Maggie Rogers’ “Don’t Forget Me” Begins at The End

In her new single, the first for her next album, Maggie Rogers reflects on the ways love comes in exchanges — sometimes painful, but perhaps more worth it for that reason. Tonally more country and more playful than previous projects, “Don’t Forget Me” comes with Rogers’ signature vocal charms and a friendly embrace of lyrics. 

In a letter on the album — for which “Don’t Forget Me” is the title track — Rogers says it was written chronologically over the course of just five days. This first single is ironically, but certainly intentionally, the last song on the album. With this release, we as listeners are beginning at the end.

The life that the song exists in is clear from the first line: friends are getting married, settling into relationships, but the narrator can’t picture this stage yet. She’s still learning to speak with intention, find her place in her own life, and conceding time to following a partner around to parties isn’t her idea of love, even though it seems to make others content.

But Rogers reveals what she can picture now: “a good lover or someone who’s nice to me.” For a line that may feel depressing and too small, with Rogers it feels like enough. And when she laments, “Love me 'til your next somebody / Oh, but promise me that whеn it's time to leave / Don't forgеt me,” it actually comes with an air of true ease. 

“Don’t Forget Me” could easily feel like an introduction to an album that will be full of sadness, knowing it will end with a plea to not be forgotten by someone knowingly temporary. Chorus lyrics “Take my money / Wreck my sundays” are the kind of bargain many singers couldn’t make and have it still feel hopeful — but with Rogers, it’s all in context.

Sonically, the single sits somewhere between a country ballad — the kind you’d find in a small town bar — and Rogers’ reliable indie-pop-folk blend. True to her envisioning of an Americana, worn in, Sunday landscape, the piano foundation follows vocals up in energy on a second, heartier chorus and a bridge that looks forward. 

Singing, “And maybe I'm dead wrong / Maybe I was bitter from the winter all along / Maybe there's a stranger standing, holding out for love / Just waiting on the next street,” we get the final admission that there is a bit of cynicism at play. But it’s exactly this willingness to admit that makes her bid not to be forgotten genuine, rather than self-imposing. 

She writes for Capitol Records, “I think remembering someone can be the greatest form of loving because when we remember, the love lives on. When I'm standing at the end of my life, I hope a lifetime of accumulated love is what I'm left with.”

Being remembered by friends and lovers, remembering them in return, is the peace at the end of the album instead of chagrin. And knowing that Rogers for the first time says she’s opened into a character space outside the autobiographical, makes the truth of the song even more freeing. It doesn’t have to be exactly from her own life to know this release of catching up is as honest as it gets.