Ten years of "Alaska": Maggie Rogers on going viral and singing for 200,000 protestors

Ten years ago, Maggie Rogers was a senior at NYU, scrambling to finish a song for a music production class she was close to failing. The guest critic that week happened to be Pharrell Williams. She played him "Alaska," a track she'd written in about fifteen minutes. It is a bit of folk songwriting crossed with the electronic music she'd fallen for studying abroad. Pharrell told her he'd never heard anything that sounded like it. Someone was filming. The clip went viral, and it launched Maggie into pop stardom. 

Ten years later, she's released three studio albums, earned a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, and gone back to school to pick up a master's from Harvard Divinity School, where she studied the spirituality of public gatherings. And in the last few months she's been as visible offstage as on — advocating for free speech in DC, performing for 200,000 people at a protest in Minneapolis alongside Joan Baez, and delivering a haunting performance during the final run of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which CBS is ending in May.

This week host Charlie Harding got to sit down with Maggie live at Chelsea Studios, in front of a room of current NYU students. It’s the same school, ten years later, now with Charlie in the professor's chair and Maggie as the visiting artist.

SONGS DISCUSSED

• Maggie Rogers "Alaska"
• Maggie Rogers "Better"
• Maggie Rogers "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" (cover of Fred Astaire original)
• Maggie Rogers "Different Kind of World"
• Marvin Gaye "What's Going On"
• Bob Dylan "The Times They Are a-Changin'"
• USA for Africa "We Are the World"

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