In which we manage to not mention Sally Rooney…
[Video]
[7.36]
Hannah Jocelyn: Maggie Rogers makes the best Kacey Musgraves song we’re covering today. The production is weirdly underwhelming, especially compared to Surrender, but if it all sounds a bit bland, the nuts-and-bolts songwriting here is solid.
[7]
Julian Axelrod: I’ve always appreciated Maggie Rogers, despite never being a diehard fan. But every few years she comes out of nowhere and drops a song that knocks me on my ass. “Don’t Forget Me” knocked me on my ass. The last song of hers that had this effect on me, 2021’s non-album single “Love You for a Long Time,” was an ebullient ode to blind devotion that felt like the first peek over the horizon of a long forever. “Don’t Forget Me” comes at long-term partnership from the opposite direction. Our narrator watches her friends’ relationships stall out over time with a mixture of bafflement and isolation, yet she can’t help but yearn for the relative safety of an unreliable companion. “Take my money, wreck my Sundays” sounds like the vows of the worst couple you know, but it’s wrapped up in a sweeping hook that would make for an amazing first dance.
[8]
Nortey Dowuona: Maggie Rogers is a storyteller. This is her greatest strength. Telling stories is difficult, especially as lyrics; the easy thing is to tell the half-remembered sketches, the poorly thought-out experiments, the overly detailed ears on pancake faces. But telling a complete story is the mark of a great songwriter — a great writer in general. Maggie lights up your ears when the sound of “I’m still trying to clean up my side of the street slides past you, glittering with the slight glint of frustration at watching Sally find another anchor in the world, no longer there to watch the raccoons dig in the cans on her lawn. Later, she turns the knife with ‘She seems happy, but that’s not love to me, a reminder that the frustration is beginning to bubble over — is it worry for Molly, who might be abandoning herself to chase her guy wherever he goes, or the knowledge that she doesn’t have someone she could trust that much? It’s concrete in its weight yet feathery in its subtlety. Then she gently casts “and maybe I’m dead wrong, maybe I was bitter from the winter all along.” She’s willing to let go of being frustrated at Sally and Molly finding happiness and willing to try again, trying to recast it as her own bitterness about her thwarted chances of love, willing to thaw out and step forward into the breach. “Take my money, wreck my Sundays, love me till your next somebody, oh, but promise me that when it’s time to leave…don’t forget me.”
[10]
Ian Mathers: There’s something so compellingly bleak, intended or not, in “Give me something I can handle/A good lover or someone who’s nice to me.” Or? I’ve never smoked, but this makes me want to gaze moodily off into the middle distance with a cigarette in my hand.
[6]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: With every song she makes, Maggie Rogers is very self-consciously attempting to write herself into great-American-songwriterdom. The funny thing is that it works – the more effortful her efforts toward greatness are, the better she is. I wanted to be cynical about “Don’t Forget Me,” about the rootsy chug of its guitars and the grand sustains of the piano, but with every listen Rogers’ writing endeared me to it a little more. Where her earlier work trafficked almost entirely in the vague inspirational register of first-person heartbreak and growth narratives, here she shines her light more outwards, capturing her own social milieu with care and grace – in passing references to green eyes and weddings – and using those observations to self-examine in a mode that feels more honest than anything she’s done before. All that autofictional jazz wouldn’t be worth much if she didn’t also have a handle on songcraft, but she constructs an exceptionally sturdy folk-pop vehicle that initially struck me as rote before I noticed all of the well-wrought details in each individual part.
