Alex Pappademas

“Like, your heart, your spirit, who you are — does it come out no matter what context you get put in?” he asked, “Or is it shaped immeasurably and irretrievably by your circumstances? I don’t know.”

He’s just written his first book, a memoir called “Acid for the Children” that’s out Nov. 5. In it he recounts how he took up bass guitar, learned to thumb and finger-pop its strings and formed a band with three high-school buddies: Hillel Slovak, Jack Irons and Anthony Kiedis. That band became the Red Hot Chili Peppers and persevered for three wild, shirtless decades, weathering the loss of members to addiction and attrition, not to mention the waning of alternative rock as a commercial force.

In March, the band performed at the Great Pyramid of Giza, like Frank Sinatra and the Grateful Dead before them. In September and October, they played Rock in Rio in Brazil, a Formula One racing event in Singapore and a festival on a man-made island in Abu Dhabi. They’ve reached the point where traditional rock autobiographies tend to close the curtain — on the far side of the hurricane years, after all the Grammys and all the drugs, with their subjects sober and solid and selling out shows on the wonders-of-the-world circuit.

Flea’s book is not that kind of book. It’s written with the same lyrical, holy-goofball energy its author brings to all his public activities, and its earnest, eccentric prose reflects Flea’s evolution from Hollywood-scene knucklehead to reflective, spiritually clued-in adult. The early ups and downs of his friendship with Kiedis — the Chili Peppers’ lead singer, the longest nonfamilial relationship of Flea’s life and seemingly the most emotionally fraught — are tenderly but unflinchingly addressed.

But not until page 375 of this 383-page volume does the band that will become the Chili Peppers play its first show: in 1983, for 27 people at the Grandia Room in Hollywood, as Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem, whose live set at the time consisted of one original song and a choreographed dance routine set to the Jonzun Crew’s “Pack Jam (Look Out for the OVC).”

The curtain closes there, with the rise and fall and rise of the Peppers — not to mention Flea’s adventures in marriage and child-rearing, much of his film-acting career, the details of his philanthropic work as founder of the Silverlake Conservatory of Music and his career as a sideman to everyone from Thom Yorke to Tom Waits — seemingly assured but still to come.

Instead, “Acid for the Children” is about everything that happened to Flea before that night, a chain of events as improbable as the Chili Peppers’ eventual path to global ubiquity. Flea can turn a phrase and knows when to turn one sideways. “The kid showed no pretty colors,” he says of a bad-egg bully who turns him on to PCP-laced bong hits. The very next sentence is “Angel dust is like smoking death.”

And so we come to the question now hanging in the warm October air — about possibility, and destiny, and what’s inherent in us, and how much context and circumstance can change that path.

Flea was born Michael Balzary in Melbourne, Australia, in 1962. Four years later, his father, Mick Balzary, who worked in customs for the Australian government, accepted a post at the Australian consulate in New York City and moved his family to the New York suburbs.

“We lived in a nice house like this” — he looked back at the big Craftsman behind him, which he’s renting with his soon-to-be wife, jewelry designer Melody Ehsani, while they renovate their place in Malibu — “in a nice suburban neighborhood in Rye, New York.”

His father was supposed to stay only four years. There may exist some parallel universe in which this happened, where Michael finished growing up in Australia, never tasted Hollywood’s night air, and went on to be a bush pilot in Kenya or a plumber in Estonia or someone else to whom the thought of playing bass guitar on MTV in pants made from sewn-together stuffed animals would never occur.

“My father always says to me, still: If I had my druthers, you would’ve been an engineer,” Flea said, slipping easily into an Australian accent.

“I like to think I would’ve rebelled and ended up in the Birthday Party or something,” he said, meaning Nick Cave’s first band, who began making unholy noise in Melbourne in the late ’70s. “Odds are I might be sitting in Australia, drinking a Fosters, working at an oil plant or something.”

Instead, in New York, Flea writes, his mother Patricia took guitar lessons and fell in love with her teacher, Walter Urban. Flea’s parents split up and Mick Balzary returned to Australia alone. Patricia took Flea and his sister, Karyn, to live with Walter, a jazz bassist, in his parents’ basement in Larchmont. Walter became Flea’s stepfather, and life at home took a sharp turn for the bohemian.

