Maggie Rogers’s Journey from Viral Fame to Religious Studies

“Alaska” is a brittle meditation on interpersonal dissonance. “You and I, there’s air in between,” Rogers sings on the chorus. That tension is deftly mirrored in the song’s sound. There’s something earthy about Rogers’s presence (she was brought up in rural Maryland, and played the harp and the banjo as a teen-ager), yet the song’s production is spectral, icy, electronic. Rogers told me that she wrote “Alaska” in five minutes, which is how she often works: urgently and with deep focus, as though she were channelling a faint signal.