Maggie Rogers wrote the songs on do not forget me In chronological order, but the way they maneuver through time is strange and amazing. At some point, you are in the present, about to hit the open road; And then, a few songs later, Rogers remembers driving upstate, singing indie rock songs, RepeatsLiving. “When all the years start blending together / I watch them disappear in your eyes,” she sings on “The Kill,” and you can feel the same thing happening in these songs. Rogers moves easily from the present tense to the past, beginning sentences with it He remembers, then we let go because the image is so vivid: “The wind was in my hair / And you had that flush in your cheek,” he says on “If It Was Now Then,” evoking another song about being paralyzed by time. “When I'm on stage, or when I'm making something, I don't think about who I am or what I'm trying to do,” Rogers said in an interview. “Time gets really tense. It's spidery and slow.” Moves like this to listen to do not forget meHowever, it flies very fast as well. She's about to turn 30, but in these songs she's 18, 22, 28, years that flash before us.
Although it comes close to the upbeat, anthemic pop-rock structures that 2022 has embraced Give upRogers made her third album under different circumstances. It was written over five days, three in December 2022 and two the following January. None of the songs were complete when I entered the studio with Ian Fitchuk, whose most recent work includes the Kacey Musgraves song. A deeper well, which was also recorded at Electric Lady Studios. They were keen to capture Rogers' live performance on a recording, and when they tried to flesh out the songs, they didn't succeed in the same way, so most of the recordings on the album are raw takes. In some ways, this makes do not forget me Less ambitious than Give up Or 2019 I heard it in a past life, but it also looks more lively and organic. There are still soaring, wide-eyed songs befitting the album's road trip aesthetic, but they've been stripped of some of their earlier material, and the urgency of Rogers' performance is amplified, as is their demise. “Drunk” is thrilling for its depiction of a self-destructive spiral, but it quickly registers as just one moment in the unfolding story; She writes “I'm tired of dreaming” as if the narrator has just reached the point of exhaustion; Then, on “The Kill,” she steps away enough to sing, “Remember the days when we used to think / About what we'd do with our whole lives.”
As much as these songs are about memory, Rogers blurs the line between her songs and the girl she portrays in them, “a kind of Thelma and Louise character who was leaving home and leaving a relationship, and processing it out loud.” There's a carefree playfulness that comes with depicting these imagined scenarios, as heard on “Never Going Home” while driving, and it also has the effect of wrapping up a journey that might otherwise have been weak and incoherent. But Rogers avoids using the narrative device to distance herself from everything; If anything, it's liberating in ways that are difficult to achieve once you've made a name for yourself as a confessional songwriter. It's her friend we hear on the opener, “He's Been Coming Along,” leading to what sounds like an existential crisis, and she has emotion in every song — especially the ballads, which benefit from raw exposition.
“I Still Do” stands out for its uplifting confession of a love you can't let go of, and one feels that enough time has passed for that feeling to become irrational. But it makes sense in context do not forget me, a collection that frames love as perhaps our only chance at being remembered, and at making anything of the sort. In the end, Rogers reminds us that this is all we have. But it doesn't have to be big and exciting. It can be as simple as “a good lover or someone who's nice to me,” she sings in the closing theme song. It would be inappropriate for the climate if the desire in the song was for love itself rather than for any of it to mean something, but that's the longing that comes through, and it's soft. “And so it goes on / Time moves slowly / Until one day you wake up and realize / That what you see is what you know,” Rogers sings on “All The Same,” the gentleness in her voice a hint of hindsight. Time bends too, listen to it do not forget meIt can stir up feelings you never knew existed, as magic hides in plain sight.