In 1972, they moved to Los Angeles, chasing theoretical career opportunities for Walter, and Flea’s newly free-range upbringing became even less rule-bound.

“I got up to whatever I wanted all night long,” Flea said. “Started getting high at 12. It was the ’70s, and let me tell you, the ’70s in Hollywood were wild.” He described nights out until 4 in the morning, running into “every flavor of person, people in all kinds of inebriated states. Scary states. People in predatory states.”

He was a feral Huckleberry Finn running loose in a “Repo Man” world. But he was also drawn to music, basketball and books — structured forms, offering a sense of security he couldn’t come by in other parts of his life. Flea, who ran with other “petty thievin’ street rats,” also lost and found himself in the words of Kurt Vonnegut and the sound of Clifford Brown and Max Roach.

He felt safer in the small rooms of his interests than he did with the adults in his world. He said Urban was an addict and an alcoholic, prone to terrifying rages. But he loved his stepson fiercely, and his commitment to artistic expression lit a fire in Flea.

“I remember watching him play when I was a kid,” he said, “and the intensity when he would go for it. Just viciously attacking his instrument, with his eyes closed and sweating, and just, like, going off. Whether he was conscious of it or not, he was exorcising the demons within him and taking the torment of his life and using it as an energy to make something truly beautiful.”

Flea said despite the trauma Walter brought to the family, “He really gave me gifts that are such a huge part of who I am.”

“Sometimes people do these books to get back at people,” David Ritz, author of 46 biographies, said a few days later, describing agendas like making an argument for one’s own greatness, or getting revenge on a spouse.

“With Flea,” he said, “I think his drive is to enlighten himself by figuring out who he is and what he did. And so there is a lightness to this book, even though it’s a heavy book.”

As a ghostwriter, Ritz has helped bring forth the life stories of Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye and Ray Charles. He did not write “Acid for the Children,” but he will politely acknowledge that his editorial input is probably the reason it is less than 1,200 pages long.

Flea calls himself “completely uneducated” as a writer, has never so much as kept a diary, and said he resorts to the act of journaling “only when I’m really miserable.”

Publishers had approached him about writing a book for years, he said, but he’d always thought of it as an arrogant, rock-starrish thing for a rock star to do. But in 2015, he took a spill on a snowboarding trip with Kiedis during a break from recording “The Getaway” and broke his arm in five places.

“At first, I was on painkillers for a month, which sucked,” Flea said. “Once my head was clear, but I couldn’t really get around, there was a couple-month period where I just wrote like crazy.” (Flea remains a bit in love with the voluminous original version of the book: “I do see a beauty in it.”)

His favorite autobiographies include Luis Buñuel’s “My Last Sigh,” Harpo Marx’s “Harpo Speaks,” David Niven’s “The Moon’s a Balloon,” Miles Davis’ “Miles” and Charles Mingus’ “Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus” — all books in which the protagonist’s voice feels indelibly theirs, even if it’s mediated by a collaborator. He’s suspicious of books that credit a ghostwriter, he said, and didn’t want to write one that did.

“That really pissed David Ritz off,” Flea said, laughing. They began a creative conversation anyway. Ritz said the decision to stop in 1983 was Flea’s idea, but also that it was the right call, and he’s convinced that in Flea he’s encountered the next great American writer at the start of a brilliant career. He envisions literary fame for him akin to that of Patti Smith, who wrote a foreword in verse for Flea’s book (“providence assigned him an instrument/that in his hands formed a spectral voice”).

By this point, it was clear that Flea’s book-promotional duties would cost his Australian shepherds their trail run. They flopped in the grass spine-to-spine, a pair of inside-out parentheses. Flea was talking about drugs, which figure prominently in the book, starting with the cover, a photo of a baby-faced Flea sucking on a joint at a nude beach. Harder stuff beckoned before too long.

“I never became a junkie,” Flea said. “I would go through periods where I was shooting heroin, and then I wouldn’t do it — ‘Oh, it’s terrible’— and I’d be listening to Minor Threat. And then I’d go do it again.”

