to the Covid-19 pandemic, which left her "doing nothing" for four months. Secluded at her parent's house in Maine, the scholar started establishing the themes and religious undertones for Surrender. She told Vanity Fair that she made a mind map of the record, creating a defined color palette of black, brown, and green. After this, she envisioned the record's tone as visceral, intense, and releasing. Then, she developed hundreds of songs that she ruthlessly cut down to 12, some of which she recorded in her parents garage.
As Covid waned in 2021, Rogers started her next venture at Harvard Divinity School. When a fan on Twitter asked where Rogers had gone during this period, she responded, "Lol i'm in grad school," with a photo of her Harvard ID. She continued working on Surrender while she built her community, attending public gatherings and taking classes on topics like modern psychedelic spiritualities, Buddhism, and abstract art. In what would eventually become a large part of her thesis, Rogers learned about music's impact on spirituality — specifically within pop culture. As she got close to finishing her master's program, she released the unchained, potent Surrender.
Despite its spiritual undertones, the explicit album isn't what people would traditionally deem as religious. The album leaves out the inherently negative connotation of religion: the idea that surrendering implies a blind submission to a powerful, punishing god. It's filled with gritty, raw vocals, loud expressions of desire, and intense emotions. Rogers told ABC’s triplej that the album was like "feral joy," a release of unkempt emotions and utterly devout feelings.
Photo courtesy of Maggie Rogers
Surrender is religious because it expresses a sheer explosion of emotion with electro-pop and rock riffs, similar to the strong feelings that come with believing in a higher power. Rogers defines her own higher power on tracks with grit, creating a landscape of emotion that evokes community building that religion creates using the sounds of fuzzy guitars along with superb production."I feel super religious, if music is a religion," she said to the New York Times: "When I'm in the crowd of fans or onstage, I felt the most connected to something greater than myself."
Regarding people's negative feelings towards religion, Rogers stated in her Harvard graduate announcement that "The work of the [Harvard Divinity School] community requires deep emotional engagement. It looks like a rapidly changing world experiencing immense pain, suffering, and injustice. It asks how to best be an agent for peace." She also cited a Pew Research Center statistic that mentioned a large reduction of people investing in spirituality since 2007. As people move away from typical religious experiences, religion has to be defined not only by its spiritual presence but by its feeling and positive impact on people’s lives.
People always seek something bigger than themselves, and music brings together a group of like-minded individuals to experience something higher than themselves. A religious experience doesn’t have to be based on the uniform idea of finding a God. Rather, it can be an intentional exploration of emotion within oneself that Rogers captures by exploring themes that are inherently not religious on tracks like “Horses” . Rogers sings in loud, breathy tones alongside an acoustic guitar. A pattering drum beat follows her powerful transition to the chorus alongside a string accompaniment. A twangy, ambient track plays beneath a bellowing refrain in which she vocalizes the desperation of trying to believe in another person who refuses to enter her life. She compares her hopelessly by gauging someone’s engagement, describing horses running in the wind and the crack of thunder, representing the freedom that Rogers is seeking with that other person. As she urges them, she sings, “I believe / in you / but the truth / about dreams / is there a feeling that meets you in between?”
“Shatter” exemplifies Roger's philosophy of "joy as a rebellion." A powerful buildup of raspy vocals accompanies the punchy electro-pop sound. The song continues to build as Rogers almost-breathlessly sings, "Again / Again / Again." There’s a climb in the song’s percussion that cuts straight into a 2-clap percussive beat right back into the vibrant, blasting sound. The fuzzy guitar gives the song an ‘80s quality that forms an attractive, danceable groove. It plays like the soundtrack for a story's main character as they dance in the kitchen across the living room. It's bright, stunning, and addicting, like most of the tracks on the album.
The Maryland-born singer takes a different approach on “Symphony.” With long, breathy notes, Rogers softly sings, "Can you live like nothing's left? / Forget your emptiness / Take a breath." This penultimate track feels like the building of a community as the world crumbles away, which is a common thread throughout the album.
Rather than defining itself by a specific religious experience, Surrender captures the ubiquitous feeling of community that comes from a religious connection. In an interview with Vulture, Rogers expanded on this sentiment. "I was thinking about this world in which people are moving further and further away from traditional religion, but yet are seeking to be connected to something bigger than oneself and to each other," she explained about her thesis. In the aforementioned Vanity Fair interview, Rogers said she doesn’t want to be seen as pastoral — her work doesn’t exist to guide people toward a religious awakening. She is not a shepherd bringing people into religion, and her music isn’t a form of higher power. Rather, she studied religion to study how people unite.
Music is a big part of modern religious services, usually preceding the discussion of scripture. It’s the connecting device to gather a congregation. Surrender evokes a different, empowering energy than anything traditionally religious, but in that way, she creates an entirely new structure for rapture. Rapture, to Rogers, is coming together for the joy of experience. Rogers’ honest Surrender of emotion on her album exceeds the limits of religion in regards to the overarching theme of community-building while also remaining ambiguous enough to still apply to the pious.