Testo Part I – Rock Ep: 2016 (Commentary)

So, the first four songs that's you're gonna hear are from quote unquote "The Rock EP" which are a series of songs that I made in 2016 right when I was graduating from college in my last semester. I was working of two different projects. One was an EP that would become my EP that came out in January of 2017 called Now That the Light Is Fading that had "Alaska" on it, and that was me really experimenting and thinking about electronic music. And at the same time I was playing guitar in a band. [laughs] The band was called Maggie Rogers because I was terrified of coming up with a band name, um, but I was really interested in playing guitar-based music and, I think, trying to find a way to have fun with music and maybe not take it so seriously. I was really starting to get interested in the live experience. And when I say "not take it so seriously" what I mean is that music has always been this steady, sturdy autobiographical process for me. So, I was looking for a way to just let it be light

I was living on 12th Street between A and B in the East Village in a five floor walk-up with a little cat named Cat Stevens and my best friend, Mary Whites who was my classmate and still a songwriter, and I was playing shows at really classic downtown venues like Pianos or Baby's Alright in Brooklyn, and I was having so much fun playing these songs. I remember how good it felt to play guitar on stage. I would wear my, like, black boots, my white jeans. I had this denim shirt, I had this black baseball cap I was wearing all the time

You know, I got my first taste of what it felt like to be in a band in 2013, 2012 when I moved to New York City, but it had been awhile since I had really been able to experience that, and so much of this EP and these four songs was really me stepping up to the plate for the first time as a bandleader, as a producer, as a songwriter. I think it was the first sort of notion of what was to come

All these songs I wrote alone except for "Celadon & Gold" which I wrote with my friend Nick Das. You might recognize his name. He was a co-writer on "On + Off," um, and I heard him just, like, playing this guitar riff one day, and I asked him if I could write a song to the chords he was playing and that he would show me what he was playing. But the rest of them are sort of just me sitting in my bedroom thinking about my life
At the time I had been dating someone for the past couple years who I was really in love with and we were starting to think of breaking up after college and what our life would look like if he would move to LA, if I would because that was sort of the migration that a lot of our friends were taking. You can hear that on "Together" and "Celadon & Gold."

Um, I was processing grief. I had a friend die early in college, my, like, first love really and was sort of just coming around to being able to process what that meant in my life, and you hear that on "One More Afternoon."

And in "Steady Now," you know, the period directly preceding this I had had a really long period of writer's block and a lot of it had to do with developing. I was changing faster than I could keep up with, and I didn't know what I wanted my music to sound like, maybe, which is also evident in the difference between this EP and Now That the Light Is Fading. I mean, they're completely different bodies of music, and "Steady Now" is the first song I wrote as I was re-entering this phase of making things, and it's really just about starting to find my footing as a musician and as an artist again. I was just really interested in this version of music that was a little bit darker and had a little bit more teeth. I mean, in "Steady Now" especially you can hear me sort of just start to understand my vocal range and just sort of opening my mouth and yelling into a guitar for the first time and it felt awesome

This EP was recorded pretty much in one day. I'm playing guitar. You've got Nick Das on guitar. Harry Terrell on drums and Dan Hemerlein on bass. This record was recorded as Oscilloscope Studios in downtown New York which at the time was the Beastie Boys' studio that NYU had rented out for senior production students to use which was sick. [Chuckles] I produced them, and we recorded this entire EP live on the floor. I overdubbed vocals afterwards and a friend of mine mixed it. There four songs have never been released before, never been heard. They've just been sitting in a Dropbox and actually I almost tried to put them out right as I was graduating before "Alaska" came out. [Laughs]

At the time, I was just becoming friends with Sharon Van Etten and she had heard these songs, and I, I said to her, "Sharon, I'm thinking of maybe putting out this record. Just like putting it on Bandcamp or something."

And she was like, "Don't do that."

I was like, "Why?" [Laughs]

She said, "If you love these songs give them a chance to live in the world in full form," and so I held on to them and I'm so happy that they are finally out in the world