Slovak died of an overdose in 1988. Flea got clean for good in 1993. Kiedis documented his own cycle of sobriety and relapse — and the strain it put on his friendship with Flea — in his 2004 autobiography “Scar Tissue,” a sordid and soulful bestseller that Flea said he’s never read.

“It’s too much shared stuff,” he said, although he used a more pungent word than stuff. “I don’t want to know what he said, because I know it’s going to be completely different than what I thought.”

Their relationship is the central romance in “Acid for the Children,” which by leaving off where it does saves Flea from discussing any strife Kiedis’ addiction issues may have created. And yet their drama is all there, implicitly, foreshadowed in painful moments from their high school years, like the impromptu camping trip where Flea loses the cap to Kiedis’ canteen while filling it at the river. Kiedis curses his friend out, then gives Flea the silent treatment for the rest of the night.

“It was a painful pattern, a dynamic that repeated between us in so many contexts for years to come,” Flea writes. “I was needy for stable support, and he was needy for the stability of control. Symptomatic of my fragility, my yearning for familial comfort. Light does not exist without darkness. The shadow side of our friendship.”

The original broken-arm draft of the book followed the arc of the band’s career up through their career-rejuvenating 1999 album “Californication,” and after the last page of the finished version there’s a somewhat tongue-in-cheek-seeming teaser for a second volume. Flea said he changes his mind day to day about whether he’s going to write one.

“I’ve become kind of obsessed with the idea of writing a novel,” he admitted. But for the moment, the future held only a photo shoot. Earlier, he’d joked about wearing a tweed blazer, in the pipe-smoking literary manner. But when the cameras were ready, he happily posed without his shirt.

This article originally appeared in

Flea Had a Wild Life. Then He Joined Red Hot Chili Peppers.

PASADENA, Calif. — On a Thursday in mid-October, Flea sat in a patio chair he’d dragged down to the lawn, looking out at the green lake in his backyard. As the late-morning sun beat down on his graying skull and the tattoo-dotted arms under his Vin Scully T-shirt, he curled his battered bare toes in the grass just centimeters from an ashy fossil that was once a piece of dog waste, and began reckoning with the unanswerable:

He was sitting in a control room at his studio, Blakeslee Recording, surrounded by totems of the past — a trophy from the first talent show he won at Castlemont High School in Oakland, California, an Amy Winehouse prayer candle and enough vintage guitars to stock three pawnshops.

Saadiq, 53, wore a pale-blue T-shirt and periodically tugged at his twists of hair. He was talking about family and addiction and loss, about a life marked by a string of tragedies, and about why it took him until now, more than two decades into his career, to bring these stories into his music.

His new album “Jimmy Lee,” out this week, is his first in eight years. It is named for his brother Jimmy Lee Baker, who overdosed in the 1990s after contracting HIV, but uses his story to tell a broader one about lives under pressure. It wasn’t Saadiq’s plan to make a concept album, let alone one that digs into stories this personal. But over the course of a few nights in this studio in early 2019, he began to hear the ghosts speak.

That first funeral was for his older brother Alvie Wiggins, who was murdered in 1973 in a dispute with a family member. Saadiq’s brother Desmond Wiggins, like Jimmy Lee Baker, struggled with addiction, and killed himself in 1987. Three years later, his sister Sarah backed out of her driveway and into the path of a police chase. Saadiq was working on the second album by his R&amp;B; band Tony! Toni! Toné! when he got the news that she had been killed; he walked back into the studio and sang “It Never Rains (in Southern California),” a yearning long-distance love ballad that would top the Billboard R&amp;B; singles charts in the fall of 1990.

None of this has ever been a secret. Saadiq has had a tattoo of Alvie, Desmond and Jimmy’s faces on his arm for 20 years. But from his time with the band he affectionately calls “The Tonys” up through his solo career — four albums between 2002 and 2011, each more joyous, and consummately crafted than the last — he’s always prioritized hooks and concision over self-expression.

“My compositions had to go farther than me,” he said. “I just thought about delivering.”

For two decades, he’s done it, over and over. As a producer, he’s pulled concise statements out of performers who often default to the diffuse, such as D’Angelo (“Lady” and “Untitled (How Does It Feel)”) and Solange (“Cranes in the Sky.”) But as one of relatively few major figures of the hip-hop age who grew up playing in bands, he’s just as adroit at leading from behind as a sideman, steering Mary J. Blige to an Oscar nomination (for “Mighty River,” from “Mudbound”) or playing bass behind Mick Jagger on a Grammy salute to Solomon Burke.

