Maggie Rogers’ Don’t Forget Me tour show at Chicago’s United Center on October 24th far superseded the expectations I had for it. Rogers has been my number-one artist for the past four years, and this was my third time seeing her. I go to see Maggie in concert specifically because of the difference in how her music lands when it is live. Her dancing and many diversions from the original arrangements of her music make her concerts an immersive and present experience—she creates a new moment with her audience throughout every song.
Maggie’s range on this tour was the largest I’ve seen it—from lighting up the audience with her heavily electronic and rock-oriented songs in the beginning to bringing out Mavis Staples for a duet, to her ballads at the piano, the Don’t Forget Me tour ranged a spectrum of emotions. In “That’s Where I am and Want Want,” from the album Surrender, Maggie and the love for her music filled the entire United Center with palpable energy and rhythm.
In incredible contrast, songs like “I Still Do” and even “Anywhere With You” honored a certain melancholic wholeness that is also harnessed in her music. To me, Surrender is her strongest album and reads on stage the best. It was showcased the least on this tour, but when she performs songs from Surrender, they truly represent a turning point in her life and her music that binds together her previous and sequential albums. Maggie’s music shows her incredible ability to regard her pain with gratitude for how it shaped her.
Her album Don’t Forget Me is all about the beauty within letting go and moving forward with the wisdom we take from people in our lives. The album is more stripped back than the more heavily produced and bodied music of Heard It in a Past Life and Surrender. This pulling back in Don’t Forget Me seems to represent her coming to terms with certain growing pains of moving into her 30s and leaving behind versions of herself that she still loves but feels limited by. This reads on stage as an incredible mix of passion, energy, angst, and joy through her performance. She is electric yet introspective, as is her music, and this tour honored all three of her albums and the full experience of traveling with her throughout the years. It was reflective of her past and insinuated her future, but the entire performance was deeply immersed in the present moment. Maggie is a star, full of heart and on fire.