[9]
Jackie Powell: I saw Maggie Rogers perform “Don’t Forgive Me” live this past summer at Forest Hills. I liked the sound. It was quite Carole Kingian. But it’s not until now that I’ve realized that this is her “Yoü and I,” a deeply personal narrative that could become her most critically acclaimed and beloved song. Rogers, like Lady Gaga, writes about the sacrifices that her chosen life presents her with. She contemplates whether the sacrifices she’s made in not living like her friends Sally and Molly are actually worth it. In verse two when she’s discussing Molly’s life circumstances, there’s a line that could easily have been less insulting: “She seems happy, oh, but that’s not love to me.” Rogers could have replaced that with something like “She seems happy, oh, but that’s not the life for me,” but opted for something a bit more grating. I wonder why she made that choice. Maybe it’s because she wants to draw a contrast between settling and having low expectations. Rogers said herself that “Don’t Forget Me” is about having low expectations, and there’s a yearning in the hook for those low expectations to amount to something that’s worth remembering. That’s all she wants: relationships with people that live on even if they are over, and that aren’t just bygones.
[9]
Katherine St. Asaph: Listening to this, I was reminded of Jess Bergman’s excellent piece in The Baffler, “I’m Not Feeling Good at All,” about the subgenre (that increasingly feels like just the norm) of books about aimless millennial women who drift through half a lonely life like the protagonist of “Don’t Forget Me” does: “She has no friends or resents the one she has. Her boyfriend is distant. Perhaps he’s not even her boyfriend anymore, but still, she thinks of him often. She rarely eats. Absent what you might call drive, her life proceeds by rote…. With this literature of relentless detachment, we seem to have arrived at the inverse of what James Wood famously called ‘hysterical realism,’ describing a strain of fiction overflowing with eccentric characters and detail that, in its exaggerated vitality, depicts life as ‘fervid intensity of connectedness.’ What these novels constitute instead is a kind of denuded realism. Rather than an excess of intimacy, there is a lack; rather than overly ornamental character sketches, there are half-finished ones. Personality languishes, and desire has been almost completely erased—except, of course, the desire for nothing. … However individually stylish or inventive, taken together, the novels tend to replicate the sensations of apathy and tedium they seek to describe.” I don’t dislike this style of writing nearly as much as others seem to, and I don’t even dislike it in music necessarily — Bergman’s first paragraph describes the plot of ABBA’s unarguably classic “The Day Before You Came” so well I’m kind of amazed it was written about something else. But “Don’t Forget Me” sure does replicate tedium, despite being on the surface a more hopeful narrative. Maybe it wouldn’t if the arrangement was as un-smooth as Rogers’ voice is.
[5]
Joshua Lu: The instrumental is gorgeous, the lyricism is poignant, and the singing is so strained it plows through everything like an excavator through a rainforest. Maggie Rogers has a beautiful voice, and she does not have to fight for her life every time she wants to express an emotion. It makes her sound like she’s making music the universe does not want her to create.
[4]
Isabel Cole: It’s the hitch in her rich, steady voice on “nice”: “a good lover or someone who’s nice to me.” Such a meagre ask, the lowest of low bars — unless, of course, you’ve had cause to learn not to take it for granted. She sings it like it’s a dream so wild she can hardly bring herself to say it out loud, and it kills me every time.
[7]
Alfred Soto: Keeping Nilsson’s “Don’t Forget Me” (and Neko Case’s cover) in the rear mirror, Maggie Rogers writes her own summa. No regret but some pain. The piano and bass lock well enough for Rogers to let her voice crack on the strategically placed syllables. A adult song without arthritis.
[8]
Aaron Bergstrom: I’ve always been clear on what I don’t want. I thought navigating adulthood would require more active efforts to suppress jealousy, but it turns out that I spend way more emotional energy on listening to people brag about their lives, maintaining a polite smile while thinking “oh my god this all sounds miserable,” then walking away feeling equal parts superior and broken. Why don’t I want that? Shouldn’t I want that? What do I want? On “Don’t Forget Me,” Maggie Rogers centers her dislocation on idealized romantic relationships, but that feeling seeps into everything. We all know what the “right” answers are, what we’re supposed to want. Setting aside those one-size-fits-all dreams is an important first step, but it’s not enough. You have to replace them with something. Maggie knows what she wants: someone who will be nice to her, someone who will remember her fondly even if it doesn’t last forever, which it probably won’t. That’s such an honest self-appraisal. Molly and Sally would probably tell her to dream bigger, but these dreams are hers, and for that reason alone they’re better.
[8]