On March 1st, 2023, I had the joy of seeing Maggie Rogers live at the Shrine Auditorium Los Angeles. Maggie Rogers is someone I’ve been aware of for a long time, but I never fully got into her music until the release of her album Surrender in 2022. I was familiar with a couple of singles from her debut album, Heard It in a Past Life, such as “Alaska,” “On + Off,” and “Light On,” her most notable songs. She was one of those artists I knew I needed to get into, and when the second single off Surrender came out, I was finally hooked.
Maggie Rogers went to New York University and got a BFA in Music Engineering and Production and a BA in English (shoutout to fellow English majors), and then went on to Harvard
to get her master's in religion and public life. Surrender is a part of her thesis, which “examined cultural consciousness, the spirituality of public gathering and the
ethics of pop power,” according to Rogers. Her education is reflected in her powerful
songwriting, and I aspire to someday write something as moving as “Begging for Rain”. The song reached right into the depths of my brain and described feelings I’d spent ages trying to explain.
The tour is certainly called “The Feral Joy Tour” for a reason; I was ecstatic for this show. My friend and I got to the Shrine Auditorium roughly half an hour before the opener went on and enjoyed an all-too-expensive slice of pizza. Slowly, I became worried about the demographic of the audience. No part of me was expecting that a majority of the crowd would be thirty and older. The potential that people would not be standing up for the show was concerning me. How am I supposed to go feral at “The Feral Joy Tour” if I cannot stand up and dance? I have an issue with auditoriums for concerts. I think it feels a little bit weird. But luckily, this was not a problem, and everyone stood up for Maggie. Even better, I was able to stand for the opener.
The most exciting thing about this tour was that Del Water Gap/Samuel Holden Jaffe was the opener. I am simply… obsessed with him. In February 2022, I managed to be the first
person in line for his show and also managed to get there minutes before he did. Nothing could’ve prepared me for when he casually walked over to where my friend and I were sitting, sat down with us, and talked to us. He asked us about where we were from, and he complimented my hair. We ended up on his story, which I promptly screenshotted and sent to all my friends with my hands shaking. Two other girls arrived, and I am still concert buddies with one of them. Holden came out and talked to those of us in line two more times; the third time I got a picture with him, and he gave me a piece of merch–an orange toothbrush with his name printed on it–because it matched my hair.
That is the story of how Del Water Gap became one of my favorite artists. The name “Del
Water Gap” was originally the name of Holden and Maggie’s band they started while at NYU together, and when they decided to focus on their solo careers, he kept the name. Their friendship is such a beautiful element of the tour, especially when Holden came out during Maggie’s set to sing their song “New Song.” Their voices together are heavenly, and there was something very spiritual for me listening to it live.
Maggie Rogers has an incredible voice. Her vocals are some of the best I’ve heard live in a long time. That woman is just all-around talented, which makes my experience with the people around me much more unfortunate. Gen Z usually gets blamed for bad concert etiquette, but for me, lately, it is the grown adults who have been the least tolerable.
First, the two flannel-wearing, millennial guys on my left. They very rarely shut up during the duration of the show, which seemed ironic to me, considering how much the guy directly next to me was expressing how much he loves Maggie Rogers. The only thing saving these guys from being my number one enemies of the night is that they weren’t necessarily loud. I cannot say the same thing about the people in front of me. It was a group of three, and I will repeat, grown-ass adults that decided that their loud conversation was more important than the show. No matter how hard I tried, I could not bombastic side-eye my way into shutting them up, but what else can you do in this situation? The most likely thing to come out of confronting people like this is an argument, which will only make things worse. If anyone has any suggestions for dealing with people like this, let me know. You can hear them in all. my. videos.
Luckily, the anger from bad experiences with an audience fades away, and the show itself becomes a much more prominent memory. I am so lucky to have seen these talented artists that I love so much, whose music is incredibly important to me, live. I would highly recommend listening to these two artists, so here are my recommendations!
Del Water Gap:
- Perfume
Maggie Rogers:
- Shatter
- Symphony