“Raphael manages to defy time by being continuously culturally and musically relevant,” said Rob Stringer, the chief executive of Sony Music Entertainment, which includes Columbia, the label releasing “Jimmy Lee,” adding, “he always has his finger on the pulse without ever being overexposed.”

Saadiq has been more underground than usual lately, writing music for films and TV, including the score for HBO’s “Insecure.” The work is gratifying because it involves producing music on time and to specification, a skill Saadiq takes pride in having cultivated: “They need a pink elephant on Sunday,” he said, “you’ve got to give it to ’em.”

As a solo artist, Saadiq has long been a master without a masterpiece for consensus to point to. “Jimmy Lee” could change that through sonic ambition alone. Several tracks have an icy Europop sheen, a nod to Saadiq’s past as an “early MTV kid” who dug Duran Duran and Level 42. The Kendrick Lamar feature “Rearview” finds Saadiq quavering on the chorus like David Bowie or the Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant. The choir on “Rikers Island” — 30-plus voices railing in blunt language against the mass incarceration of black men — is actually all Saadiq, multitracked to infinity.

Saadiq has always bent time-tested pop idioms into supple, modern shapes. But he’s never populated his tracks with desperate characters on the run from themselves and the world’s harsh judgment, forever getting in their own way. The album title “is a reference to everything — I couldn’t name it after all of them,” he said, but Saadiq himself is a newly raw and vulnerable presence, too.

“It’s probably the most honest record I’ve ever made,” he said. While he’s talking about a few people on the songs, “a lot of it relates to me. It was like a mirror.”

Saadiq’s father, Charlie Wiggins, was a former super-lightweight boxer who played blues guitar sang in a voice like Sam Cooke’s, but chose family and a steady job over a career in music. He worked for decades as a sheet metal man at the Naval Air Station in Alameda, California, but always kept a battered guitar and a little tweed Fender amplifier around.

Charlie had been married and divorced by the time he met Edith James, Saadiq’s mother. Collectively, his parents had 14 children, but Saadiq was the only child they had together. He came along late, when many of his siblings were grown. (His father would tease him, “You were a good mistake, but you were a mistake.”)

As a child, Saadiq often caught a ride between his families’ houses on the handlebars of his older brother Randy Wiggins’ bike. “He sang better than all of us,” Saadiq said of Randy. “That’s how I learned about the Delfonics and the Stylistics.”

Randy sang with Alvie in talent shows but never pursued music professionally, and is now retired after a long career with Kilpatrick’s Bakeries in Oakland. Asked in a phone interview about the present state of his falsetto, he offered an impromptu demonstration, singing the first few bars of the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly Wow” into the phone in a voice that was high and powerful.

Saadiq was a child when Alvie was killed; he had more time with Jimmy Lee, a heroin addict who didn’t get along with their stepfather, Ed Nelson, Saadiq said, and would sometimes break into the Nelson house and steal whatever he could. “For me to title my album ‘Jimmy Lee’ — people in my family will wonder, Why him,” Saadiq said.

Saadiq said his brother Desmond also fell into addiction and shot himself in Saadiq’s father’s apartment, and matter-of-factly described the family cleaning up the aftermath. “We didn’t know what to do,” he said. “We just did it.”

Saadiq described himself as an observant kid. Witnessing his brothers’ travails informed his own decisions. Street life didn’t beckon him. “I never could have sold dope,” Saadiq said. “I didn’t think some dude my age could be my boss and tell me what to do.”

Instead, when he was still in grade school, he found his first professional music gig, backing the Gospel Messengers, who’d met as custodians at the hospital where Saadiq’s mother worked. At age 9, he became the bassist of his uncle Elijah Baker’s group, the Gospel Hummingbirds, and carried a stack of business cards identifying himself as such.

Oakland was a musical hotbed back then. Natalie Cole’s band lived around the corner from his mother’s house; once, at the supermarket, a preteen Saadiq encountered his idol, Larry Graham, the Sly &amp; the Family Stone and Graham Central Station bassist, who was shopping in platforms and leather with a Lincoln Continental parked outside.

