Maggie Rogers' Split Stones: A 'Parting Gift' to Fans

After nine months of touring across North America and Europe, Maryland singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers is ready to close the chapter on her well-received five-song debut EP Now That the Light Is Fading (2016) - largely inspired by her final year experience at the NYU Clive Davis Institute - and (presumably) begin working on her debut LP. Meanwhile, newfound fans of her refreshing blend of folk, pop and electronic music across the world can delight in her ‘parting gift’. She recently shared a new song titled “Split Stones”, which marks “the end of the beginning and the start of everything else.”

The song’s initial premier via a North Face collaboration (“All you have to do is get moving and stay moving to unlock the layers of Maggie's song and her exclusive movement playlist on Spotify”) points towards her relatively unusual reliance on the great outdoors for musical inspiration. Like her breakout hit “Alaska”, Rogers uses sound samples (loops of her exhaled breaths) from an outdoor trip to counterpose the electronic with the organic. Her voice is as crystal-clear and melodic as before, energized by a greater sense of urgency than before: ‘If you could say all the things you wanted to/ If you couldn’t lie/ If you would only move like you had something to lose’.

The loud and galvanizing chorus is as carpe diem as it gets, but Rogers has always looked towards the future with a clear memory of the failures, disappointments, and missed opportunities of the past. There is a meta first verse about making music, as well as vague details (Rogers manages to establish intimacy without being fully confessional) that suggest a break-up, or a divergence of paths, in the song’s verses and bridge: ‘And I can see us there/ You staring at me/ And me just praying for air’. Once again, there’s that arresting juxtaposition of introspection and life-seizing action.