Saadiq spent hours in his room, teaching himself to play Graham’s busy bass lines — particularly “Pow” and “Release Yourself,” which Saadiq said were essentials for any bassist looking to sit in with a pickup band — as well as songs by the Commodores and Earth, Wind &amp; Fire.

Saadiq formed Tony! Toni! Toné! with his brother D’Wayne Wiggins and the drummer Timothy O’Brien at the end of the ’80s. Hip-hop had crews, R&amp;B; had groups, but neither one had bands; the skills they’d honed on the competitive Oakland garage-band circuit set them apart at the peak of the age of sampling. But Saadiq also sought out the Queens rappers A Tribe Called Quest and quizzed them about their gritty drum sound.

Tribe’s DJ/producer Ali Shaheed Muhammad contributed to the Tonys’ fourth album, “Sons of Soul,” and said watching them work out the song “Couldn’t Keep It to Myself” at a recording session in Trinidad inspired him to learn an instrument.

“He just said, ‘Yo, follow me,’ ” Muhammad said. “He started playing a bass line and singing — just humming, freestyling like a rapper. I was just staring at them — they had not said a word to each other but they all joined in and started playing.”

“Sons of Soul” yielded the Tonys’ biggest hit, the rollicking “If I Had No Loot.” Saadiq said he effectively left the band after that, although they made one more album together in 1996. He wasn’t, as he put it, “trying to be Bobby Brown or something” when he left. He hoped to go broader, not bigger.

“I wanted to be able to shoot from anywhere on the court,” he said. “I didn’t think it was just singing. I didn’t think it was just producing. If I was free to do anything I wanted to do? I’m my own best bet. I’ll bet on me all the time.”

On the 1995 soundtrack for John Singleton’s “Higher Learning,” the newly solo Raphael Wiggins is credited for the first time as “Raphael Saadiq.”

“I just wanted a little separation — some branding, different from the Tonys, different from a Wiggins,” he said. (He had become “Raphael” on an audition to play in Sheila E’s live band in the mid-80s.) Also, he was told an executive at PolyGram asked: “Who wants to hear an artist named Raphael Wiggins?”

He was not, for the record, trying to be Bobby Brown. His aspirations as a performer continued to be band-shaped. There was the unrecorded Lynwood Rose, whose various incarnations featured Saadiq playing bass alongside D’Angelo and A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip and Muhammad. A less theoretical supergroup, Lucy Pearl — with Saadiq, Muhammad and Dawn Robinson, formerly of En Vogue — released one self-titled album, in 2000.

That same year, D’Angelo released his years-in-the-making second album “Voodoo,” a work of moody postmodern R&amp;B; that played mostly like deep-space transmissions from a nebula of Nag Champa smoke — except for the sensual, soaring “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” the first indelible soul single of the 21st century, which happened to be the one track Saadiq co-wrote.

“I don’t think he gets credited enough. Raphael is not the type of person to look for credit,” said Muhammad, who added that it was Saadiq who first played him D’Angelo’s demo tape in a car in Manhattan in 1992.

“ ‘There’s Stevie, there’s Michael, there’s Marvin and then there’s D’Angelo,’ ” Muhammad remembered him saying. “What a setup, for a brand-new artist who was just walking around with a demo tape.”

When asked, toward the end of the day in North Hollywood, if he felt he’d been properly credited for his contributions to D’Angelo’s success, Saadiq answered, “I do,” and then he said “I do” again, and then he said he really didn’t worry much about it, and then he talked about it for a while longer.

Saadiq said that even D’Angelo has called him underrated.

“He says, ‘Man, I don’t feel like the whole world knows that you’re dope,’ ” Saadiq said, approximating his friend’s gravelly delivery.

Saadiq also said this was how he preferred it: “People aren’t watching until I hit ’em in the head with something like this album. I like to pick my punches, when I want to hit you at.”

“I’ve always been making music for me. Only for me,” he continued. “I understood how lucky and fortunate I was, for people to listen to me and like me and to buy a ticket to come see me — I knew that was very special, because I didn’t make the music for them.”

So where does the satisfaction come from? “Right here when it comes off your speakers. That is already the Grammy.”

Saadiq skipped the Grammy Awards in 2017, the year Solange won for a song he helped write. When it was suggested that “Jimmy Lee” is the kind of record that might mandate his attendance at next year’s ceremony, he laughed.

“Grammys are beautiful things,” he said. “I just think you have to start wanting to win it right here first, before it gets to them.”

He stood up, walked to the console, and stood with his arms outstretched, as if surveying an invisible kingdom on the other side of the control-room glass.

“When you feel it in here,” he said, “you should be feeling like, I just won.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/arts/music/raphael-saadiq-jimmy-lee.html" id="a5751b32-a9e2-3a9f-ad05-91ea78d70a2e">The New York Times</a>.

Raphael Saadiq Finally Put His Past on the Record

LOS ANGELES — “My first funeral, I was 7 years old,” Raphael Saadiq said. “They called my name: ‘Charlie Ray Wiggins, limousine three!’ I never liked limousines after that.”

<h1>LOS ANGELES — A few Tuesdays ago, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers’ single “Light On” displaced Mumford &amp;amp; Sons’ “Guiding Light” at the top of the first Billboard adult alternative songs chart of 2019 — one of the publication’s niche charts, but something she could get jazzed about all the same, if she let herself.</h1>

“My parents are really excited,” she said hours after the news broke, huddled beneath a heat lamp on the back patio of a restaurant on Silver Lake Boulevard. “But they don’t know what it means either. They were like, ‘Are you excited? We don’t know if we’re supposed to be excited.'”

Rogers wasn’t quite sure either. She started out as a banjo-slinging folkie, but broke through with songs like “Alaska” and “On + Off,” whose sonic textures reflected her growing interest in electronic dance music and mainstream pop. Perhaps appropriately, she has both a folkie’s suspicion of airplay charts and No. 1 hits as markers of artistic success and a pop star’s understanding of self-promotion as a job requirement. After some internal debate about whether to note the news on social media at all, she posted a tweet that included a string of exclamation points but began with the word “WHAAAAATTT” — celebratory, yet noncommittal.

In photographs, Rogers brings to mind a millennial version of Sissy Spacek circa “Badlands” crossed with Lana Del Rey; what the pictures don’t capture is the articulate intensity she exhibits in conversation, especially when she talks about re-establishing control over her career after an unexpected brush with viral fame — a moment that led to labels knocking down her door, but one she ultimately found quite destabilizing. Her third album and first on a major label, “Heard It in a Past Life,” is due on Friday.

Rogers grew up in rural Easton, Maryland. Her father is a now-retired Ford dealer; her mother, a former nurse who introduced Rogers to Erykah Badu and Alanis Morissette, now works as an end-of-life doula. Rogers was writing songs by age 13; at 17, she produced and self-released her debut album, “The Echo,” which channeled the pastoral spirit of early Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens. The demos for that record helped her secure admission to the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. In New York, she played in multiple bands and “overdosed on live music”; during a semester abroad, she visited clubs in Paris and Berlin and fell in love with house and techno.

During this time, she also found herself unable to write songs, even as graduation loomed and her music-production classes demanded it. “All my teachers were really frustrated with me,” she said. She began seriously considering a career in music journalism as a fallback; she interned at Spin and Elle and worked as an editorial assistant to writer Lizzy Goodman, transcribing hundreds of hours of interviews with the leading lights of the early 2000s New York indie-rock boom for Goodman’s oral history “Meet Me in the Bathroom.”

Then in March 2016, during the second semester of Rogers’ senior year, Pharrell Williams — an artist-in-residence at NYU at the time — visited her music-production class to critique student work. Rogers brought a demo of “Alaska,” on which her supple soprano bobs and weaves over a sparse shuffle beat that brings to mind Williams’ own work with producing partner Chad Hugo as the Neptunes.

In a video that subsequently blew up online Rogers plays her demo for Williams, whose face contorts in surprise and delight while he listens. “I’ve never heard anyone like you before,” he tells her afterward. “That’s a drug for me.”

Coming from Williams — a category-killing industry icon who’s worked with Migos and Ed Sheeran, indelibly stamping his imprint on 2000s pop as well as hip-hop — this was a career-making endorsement. But it wasn’t one Rogers had sought out, and she says now that she was unprepared for the attention that came with it. “As a producer, as a songwriter, I’ve spent a lot of time either in my bedroom or in studios, alone,” she says. “Suddenly I was in the public eye in this way that I had absolutely no control over. It was really scary.”

She compared processing that video with a more recent broadcast moment: her early November appearance previewing her new album on “Saturday Night Live,” which was met with a mixed response.

“This thing happens when you’re like grossly overstimulated, your memory changes,” she said. “It’s the same reason why I haven’t watched any of my SNL performances. It’s just, like, I want to keep that for me. And I realized from the Pharrell stuff when you watch it back it changes your memory. And I want to really protect the way I’m remembering things.”

“Heard It in a Past Life” is a collection of buoyant electronic pop songs, but the lyrics are unmistakably the work of an introvert struggling to recalibrate. “Oh, I couldn’t stop it,” she sings on “Light On.” “Tried to slow it all down/Crying in the bathroom, had to figure it out/With everyone around me saying ‘You must be so happy now.'” The first line of the opening song, “Give a Little,” is “If I was who I was before”; the last track is a triumphant ballad called “Back in My Body.” Rogers is not coy about the work’s autobiographical component; she describes the album as an attempt to process everything she’s experienced since 2016 and take back control of the narrative around her career.

“Part of success is having a good story, and as a journalist I totally understand,” she said. “But it meant that my many, many years of focus and hard work got kind of prepackaged into a Cinderella story. I’m super grateful that it happened, but it left me feeling like I never got to be a full human in the experience.”

After the Pharrell video caught fire, Rogers quickly found herself the focus of an old-fashioned record-company bidding war; one prospective label wooed her with her a first edition of Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.” Rogers took a hard-nosed approach to this courtship process. Many of the executives hoping to sign her were industry veterans who had been mentioned or interviewed in Goodman’s book; before meeting them, Rogers cross-referenced their names in her database of transcripts.

“I would show up with ammo,” she said. “Really minute stories from their lives, like where they were on 9/11, or that time they tried to sign the Killers in 2007. And during these interviews, inevitably, when I was the only woman in the room and these men started talking over me, I would pull out these stories and people would look at me like they’d seen a ghost.”

Rogers eventually signed to Capitol and an EP, “Now That the Light Is Fading,” appeared in 2017. But she did insist on taking a bit more time with a full-length album — a decision that challenged, but didn’t discourage, her new label home. “Ultimately we trusted her, because nobody knows her better than herself,” said Michelle Jubelirer, the chief operating officer of Capitol Music Group. “It became very clear early on that there was a lot more to her than a viral moment — that she was an artist with a real soul, and something to say, and a modern pop star with a strong female point of view.”

Rogers found promoting the EP psychologically draining. She’d studied branding and marketing at NYU. but branding and marketing herself was a different challenge. Even when interviewers complimented “Alaska” by telling her “I love that song Pharrell made for you,” Rogers felt obligated to be polite. She remembers feeling like she’d allowed a “cocktail party version of myself” to take over.

“I became pleasant,” she said, which was not the goal. " The only thing I wanted to do in my music is be human, and communicate all the aspects of that, which often means being vulnerable. Those are the kinds of artists I’ve looked up to and the kinds of artists I’ve worked really hard to be like. Being pleasant is great, but it’s not the whole picture.”

“The Pharrell video cut my body and soul in half,” she added. (Her tone suggested that this experience had been painful, but also on some level fascinating.) “I felt such an intense sense of displacement, and I’m only now to a place where I can like breathe normally again and start to relax and remember who I was before this.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="905cb824-e942-44e7-9d49-3c2d180690a0" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/arts/music/maggie-rogers-heard-it-in-a-past-life.html">The New York Times</a>.

Maggie Rogers Went Viral. Then She Had to Become Herself Again.

“My parents are really excited,” she said hours after the news broke, huddled beneath a heat lamp on the back patio of a restaurant on Silver Lake Boulevard.

Maggie Rogers went viral, then she had to become herself again

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Alex Pappademas

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